Trump sent a message to the GOP

What Will I Learn If You Run for President? CNN Observations of Donald J. Trump’s First Campaign Run and the Challenge of Running in 2024

Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of 24 books, including the Presidency of Donald Trump: A First Historical Assessment. Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. CNN has more opinions on it.

It seems like former President Donald Trump will run for president again. On Thursday, Trump told his followers to “get ready” for his return to the presidential campaign trail – and top aides have been eyeing November 14 as a potential launch date, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. It’s thought that Trump is trying to become the first person in a long while to win back-to-back elections.

Add it all up, the news is not good for those who argue that Trump is still the best option for the GOP’s hopes of recapturing the White House. It is now fair to say that the former president has cost Republicans political power in three election cycles – 2018, 2020 and 2022 – and the heavy baggage of controversy that he carries with him just became much heavier. And there seems to be no end in sight.

Biden will be much more important in the election than it will be in Trump’s favor. While Biden can tout a successful legislative record that includes the Inflation Reduction Act and the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package, he will go into 2024 with the baggage that plagues any incumbent. The problems he has had with inflation and the aftermath of the Afghanistan withdrawal will come up in a conversation that was not four years ago. If he runs, Biden will no longer be campaigning to be the new boss – he is the boss.

These events have shown that those in the party who believed that Trump’s influence over the GOP had waned were wrong. After the party’s disappointing performance in last November’s midterm election, which included losses for multiple Trump-endorsed Senate and gubernatorial candidates in key swing states, an unprecedented procession of GOP strategists, local leaders and fundraisers openly insisted that the party needed to move on from him in 2024. But the blistering attacks on the New York investigation by figures like House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and former Vice President Mike Pence quickly demonstrated how difficult that will be to do in practice.

Even with unconventional and deeply flawed candidates such as Herschel Walker and Dr. Mehmet Oz running for key Senate seats, recent polls are showing that the GOP is in relatively good shape overall going into the midterm election on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Democrats are scrambling to defend several seats and even candidates in reliably blue states such as New York are at risk.

Even though Trump frequently accuses the “establishment” of trying to silence them, most in either party think his base will take any legal actions against him in order to show that. But those voters, while a powerful faction inside the GOP coalition, are not the only voters who will decide the Republican nomination next year – much less the general election. The fact that there is a significant contingent of general election swing voters and even participants in the Republican primary who harbor doubts about Trump is shown in the polls.

A GOP midterm victory would also embolden Trump himself. At this point, he has largely escaped accountability. Despite ongoing criminal investigations and the House select committee investigating January 6, Trump is still a viable political figure.

Trump is also facing at least one case of potentially criminal vulnerability. New developments on multiple fronts suggest it’s possible he could be indicted in several separate investigations that are all apparently moving forward in a long-delayed crescendo of possible accountability.

If the President is not found guilty, Trump would unleash a violent assault on him, which could cause serious damage to the economy and party. If election deniers enter positions of power after the elections, Trump might be able to take advantage of the loyalists who are in state and local election offices to make sure that he wins the election. Trump will also come to the race having been to this rodeo before, which will mean he can perfect the technique and rhetoric that put him into office in 2016. And now that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter, Trump could be reinstated – giving him a way to direct and shape the media conversation once again. Trump has not stated publicly how he will return, but he founded Truth Social, where he has been active since he was banned.

The Donald Trump Organization: Investigating IRS Tax Frauds in the Era of Biden’s 2020 Runaway Supermajority Loss

The midterms have shown that the Democrats’ focus on the radical nature of the GOP and the dangers posed to democracy are not necessarily enough to rally voters. Biden said these dangers were outlined in his closing speech Wednesday but the Democrats are struggling to maintain power.

The fact that Trump presents a serious threat in twenty four doesn’t mean he will win. It is not clear if Trump can win the support of Republicans and even some independents in swing states by 2020 because he turned off many. And as we have seen with President Barack Obama’s run against Mitt Romney in 2012, presidents who have faced tough reelection campaigns can still find a path to victory.

Supporting Donald Trump to the republican party is getting more expensive. There is new evidence that shows the party’s connection to the former president, and his likely nomination in 2024, may be very damaging.

