The looming threat of a federal indictment may lead him to root for the GOP nominee.
The Republican presidential nominee in 2024, if it’s someone other than Donald Trump, will need to keep a significant number of Trump supporters in the fold in order to win in November. He or she won’t need all of Trump’s supporters, because no candidate ever transfers his entire support to another candidate, but enough to avoid tipping the margins in competitive states. If Trump is defeated in the primaries, there is great concern among Republicans that he might actively sabotage the winning ticket, perhaps by a third-party run, but more likely by the kind of well-poisoning tantrum that followed the 2020 election. Perhaps he will claim again that he was robbed; perhaps he will snipe from the sidelines, trying to persuade his most devoted followers to stay home. But there is a good reason to think that Trump might not do that this time, however much his instincts point in that direction.
The implicit (and sometimes not so implicit) threat that he will be a colossally sore loser with no loyalty to the party, its causes, or its voters is one that Trump has deployed since 2015 to deter criticism and keep his opponents within the party in suspense and off-balance. This is not an idle concern. Trump has changed parties repeatedly in his lifetime, sought the Reform Party nomination in 2000, and, to this day, often talks of the Republican Party as if it is an organization run by other people in which he has no role. In 2016, Trump argued that Ted Cruz had cheated to beat him in Iowa and benefited from a rigged system when Cruz won Colorado’s delegates at the state convention. We all recall how he took defeat in 2020, including willfully burning down two Republican senators in Georgia by convincing Georgia Republicans that their election system could not be trusted enough for them vote in the runoff. Even the announcement of Trump’s 2024 campaign seems calculated to complicate the party’s task in the current Georgia Senate runoff.
At 78 years old in 2024, Trump will have fewer purely political incentives not to burn his bridges with the party if its voters reject him; his career running for office will be over. Members of his family who want a future in Republican politics might try to talk him down from that, but their track record in restraining his worst impulses has been checkered at best. If Trump was worried about his longer-term legacy, he would not have acted as he did after the 2020 election.
Political incentives, however, aren’t the only thing that may be on Donald Trump’s mind. This time, Trump may have a more powerful spur to help Republicans win the White House: his own legal troubles. If Andy McCarthy is right that a federal indictment of Trump is now a real and imminent possibility, this will not be just a hypothetical discussion. If we go into 2024 with Trump facing a possible federal indictment — or if he has actually been charged with a federal crime — Trump will face three possibilities: (1) the people investigating or prosecuting him remain in office, bent like Inspector Javert on getting their man; (2) the voters elect a Republican who has a bitter grudge against Trump for trying to tank the election, and who can afford to take a Pontius Pilate stance toward an ongoing case; or (3) the new Republican administration is on good terms with Trump and perhaps even owes him some thanks, and could shut down a prosecution.
It will matter very much to Trump which of these is the case. The Republican nominee doesn’t need to make any sort of public or private promise to pardon Trump or to call off the dogs in order for Trump to assess — probably correctly — that he will stand a better chance of avoiding prison if a Republican wins. It is, moreover, likely that such a nominee will have publicly criticized the prosecution as political, and will owe his or her election in good part to voters who think the prosecution is illegitimate.
None of this is an argument about whether it would be a good thing for the country, justice, or the rule of law for Trump to be either prosecuted or pardoned — or, for that matter, that it would be a good thing for political actors in America to mute their criticisms for fear of ending up behind bars. This is simply a commentary on the world we actually live in. Everyone, not least Donald Trump, understands that politics is never going to be completely absent from an elected government’s decisions as to when to prosecute or pardon a former head of state. A simple assessment of where Trump’s incentives will lie makes it clear why he will have a great interest not only in helping remove the Democrats from executive power, but in remaining on good terms with their successors. Maybe Trump wins the nomination, and this is irrelevant; maybe he loses and reacts out of emotion rather than calculation. But for a man with Trump’s instinct for survival, the possibility of a looming federal prosecution may have a clarifying effect on where his best interests lie.