The Normalization of Trump’s Alleged Crimes
The clock started ticking on Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign last year, when prosecutors announced dozens of criminal charges against him. With each new allegation — mishandling classified documents, election fraud, racketeering — it became clear that Trump’s campaign for a second term would unfold in a time crunch. He was deeply unpopular, holed up at Mar-a-Lago, and venting on Truth Social because Twitter had banned him. Now, he was applying for a job that voters had already fired him from, and he had to somehow get it back before courts could rule against him.
Today, the safety of the Oval Office looks like Trump’s to lose. Joe Biden is polling worse than any modern president at this stage, weakened by doubts about his age and stewardship of the economy. Trump didn’t even bother to debate his challengers in the GOP primary and steamrollered them anyway en route to the nomination. He’s edging out Biden in national polling averages and leading him comfortably in swing states. And in March, a New York Times–Siena College poll suggested that voters have grown less certain that Trump committed federal offenses. As he scampers to the finish line, these changing attitudes toward what makes him deeply abnormal for a presidential candidate — his alleged crimes — are the latest sign of how normalized he’s become.
Critics have long worried that Trump’s behavior would come to be seen as normal, but they mostly meant his bigotry and lies. In a recent column, Thomas Edsall at the Times lamented how Trump “demonizes minorities and fans ethnic hostility,” yet “a substantial share of the American electorate remains willing to cast a ballot for him.” There was always something incomplete about this conceit. There’s no shortage of racists in the history of an office that includes a dozen slaveholders, and Trump got his start in Republican politics as a birther — evidence that normalized racism has long been alive and well in the GOP, at least. His real innovation was becoming the first former U.S. president to have been indicted. If his opponents failed to convince the public his rhetoric was beyond the pale, there was still the hope of disqualifying him from politics by labeling him a convicted criminal. “It is not too soon for patriotic Americans to publicly take pride in what is now clear,” wrote Donald Ayer at The Atlantic in the wake of the charges, “that our rule of law is durable and works.”
The longer Americans wait for this question to be resolved, however, the more that hope seems to be fading. Among Democrats and independents, belief that Trump committed serious federal crimes has fallen by seven and nine percentage points, respectively, from 92 and 66 percent in December to 85 and 57 percent today, according to the Times-Siena poll. Just over half of voters still think he’s guilty, and surely that has contributed to Trump’s enduring unfavorability in poll after poll. But it’s notable that attitudes toward him have softened even though no exonerating evidence has emerged and none of the facts has changed. The shift of the past four months seems based mostly on vibes.
Time tends to be forgiving of former presidents even under typical circumstances. Jimmy Carter rebounded from the economic crises that doomed his presidency to become a beloved humanitarian. George W. Bush caused hundreds of thousands of deaths during the Iraq War, only to rebrand as a lovable amateur portraitist. Even the poor economy that Trump presided over, which cratered under COVID, is now the toast of electoral focus groups. By deploying a strategy of postponement — hoping that by 2025 he could have the power to make his legal problems disappear — Trump’s legal team has given him the temporal space needed to cast his presidency in a better light.
Trump has been helped in this effort by some lucky breaks and unforced errors on the part of prosecutors. Alvin Bragg’s case in New York, which involves hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels, has been widely criticized as weak. Federal prosecutors and Bragg’s predecessor as Manhattan district attorney had already passed on the case, leaving Bragg to reach a tough threshold for felony charges and explain why it took so long — all of which has bolstered Trump’s assertion that he is the victim of a witch hunt. In Georgia, where Trump is facing a RICO indictment for interfering with the 2020 election, the upcoming trial has been threatened with delay by charges of prosecutorial impropriety brought by one of his co-defendant’s canny defense lawyers. Fulton County DA Fani Willis hired her ex-lover, a private attorney named Nathan Wade, to oversee the prosecution for a hefty fee and had to testify that she and Wade didn’t improperly benefit from the arrangement.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s federal cases in Florida and Washington, D.C., are generally seen as the most fraught for Trump. The former involves Trump’s refusal to return classified documents he took to Mar-a-Lago and has a trial set for May that may be delayed, and the latter alleges he defrauded the government and disenfranchised voters in 2020 with his efforts to overturn the election, culminating with the January 6 uprising. Now both are on hold after Trump’s lawyers filed a motion arguing that he enjoys total immunity from prosecution. The Supreme Court in February agreed to take the case, which will get an April hearing and likely be decided by the justices sometime this summer — pushing any trial so close to November that Trump might be reelected before he can be tried, let alone convicted.
Trump’s campaign team must be delighted at the prospect of the public growing numb to his alleged misdeeds. His path to immunity still runs through a popularity contest. The more room he leaves for people to convince themselves he’s done nothing illegal, the better his odds of mitigating their distaste for having him in office. He may never actually be popular, but when the goal is 270 electoral votes in a race won at the margins, he only benefits from making it harder for voters to dismiss him.
The shift in public opinion since December casts doubt on the wisdom of Biden’s reelection strategy. So far, the president’s campaign staff has taken his dismal polling in stride, remaining confident that Trump is too reviled to actually win. Democrats have been on a tear of state-level election wins lately, thanks to abortion and other issues, a sign that reports of Biden’s toxicity are exaggerated. The campaign insists that once the trials begin — and despite Trump’s efforts, that may very well happen before November — voters will be shocked by the evidence that prosecutors present. It says that most voters aren’t even aware that the 2024 election is set to be a rematch of 2020, and that when they realize this, they will choose “old over crazy” every time. Mike Donilon, one of Biden’s closest aides, told The New Yorker that by November, “the focus will become overwhelming on democracy. I think the biggest images in people’s minds are going to be of January 6th.”
The campaign seems content to let the race run its course with the expectation that it will turn in Biden’s favor once voters remember who Trump is. The latest developments suggest the Biden team hasn’t woken up to a growing possibility: What if voters just don’t?
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