A Manhattan jury found two of the companies in the Trump Organization guilty of criminal tax fraud and falsifying tax business records on Tuesday, though Trump and his family were not charged in the case.

The Democrats won the Senate majority in Georgia thanks to a loss by Herschel Walker, Trump’s preferred candidate. That was also the day that Trump posed for photos with a conspiracy theorist.

According to the Washington Post, a group of investigators hired by the former president’s lawyers discovered two classified documents in a Florida storage unit.

No one-off for Trump. And what does it take to become a nut? The story of Trump, Kayne West, and Nick Fuentes

Nor was this week some sort of one-off. For instance, it comes after his decision to dine with Kayne West soon after Ye, as he’s now known, made more antisemitic comments. Also at the table that evening was Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, who is a notorious promoter of racism of all kinds.

Commenting on everything that has happened, Republican strategist Scott Reed called this week, and the two that came before, “devastating for Trump’s future viability.” The writing on the wall, Reed told the New York Times, seems clear. He said that apostasy has begun.

An increasingly circus-like atmosphere in Washington, New York and Florida, where Trump now lives, is making the drama around the various cases even more tense and confusing – and, to some extent, taking the focus away from what may be a moment of dubious history. And a mounting partisan uproar led by House Republicans, meanwhile, appears designed to blur the facts, distract from the evidence and fuel Trump’s claim he’s the victim of an endless political vendetta.

Trump never strives to be loved but, rather, he seeks to weaponize the anger and vitriol that he generates. Despite Trump’s name-calling and personal drama, he twice won the GOP presidential nomination – and the 2016 election. The same dynamic held true throughout his one-term presidency.

While many speculate about whether Trump has “gone too far,” this has never proven to be a concern to Republican powerbrokers such as Sen. Mitch McConnell. This is not the issue that motivates them.

Almost nothing that happened in recent weeks is totally new to Trump, unless a person hasn’t been paying attention. From the moment he set foot in politics, he was involved in scandal. He was always breaking the limits of power. And he has a history of making remarks that invoke antisemitic tropes.

But now things might start to look different. The history of the Trump- Republican relationship is at risk of being turned into a divide during the upcoming elections. In Republican politics, partisan power drives decision-making above all else.

Over the past six years, Republican officials, and the rank and file, have learned how to live with Trump because they believe that he can win, and that his loyal base can help them be victorious. Republicans showed that they would tolerate almost anything in order to protect him.

Nonetheless, the frustration is mounting. The most recent elections put him in genuine danger with the party as a result of all of the political problems facing him. Republicans are paying attention to more than the documents, but the ways that Trump and the candidates he supported cost the party majority power. McConnell might be forgiving of many things, but having to serve as the minority leader is not one of them.

If Trump is going to solidify his position, he will need to convince more Republicans that he can deliver votes and that he is not a “loser,” in his own parlance. The Republicans were hoping to win many governorships and state legislatures but Democrats in the White House, Senate, and many other places have made it harder. Trump will have a much harder road ahead if Republicans conclude that by not fighting his nomination tooth and nail, they might end up handing Democrats a united government two years down the road.

What do conservatives really want from a Democrat politician like Kim Jackson and the teen who shot at a spa: what will she do next?

The N.A.A.C.P.’s Griggs, who has known Willis since he was an undergraduate and working alongside her in the city solicitor’s office, calls her “a great lawyer, a consummate prosecutor,” but continues, “I just think that, you know, sometimes she’s a little too gung ho. And I think that justice is somewhere in the middle.” We met in his law office, and when I brought up Trump, Griggs pulled a book from his shelf and read aloud from Title 21, the state elections law, which bars “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud.” Griggs told me that if you played the recording of Trump’s phone conversation to a grand jury and read the state code, they would indict him. Griggs said it was interesting to find himself on the side of the prosecution, rather than the defense in this case. He sounded optimistic as he mentioned that the former president would get his due process in Georgia, not in a TV studio, and that it was not on Truth Social or Fox News.

