Juan Williams: Would an indictment help or hurt Donald Trump in 2024?

It pains me to say it, but even if former President Trump is soon indicted, it might have zero effect on his campaign for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

In fact, an indictment might help him with many Republicans. He can start every rally by claiming to be the victim of a political “witch hunt.”

Even with several possible indictments hanging over him, Trump remains in the lead for his party’s nomination. According to the RealClearPolitics average of the latest polls, Trump is the front-runner with 43 percent support, and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) is at 31 percent.

The question now is whether an indictment would bring down Trump’s poll numbers.

I wouldn’t bet on it.

Most Republican voters continue to ignore his blatant lies about a stolen election in 2020. Even the GOP candidates who smell blood, as they position themselves to enter the 2024 Republican primaries, are hesitant to call attention to Trump’s legal problems; they fear angering GOP voters who are more loyal to Trump than to the party.

DeSantis even declined to aggressively respond to Trump sharing posts of a photo of him when he was a private school teacher. Trump’s supporters accused DeSantis of “grooming” young women “with alcohol.” Trump gave further allure to the picture by writing: “That’s not Ron, is it? He would never do such a thing!”

DeSantis’s only response was that he doesn’t “spend my time trying to smear other Republicans.”

Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and the first Republican to officially challenge Trump for the nomination, refused to point out the heavy baggage Trump would load on the party’s efforts to win the White House. “I don’t focus on President Trump,” she said when asked about her opponent on “Fox News Sunday.” She blamed “the media” for wanting her to address how she differs from Trump, adding: “I am focused on Joe Biden.”

But there is a chance that an official indictment of Trump in any of four pending investigations might force Republicans to consider the wisdom of nominating Trump for a third time.

Under indictment, Trump could not pretend he is anything but a candidate who lost the presidency in 2020 and now faces the risk of prison time before Inauguration Day 2025.

Trump’s past response to charges of illegal acts was to say he was being treated unfairly by the media, Democrats or the Republican establishment. But after the convictions of several Trump supporters for involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, Trump’s claim of unfair treatment looks weak. How can he say he is being treated wrongly when he has never been charged in a case that resulted in his supporters going to jail?

“Take the more than 900 individuals who have been convicted or pled guilty to January 6 offenses,” wrote Alan B. Morrison, of the George Washington University Law School, in a piece last week for Bloomberg Law. “They would justifiably demand that equal treatment requires that Trump defend himself in court, especially because many of them told the judge who sentenced them that they stormed the Capitol because their leader urged them to do so.”

Morrison added that equal treatment also means that the Justice Department should follow its consistent practice of indicting people who intentionally mishandle classified documents and defy a court order to return them.

That standard for equal application of the law, wrote Morrison, also “differentiates the Trump case” from apparently inadvertent misfiling of classified documents by former Vice President Mike Pence and President Biden.

True, but we are talking about Trump. He has a history of escaping political and legal trouble.

He been impeached twice. Both times, Senate Republicans, fearing backlash from his supporters, closed their eyes to evidence and allowed him to stay in the White House.

Then there was the damning report by special counsel Robert Mueller. Trump escaped damage from Mueller’s finding that his 2016 campaign had contacts with Russians.

He survived thanks to what a federal judge called a “one-sided narrative about the Mueller report,” put out by Bill Barr, Trump’s attorney general at the time. Judge Reggie B. Walton said Barr “made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller report in favor of President Trump” with his favorable accounts while withholding release of the report until a month later.

More recently, Trump managed to distract from possible charges for illegal handling of classified documents by saying he was treated unfairly when the FBI raided his Florida home and found the documents.

Now, he is attacking the prosecutors. Just last week he charged Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, with being a “racist” and engaging in a “political witch hunt” against him for investigating his alleged interference in the state’s 2020 presidential election vote count.

If Trump is indicted on election interference in Georgia, he is likely to again say he is being singled out unfairly.

When Manhattan’s district attorney, Alvin Bragg, reopened a probe into Trump’s involvement with a payoff to a porn star, Trump labeled him as “Radical Left.”

All that bluster may not work this time, however.

After all, will Republicans vote for a man wearing an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs?

Some will, of course… but enough of them?