Opinion Express View on Donald Trump’s indictment: Former president will play the victim card

Donald Trump is the first US President to be indicted on criminal charges. A New York grand jury has voted to frame charges against him for allegedly paying “hush money” to adult film star Stephanie Clifford (known more widely by her screen name, Stormy Daniels) during his presidential campaign in 2016. The former president could be arrested after he surrenders and will likely be presented before a judge. As the wheels of the US justice system turn, the case is bound to be thoroughly politicised before the presidential election in 2024.

While the Stormy Daniels episode carries worrying allegations of misappropriation of campaign funds, it is only one among the many alleged improprieties and illegalities of the former president, including deliberate incitement of the Capitol riots. Trump is clearly hoping to shore up his base by playing the victim card — that is also of a piece with his politics. He has constantly maintained, often with leaps of logic characteristic of conspiracy theorists, that the entire US polity is against him. He has called the indictment a “witch hunt”, and said that the Democrats have attacked a “completely innocent person in an act of blatant election interference”. It is clear, then, that Trump is likely to double down on the politics of majoritarian victimhood that has long marked his political career. Recently, that politics — denying the 2020 election verdict, dog-whistle anti-minority statements, playing up insecurities on LGBTQI-related identity issues — has seen diminishing returns. The Republicans performed poorly in the mid-term elections to the legislature last year, and many Trump-supported “election deniers” in so-called safe seats lost the election.

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It may well be that the indictment and arrest strengthens Trumpism, especially among his core supporters. At the same time, though, Trumpism is not coterminous with the Republican Party and the Conservative American voter. The trial — and wall-to-wall media coverage — of affairs, adult performers and pay-offs may end up alienating the Christian, mid-Western Republicans. In his political career, Trump has achieved success partly by distracting from bread-and-butter issues and drawing the focus to himself. For Democrats ahead of an election year, the challenge is to ensure that America’s political conversation isn’t reduced just to the drama around Donald Trump.