A scenario like that in which the Democrat with her tough-as-nails messaging on crime could have been better situated to deliver on reforms the left wing of the party has been fighting for, is not completely out of the ordinary. Kim Jackson has since been elected to the state senate and she told me that she was excited about the fact that there was a black woman running on a platform against death penalty. But three months into Willis’s tenure, a horrific mass shooting occurred at multiple spas in and around Atlanta, leaving eight dead, mostly Asian women, in what appeared to be a hate crime. She said that she would try to get the death penalty for the accused shooter. And though Willis campaigned on pretrial diversion in lieu of prison time as one of her major reform issues, a report released by the American Civil Liberties Union on overcrowded and unsafe conditions at the Fulton County Jail cited insufficient use of diversion and a failure to indict arrested individuals in a timely manner as two major factors.

But the morning after we spoke, I sat in the back of a courtroom where the judge was holding a series of preliminary hearings for jail inmates, all Black men, who had been arrested and held since mid-July. One, accused of stealing equipment from a landscaping truck, had been in jail for 112 days; another, accused of smashing storefront windows, had been locked up for 116. The police report overstated the amount of damage and it turned out that it was a felony.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/magazine/she-took-on-atlantas-gangs-now-she-may-be-coming-for-trump.html

An investigation of the charge against Donald Trump in the case of alleged misdemeanor accounting for a payment to Stormy Daniels

Mark Binelli is a contributing writer for the magazine. The last thing he wrote about was the opera director Yuval Sharon. An Atlanta based artist named Nydia Blas is interested in telling stories through a Black female perspective. She was named one of The British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch in 2019.

The country is closer to a precipice that could lead to the indictment of a former president for the first time. The ex-commander in chief’s 2024 White House bid would make this historic twist even more inflammatory and amount to his greatest stress test yet of America’s legal and governing institutions and its brittle unity.

onlookers are concerned by the theory of a case against Trump outside the bubble of the grand jury and the office. The ex-president could be charged with a misdemeanor over allegedly improper classification in business records of a payment to Daniels, although hush money payments themselves aren’t illegal. If it is proven that Trump tried to cover up the payment in order to commit another crime, the charges could rise to a felony which would be a violation of campaign finance laws. Trump has previously denied knowledge of the payment.

The development came with all eyes on New York, where there was expectation that Trump could face indictment relating to the Stormy Daniels case. Intrigue spiked after the grand jury in the matter did not meet on Wednesday. According to a source, it will sit on Thursday.

A previous prosecutor did not decide to pursue an investigation into the payment of $130,000 to Stormy Daniels because they felt that the election was enough reason to do so.

The Ex-President of the House of Representatives will not be charged with a crime against the American people, but to protect him and his family

But the ex-president launched a characteristic effort to discredit attempts to call him to account, trying to intimidate prosecutors, mobilize his grassroots supporters and pressure top GOP officials to rally to his side. Every American has a constitutional right to political self-expression, but the ex-president’s call this weekend for his loyalists – “Protest, take our nation back” – struck an ominous tone since he showed on January 6, 2021, that he was willing to incite violence to further his interests.

If Trump were to be indicted for merely a trivial crime, there would be serious consequences, according to Trump lawyer Alina Habba. It is going to be a terrible thing, Paula. I mean, it’s just a very scary time in our country,” Habba said. But she also said that “no one wants anyone to get hurt” and Trump supporters should be “peaceful.”

The strategy of the House Republicans has stayed the same. Trump has long launched fierce and preemptive attacks on institutions, in government or the law, that try to hold him to account as he has tried to blur clarity about his conduct or culpability and taint their conclusions in advance.

Trump tried to distract from the allegations against him by using his allies in the House leadership to attack Bragg.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Sunday called it “the weakest case out there.” The California Republican, who has instructed GOP-led committees to investigate whether the Manhattan DA used federal funds to probe the hush money payment, said at a news conference that he had already spoken to Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan – who is investigating “the weaponization” of the government against political opponents – about looking into that question.

The Case for a Trump Ex-President is Not a Symmetry Under the Law: A Comment on the Case of the Bragg Investigation

But the speaker also said people should not protest over what may or not happen and insisted that Trump didn’t want that either. “If this is to happen we want calmness out there … no violence or harm to anyone else,” McCarthy said.

