Rebecca Blackwell / AP
Former President Donald Trump arrives to speak at his Mar-a-Lago estate hours after being arraigned in New York City, Tuesday, April 4, 2023, in Palm Beach, Fla.
Wednesday, April 5, 2023 | 2 a.m.
View of US political scene from Nevada
Donald Trump’s ability to dodge scandals and maintain favorability among his base is a testament to the support he’s been able to coagulate since coming onto the national political scene in 2015, when he announced his first bid for the White House, said Sondra Cosgrove, a history professor at the College of Southern Nevada.
Whether it’s investigations into his 2016 presidential campaign colluding with Russian agents, an impeachment trial revolving around investigating the family of political opponents in exchange for foreign aid to Ukraine, or efforts to undo the results of the 2020 election, Trump’s grip on the GOP remains unwavering, Cosgrove told the Sun.
That includes his latest, and potentially rockiest, dealings yet with the legal system: He was arraigned Tuesday on 34 felony counts — a watershed legal moment involving a former U.S. president. New York prosecutors allege Trump conspired to illegally influence the 2016 election through a series of hush money payments designed to stifle claims that could be harmful to his candidacy.
In fact, his supporters were inspired by the latest news, donating $7 million to his 2024 campaign in the days after the indictment was announced, his aide told CNBC.
An Ipsos and Reuters poll released Monday showed 48% of 706 Republicans reporting they would support Trump in a primary for president, despite his criminal indictment. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who hasn’t yet formally announced he is running, was a distant second choice at 19%. Polling took place between Friday and Monday.
A similar survey released Friday by YouGov and Yahoo showed Trump with a 57%-31% edge over DeSantis. That’s in spite of dips in popularity following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and Republican underperformance during last year’s midterm elections.
"I think if this were normal times — and I don’t even know what normal is anymore — we would think there’s no way somebody could keep their name in and be able to go out and campaign and win," Cosgrove said. "But we’ve seen with Donald Trump that almost the opposite ends up always being true for him. His followers do see him as a victim sometimes, and that he’s fighting against this big machine that’s coming after him."
Non-Trump supporters, however, have a different view, according to polling.
An Ipsos/ABC News poll released Saturday found 55% of respondents viewed Trump unfavorably, as opposed to 29% who saw him as favorable. As of Tuesday, Trump’s average unfavorable rating clipped 54.6% and 16.2 points higher than his favorability rating, according to FiveThirtyEight. That’s worse than FiveThirtyEight’s average favorability for Democratic President Joe Biden (52.9% disapprove; 42.8% approve).
Stephen Benning, a psychology professor at UNLV, said Trump’s staying power may be the result of right-leaning voters viewing his personality more favorably than their counterparts on the left, adding that folks with conservative leanings tend to see Trump as "relatively agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable and open to experience," Benning told the Sun in an email.
"In contrast, those on the left see him as antagonistic, disinhibited, high in negative emotion and closed to new experiences," Benning wrote. "Thus, it may be difficult for people on the political right to understand why other people view Trump so negatively and feel polarized against those negative perceptions of him."
That, Benning says, became clear after a 2018 study in the Journal of Research in Personality showed differences in how people who believe in liberal or conservative values are conflated with a candidate’s personality, as evidenced by Trump and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Benning notes that Trump supporters still perceive him as antagonistic and sometimes disinhibited, and cited studies showing that voter antagonism in 2016 and 2020 predicted a deep-rooted support for Trump, who often ditches talking points and promotes his pro-business, America-first "Make America Great Again" platform.
"Those who voted for Trump in 2016 were also higher in two personality constructs consistent with his political positions," Benning said. "Social dominance orientation reflects a belief that some groups should be seen as better than others, and national identity importance refers to how important one’s nationality is to one’s sense of identity. These kinds of beliefs are stoked with Trump’s rhetoric, allowing his supporters to frame themselves as the true Americans who should be on top of other groups."
Another factor that explains Trump’s grip on the GOP is that to date, no viable candidate has risen through the party as an alternative, Benning said. Unlike other conservatives who have been embroiled in scandal (like President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal of the 1970s), few from within the Republican Party have pressured the rest of their peers to move on from Trump.
And those who have, like the handful of Republicans who voted in favor of convicting Trump during his second impeachment, have largely been ostracized within the GOP’s ranks.
"Unlike figures like Richard Nixon, who faced severe political consequences from his party in the light of the Watergate scandal, Trump has had no consequences meted out to him by the current Republican Party for his antagonism," Benning said. "In this way, his supporters see a figure who shares their personality traits and values, who promises to put them on top of society, even though Trump has antagonistic and disinhibited traits that would make it difficult for him to enact those promises."
Even if a figure like DeSantis can contend with the former president for the 2024 nomination, Cosgrove, the history professor at CSN, contended that Trump is emblematic of a gripe millions have with American politics.
"There’s a deep dissatisfaction with our political systems and processes, (people) who are frustrated and angry that they vote and feel like nothing changes or things get worse," Cosgrove said. "And as somebody who works in civic spaces, I hear this from people from across the political spectrum; that they don’t want to participate because they don’t think our political system represents them anymore.
"So the reason we might see Donald Trump having kind of the opposite always be true for him, is his voters are maybe just saying, ‘OK, fine. Blow up the two-party system. We don’t like it anyway.’ And what’s the solution to that?"
While Trump’s trial plays out, other possible indictments surrounding his retaining of classified documents, efforts to retain control after losing the 2020 race to Biden and a pressure campaign to "find votes" in Georgia, a state he lost, will loom over the former president as well. Those investigations remain ongoing.
Republicans in the meantime will need to reckon once and for all whether to support Trump in 2024, Cosgrove said. She said moderate conservatives like former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah have long tried to distance themselves from the former president, and will urge others in their conference to move in a new direction.
"You have Republicans that are going to rally around the former president and his campaign, and you’re going to have other Republicans like Mitt Romney who are going to say they can’t be associated with this anymore," Cosgrove said. "And we may see the Republican Party split apart."
That may sound like enjoyable political theater to Democrats and progressives. But Cosgrove warned that would put the U.S. on a path toward greater political dysfunction than what’s been seen in generations.
"Then the question is: Is it OK for our democracy to only have one party that’s functioning? The Democrats have their own issues, but not like this," she said. "In a two-party system, you need to have a weight and a counterweight so that people can have debates and that we can see more than one program or plan."
Shortly after news broke Thursday of Trump’s pending indictment, the Nevada Republican Party in a statement called the charges politically motivated.
"This is an attack on the rule of law, our republic, and should be repugnant to anyone who values an impartial and equal justice system. This isn’t a prosecution, it’s a persecution," the statement read.
In a statement Tuesday, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who inherited the hush-money investigation into Trump and ultimately brought the case against the 45th commander in chief, defended the indictment.
"Manhattan is home to the country’s most significant business market," Bragg said. "We cannot allow New York businesses to manipulate their records to cover up criminal conduct."
