Being on a short holiday and mostly removed from daily news, I have not followed all of Trump's political countercharges against the Department of Justice and the FBI. I did, however, just hear in a CNN report that Trump and his followers are now absurdly claiming that Democrats are collaborating with a politized Justice Department so as to bar him from running again for the White House.
What the ex-president's millions of disciples cannot know — because of their cloistered Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, Breitbart and talk-radio environment — is that Democrats at large and top party leaders are hoping desperately that Trump indeed is the Republican Party's presidential nominee in 2024.
His unfavorability numbers had already tanked prior to the latest news of the FBI search and subsequent to the Jan. 6 committee hearings. Now his unfavorability numbers are lower than ever due to the ubiquitous news coverage of his obstruction of justice and possible violations of the Espionage Act.
For Democrats, what better GOP nominee to run against? Not only would Trump reap the lowest popular and Electoral College votes imaginable, he would do unprecedented injury to virtually every down-ballot Republican running for federal office, resulting, perhaps, in a massive realignment of the American electorate.
Last night on my phone I tuned in to Fox News at a top-of-the-hour slot to hear what the cloistered ones were hearing about Trump's concealment of top-secret records in his Florida home. The network's legal panel had settled on the curious argument that the former president had declassified the records while still in the Oval Office, hence no crimes were committed, or could have been committed.
Through either ignorance or deceit, Fox News' panel was overlooking two salient facts: A president cannot unilaterally declassify the nation's most highly ranked sensitive documents, and, at any rate, no ex-president can legally transport such documents to his private home. Neither actuality was raised as an issue by Fox's legal "experts," and sooner than later, even much of Trump's base will come to know the still-denied truth.
We do not yet know what criminal defense the ex-president's lawyers might pose at trial. But he would likely encounter a federal judge who would, as in Steve Bannon's trial, bar his attorneys' advancement of the more preposterous arguments, leaving him with ... no real defense at all, again, just as in Bannon's case.
Trump would appeal his conviction for years, and his appeals would probably outlive him. But the almost certain prospect of a federal conviction on even one of the possible charges he'd be facing sometime down the road would haunt his 2024 presidential campaign. Only the truest-believing Trumpers would have his or even his party's at the voting booth.
Run, Donald, run.