The more daring Republicans may try to ding Trump for his seamy behavior even while attacking the politicized prosecution. The governor of Florida went against the former president when he was a candidate for the nomination.

New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, who has said it is time for Republicans to move on from Trump, told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union” the Bragg investigation was “building a lot of sympathy for the former president.” He said that none of the people at his coffee were big Trump supporters, but they all said that he was being attacked.

— Any indictment against Trump would be rooted in the principle that no one, not even an ex-president, is above the law. Some legal experts think that a conviction might be a challenge and there may be questions about the ex-president’s reputation if he is indicted. His lawyers might argue that someone less famous or politically active would have been treated differently.

— There is also the issue of whether the political division and trauma of putting Trump on trial would be in the wider national interest — at least in a fairly constrained case that seems to hold fewer lasting constitutional implications than those connected to the January 6 investigations. History may not look kindly on any failed prosecution.

The fact that the Daniels case dates back to an election that is now more than six years old, even as the nation faces another White House campaign, could also raise questions for the public, especially given the uncertainty about the case for anyone outside the small bubble of the investigation. Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” on Sunday that “nobody in our nation is or should be above the law.” I would hope that, even if the charges are brought, they have a strong case. There are risks here.

Kelly’s comment emphasized how Trump, nearly eight years after he burst onto the scene with an upstart presidential campaign, is again shattering convention about the role of presidents and ex-presidents in national life. He is about to move back to the center in the most controversial ways of the political debate.

Reply to Bragg’s Appellate Charge in the New York District Attorney’s Dilemma and Appeals to the Court of First Amendment

The chairs of House Judiciary Committee, House Oversight Committee, and House Administration Committee sent Bragg a letter on Monday demanding documents, communications, and testimony related to his.

The chairmen said that the case was based on a new legal theory that federal authorities declined to pursue, and that it was an unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority.

Bragg’s actions ” will undermine confidence in the application of justice and interfere with the presidential election if he indicts Trump,” they said.

They said they expect him to appear as soon as possible but did not set a date for the hearing. They gave Bragg a deadline of Thursday to respond to them to set up a possible appearance.

The former president, currently running for the GOP nomination, is dominating the discussion at a retreat of House Republicans in Florida.

Kevin McCarthy, the Speaker of the House and a Trump supporter, said on Monday that it was perfectly acceptable for the ex-president’s allies to publicly lambast a prosecutor as he conducts his work. Or as the California Republican put it, House committees have the right to ask questions.

McCarthy said that the reason they won New York races is because the district attorney didn’t protect the people of New York. “And the statute of limitations are gone.” He added about an indictment: “This will not hold up in court, if this is what he wants to do.”

What do Republicans think about Donald Trump? The latest CNN national poll of senate GOP voters in South Carolina and what they want to see next year

The issue of Trump’s time in the White House wasfront and center as House Republicans sought to showcase their agenda in the majority.

The Hispanics at the press conference were interested in Bragg’s probe. “It definitely smells like it’s political”, said Rep Carlos Gimenez when asked if it was political.

The flurry of events has made it clear that Donald Trump is still the center of the GOP universe.

“You would think they would have learned their lesson” from Trump’s defeat in 2020 and the GOP’s surprisingly weak showing in 2022, said Jennifer Horn, a former state Republican party chair in New Hampshire, who has emerged as a staunch Trump critic. “It’s like they are addicted to him. The GOP can’t break their addiction to Trump.”

“I think there are core Trump voters that this galvanizes,” says Dave Wilson, a conservative strategist in South Carolina with close ties to the evangelical community. “I think that there is a much broader group of Republican/conservative voters that this may give enough pause to, to then say, ‘I’m going to at least look at everybody else in the field.’”

There is no guarantee that enough people will vote for a specific GOP alternative to deny Trump a third nomination. The latest CNN national poll of GOP primary voters, conducted by SRSS, highlights that difficulty.

