Despite What Republicans Say, Trump’s Legal Cases Aren’t a Distraction

Amy Davidson Sorkin in The New Yorker:

“How does this indictment affect his candidacy?” Bill Hemmer, of Fox News, asked the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley last week. The candidacy in question was, of course, that of former President Donald Trump. The indictment being discussed was one that Trump, in a Truth Social post last week, said he expected any day after receiving a so-called target letter from the special counsel Jack Smith, on charges related to Trump’s actions in the prelude to the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol. It would be his third criminal indictment in about four months. And, Haley told Hemmer, “it’s going to keep on going. I mean, the rest of this primary election is going to be in reference to Trump, it’s going to be about lawsuits, it’s going to be about legal fees, it’s going to be about judges, and it’s just going to continue to be a further and further distraction.”

Haley is herself running for the Republican nomination, so perhaps what she means is that Trump’s legal troubles are a distraction from her own campaign, or from the picture she wishes voters had of the Republican Party. “We can’t keep dealing with this drama, we can’t keep dealing with the negativity,” she said. (One wonders how she managed to spend almost two years in Trump’s Cabinet, as the Ambassador to the United Nations.) And yet, in a crowded primary field, Trump is polling around fifty per cent, while his closest competitor, Ron DeSantis, comes in at roughly twenty. Haley is hovering at about five per cent, somewhere between Senator Tim Scott and former Vice-President Mike Pence. Trump, for all his drama, isn’t a distraction from what the G.O.P. is; in many ways, he is the G.O.P. And the various cases against Trump aren’t a distraction preventing people from assessing him. Instead, they provide an almost encyclopedic guide to his political and personal character.

Haley is right that the cases, criminal and civil, are going to keep on coming.

More here.