Trump indictment jolts slow-motion 2024 U.S. presidential election race

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This is the year October came early.

For decades, American political strategists have girded for an “October surprise” – a startling development just ahead of November elections that upends the political calculus, transforms the country’s conversation, scrambles the election odds and reshapes the presidential campaign.

Don’t look now, but the leaves (all the premises that undergirded the 2024 election) are falling and casks of autumn cider (providing a bracing jolt to the system) are on offer. Welcome to October, 2024, in April, 2023. With the indictment and imminent arrest of former president Donald Trump, the most consequential October surprise of the century has just occurred.

Now Mr. Trump, whose third presidential campaign seemed stalled, is on the offensive. Suddenly, Ron DeSantis, who only a fortnight ago seemed in the ascendancy, is in the role of seeking to depose a Republican giant who claims to be the victim of a partisan witch hunt – even as he, in his role as the Governor of Florida, where Mr. Trump resides, has vowed that he “will not assist” in any extradition request by New York officials in the Trump case.

Relegated to afterthoughts, and also forced into the awkward position of coming to the defence of their principal rival, are figures such as former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott. The period they hoped to use to present their cases to the Republican primary electorate is now overshadowed by Mr. Trump’s legal woes.

Jared Yates Sexton: Trump’s indictment shows there can be consequences, even for America’s most privileged

The campaign that was beginning to take shape only last month now seems as distant as its now-forgotten analogue, the 1964 struggle for the soul of the Republican Party between Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York.

When Nazi Germany invaded Soviet Russia in 1941 and thrust the Communist government of Joseph Stalin onto the side of the Allies, it was said that all the “isms” had become “wasms.” When a New York grand jury formalized criminal charges against Mr. Trump, the “isms” (the deep antagonism toward the 45th president, the equally profound devotion to him) were suddenly turbocharged and the “wasms” (the assumptions about the course of next year’s presidential campaign) were relegated to faded newspapers and web postings swiftly withdrawn from view.

U.S. presidential campaigns, like Canadian federal elections, are always shaped by the prevailing political environment. The 1932 presidential election that propelled Franklin Roosevelt into the White House was shaped by the Great Depression, just as the 1940 Canadian election that kept William Lyon Mackenzie King in office was shaped by the Second World War.

But unlike Canadian elections, which can be called at virtually any time and often are timed to coincide with events, American national elections are quadrennial events that cannot be interrupted even for a civil war (the 1864 election that saw Abraham Lincoln re-elected) or a deadly pandemic (the 2020 election that took Joe Biden to the White House).

And so the campaign that had a sleepy start is now being moulded by an outside event that has no antecedent in U.S. history: a criminal indictment against one of the contenders, all the more powerful an event because the focus of the legal action is a former president with unusual powers of incitement and no regard for the usual guardrails of American political behaviour.

Only a handful of times in the country’s history has such an eventuality intruded on the reliable, rhythmic procession of elections.

The most significant may have occurred in the 1864 campaign, when Lincoln, who expected to be defeated for re-election, was aided by General Philip Sheridan’s victory in the Shenandoah Valley, General William Tecumseh Sherman’s destruction of Atlanta and the support Lincoln consolidated with his Emancipation Proclamation and his argument that the country should “never swap horses in midstream.” More than a century later, Jimmy Carter’s 1980 re-election prospects were wrecked by the seizure of U.S. diplomats as hostages in Iran.

At present the principal question is whether Republican criticism of Alvin Bragg, the New York County District Attorney at the centre of the indictment, morphs into electoral support for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump hopes so, while his critics and his competitors for the GOP nomination are working hard to keep that from happening. That was the motivation at the heart of remarks in March by Mr. DeSantis, who deplored the pending indictment but stopped short of giving succour or support to Mr. Trump.

A Quinnipiac University poll in late March showed that almost three out of five Americans believe criminal charges will disqualify Mr. Trump from running again. But three-quarters of Republicans, the voters who will determine their party’s nominee, believe criminal charges should not disqualify him from running again.

Meanwhile, Washington is convulsed in wariness.

Some of it is dread of the spectacle this episode inevitably will create.

Some of it is apprehension about how Mr. Trump, a magnet for attention, becomes a distraction, both for Republicans who believe his time has passed and for Democrats who are anxious about his possible return to the White House.

Some of it is pure weariness of what former New Jersey governor Chris Christie – a onetime Trump foe-turned-ally who became a foe again – called “the circus”: the insults (calling his legal assailants “misfits”), the insinuations (the hints that Mr. DeSantis may be a sex offender), and the innuendo (the vague suggestions about his principal rival’s sexual orientation, which would render his “Don’t Say Gay” measures in Florida hypocritical).

Mr. Trump’s closest adherents – Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, is the prime example – have rushed to plead his case, but other Republicans have held back. “He only profits and does well in chaos and turmoil, and so he wants to create the chaos and turmoil on his terms – he doesn’t want it on anybody else’s terms,” Mr. Christie said on ABC’s This Week program earlier this week. “But look, at the end, being indicted never helps anybody.”