The survey found that about three-fifths of GOP voters said they most prioritized a nominee who shared their positions on issues, while about two-fifths wanted someone who had the best chance of beating President Joe Biden. Trump led among the voters who wanted a candidate who shared their views, while Gov. Ron DeSantis led among those who prioritized electability, according to previously unpublished results provided by CNN polling director Jennifer Agiesta. The group focused on shared values larger, as opposed to the Florida governor, led by nearly twice as much as the one who focused on beating Biden.

Wilson expects the same kind of reaction in South Carolina. Wilson said that an indictment of Donald Trump could help reinforce the sentiment at the upcoming Palmetto Family Council meeting in Charleston, a social conservative group for GOP leaders and potential candidates. He said that the belief was that Americans can and should be focused on 2024, as opposed to the past. “People want to be focused on what we are doing for the next four, eight, twelve, twenty years from now, not looking in the rear-view mirror,” he added.

The tactic they use to accuse the Biden administration, Bragg, and any other investigators on the trail of Trump is weaponizing the powers of government to advance a partisan political end.

All of this followed a midterm election when Republicans underperformed historical patterns for the party out of the White House in large part because too many swing voters discontented about the economy and disenchanted with Biden still viewed the GOP alternative as too extreme. The five states that decided the 2020 race by shifting from Trump to Biden wereMichigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona. The exit polls in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona showed that nearly three-fifths of voters viewed Trump unfavorably.

Which is why Democrats are watching with such amazement – and a spreading sense of opportunity – as McCarthy so indelibly tattoos the Trump stamp onto the House GOP. “You now have multiple elections from 2018 forward showing that this playbook is not only extremely dangerous [for the country], it is completely ineffective” politically, said Dan Sena, former executive director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Defending Donald Trump has never been a winning electoral strategy.

Matt Bennett is the executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. But whatever the near-term partisan consequences, Bennett, like Sena and Horn, believes the much larger and more ominous signal is the continuing indication that Republicans, especially in the House, are willing to break almost any convention to protect Trump.

Bennett said it was profoundly dangerous and bad. The quisling approach to strong men gets countries into serious trouble.

The former president instructed the House to use government power to try and keep his threats at bay, and they are doing that.

Yet there are also sufficient doubts about a possible prosecution assembled by Bragg – and the unusual nature of potential charges relating to business and electoral law violations – to fuel questions from nonpartisan legal experts about the case perhaps not living up to its billing. This is an especially fateful issue given the gravity of any potential case against a former president.

The big question for Trump in New York is what has changed in the past year or what has happened to him? CNN investigation of the case of Mar-a-Lago Trump

Trump’s calls for protests, meanwhile, have authorities on edge in New York, where security cameras and barricades have been erected, and in Washington amid painful flashbacks to his incitement of violence to further his personal and political ends on January 6, 2021.

“I do get concerned when I look out there, and I see justice not being equal to others, especially in the history of where we are,” he said. It is tough to believe that it would happen across the country with a local party playing in presidential politics.

The Republicans in the new subcommittee accuse the FBI, Justice Department and other agencies of weaponization of the federal government, but the use of government power seems to mirror that behavior.

Jim Jordan, the House Judiciary Chairman, was worried about the Manhattan investigation and wanted to know if federal funds were involved. The Ohio Republican also told CNN’s Manu Raju: “We don’t think President Trump broke the law at all.”

Republicans, along with every other American, do not know exactly what the evidence against Trump might be other than hints contained in media accounts and a previous case involving his ex-lawyer – Michael Cohen, a pivotal witness in the current matter – who was previously sent to jail for for tax fraud, making false statements to Congress and violating campaign finance laws.

CNN reported Monday that prosecutors are considering bringing racketeering and conspiracy charges for the Trump campaign in the state of Georgia.

“My big question in the New York case is what has changed?” CNN legal analyst Carrie Cordero told Wolf Blitzer on the “Situation Room” on Monday. The facts of the case are not new. And so the big question that I have with respect to New York is what has changed more recently in the past year or so that has gotten it to this point?”

The legal tale is complicated, and could be difficult to sell in a highly political case.

— On Wednesday, his problems deepened when an appeals court ruled that Trump’s defense attorney, Evan Corcoran, must testify before a grand jury in the case surrounding classified documents that Trump ferreted away at his resort at Mar-a-Lago. The ruling, which came with surprising speed and thwarted Trump’s typical monthslong delaying tactics, was so significant because the Justice Department had to convince the court there was sufficient evidence to show Trump committed a crime in order to puncture the convention of attorney-client privilege.

It seems like the case would be made solely on Cohen’s word, without some evidence to back it up. There is a lot that the country does not understand about the grave matter.

The Trump legal peril in court: What will judges decide if a prosecutor is prosecuted? CNN legal analyst Eisen, Pence, and DeSantis

That is not, however, quelling the storm that has accompanied Trump’s return to political center stage, which could reach hurricane strength in the days ahead.

Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and CNN legal analyst, said the piercing of this bedrock legal protection was highly unusual and an ill omen for Trump, since Corcoran’s testimony could be used to suggest he committed a crime. If this is done, it could involve not just the improper handling of documents, but also obstruction of justice. “It considerably worsens what was probably Trump’s most federal legal peril,” Eisen told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room” on Wednesday.

Cohen, who made the payment to Daniels, is seen by some analysts as a weak link in any trial since his credibility could be undermined by his own conviction for lying to Congress. CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams explained that Bragg would have to test the question of Cohen’s trustworthiness now before a grand jury or at trial. “It’s very much in their interests, to take a beat, step back and decide,” he said. This is what happens when prosecutors decide on whether or not to bring cases.

The ex-president and his lieutenants are being investigated by the Justice Department over attempts to steal the 2020 election and cause an insurrection in the US Capitol. In another sign of the seriousness of the probe, Smith has subpoenaed former Vice President Mike Pence, who helped save US democracy on January 6, 2021, to testify. (Smith is also investigating Trump’s handling of classified documents.)

I am not sure what goes into paying for the silence over an affair with a porn star, DeSantis said, while stressing he sees the prosecutor’s potential charges as an example of pursuing a political agenda. Conservative stalwart Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, who has already endorsed DeSantis despite him not even having officially announced yet, offered a similar version of this strategy on a radio show.

One DeSantis adviser told Steve Contorno that the governor cannot afford to be marginalized. He clearly made the decision that it was time to back off.

Apostasis: What can the diehards tell us about Donald Trump and the 2024 presidential nomination? An analysis by P.T. Brown

All of this underscores the fact that more than two years after Trump left office, the nation is nowhere near working through the enormous political and legal trauma of his term. And if the events of recent days are any indication, Americans may be in for another round of turmoil.

Patrick T. Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which is based in Washington, DC. He is also a former senior policy adviser to Congress’ Joint Economic Committee. Follow him on Twitter. The views expressed in this piece are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

Perhaps Republican primary voters may take both routes — immediately flocking to support the former president against his perceived adversaries before being persuaded to opt for a safer, more scandal-free option once the 2024 presidential primary campaigning begins in earnest.

But the biggest political impact may be in creating a tightrope that Trump’s would-be challengers, and other Republicans interested in charting a post-Trump future, will need to walk.

On the legal question itself, many Republicans will go on the record as calling it the politicized decision of an overzealous prosecutor. Some will be tempted to back Trump to the hilt, arguing that the party should unify against the arrayed forces of the “deep state” and the media. The Republicans will be tricked by the strategy of the diehards: if they can come for Trump they will come for you.

The ancient Greeks had a word for this kind of rhetorical move — apophasis, or, the art of bringing up a subject in a debate by claiming not to be bringing it up. Republicans who offer a response coupling implicit criticism of Trump with explicit criticism of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg offer a textbook example of the strategy.

It runs the risk of being a little too clever. DeSantis’ quip infuriated the usual MAGA online crowd, including the former president himself. But solely concentrating their rhetorical ire on the legal adventures of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, without laying out subtle critiques of Trump, would make it harder for Republicans to then run or endorse other candidates for the 2024 nomination.

Candidates and parties need to have compelling stories to tell. Without making a case, directly or indirectly, for why Trump should not be the presumptive nominee, the narrative of the Republican Party will center around Trump and his adversaries. The risk of letting Trump claim the nomination is mitigated by the response that only focuses on the sins of prosecutors.