The guilty verdict rendered against former President Trump is bringing moderate Republicans and longtime Trump skeptics to his side in a way that Trump’s campaign has failed to do for months.
Longtime Trump critics, including Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and moderate Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), among others, are rallying to Trump’s defense after the verdict — and other Trump-leery Republicans including Nikki Haley are expected to do so as well.
Haley, who said last week she would vote for Trump over President Biden, has so far stayed quiet about Trump’s conviction, but prominent Republicans, even some of his biggest critics, say the case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) was fundamentally unfair.
McConnell said after the verdict the “charges never should have been brought in the first place” and predicted the conviction will be overturned on appeal.
And Collins said Bragg had blurred “the lines between the judicial system and the electoral system” by running for the district attorney’s office on a pledge to prosecute Trump.
“This decision has the same dramatic effect across the country like President Clinton’s impeachment. They are very different scenarios, but both caused a massive rally effect. With Clinton it was Democrats, and now with Trump it’s Republicans who believe there is judicial overreach,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist and former senior Senate and House leadership aide.
Bonjean said McConnell’s surprise defense of Trump is a signal to the other traditional, mainstream Republicans to rally behind the former president.
“He’s giving establishment Republicans permission to be supportive of Trump going into November,” he said.
Senate Republicans in particular recognize their hopes of winning back the majority are riding on Trump’s performance in battleground states. This leaves them little choice but to close ranks as Trump faces a possible jail term when he is scheduled to be sentenced shortly before the GOP nominating convention in mid-July.
Bonjean said McConnell’s show of support for Trump is “making sure that Republican challengers in battleground states are fully supported from the top of the ticket with Trump.”
Even former Vice President Mike Pence, who has refused to endorse his former boss, called the verdict an “outrage.”
“The conviction of former President Trump on politically motivated charges is an outrage and disservice to the nation,” Pence told Fox News Digital.
“No one is above the law, but our courts must not become a tool to be used against political opponents,” he said, echoing talking points used by Trump’s allies claiming “weaponization” of the Justice Department.
Ford O’Connell, a GOP strategist, said the verdict “is going to have a unifying effect on the party.”
“You can do two things simultaneously, say, ‘Hey, I’m not a big fan of Trump, but at the same time, this is completely wrong,’” he said.
O’Connell said the more than $30 million the Trump campaign raised after the announcement of the verdict “is a good indicator of the unifying effect it would have on what we call base Republican voters, regular Republican voters.”
A recent New York Times/Siena College poll of voters across six battleground states found that 49 percent of respondents did not think Trump would get a fair trial in New York, while 45 percent thought he would.
An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted before the verdict came out and published Thursday showed that 25 percent of Republican respondents said they would be more likely to vote for Trump if a jury found him guilty.
The same poll found that 67 percent of surveyed voters nationwide said they would not vote differently in November if Trump were found guilty.
GOP senators had predicted before the verdict that a guilty finding could energize GOP voters behind Trump and put Democrats on the defensive.
“He might win in a landslide,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said last month about the political impact of a guilty verdict on Trump’s chances in the general election. “It looks so awful.”
Paul noted that New York’s statute of limitations had expired on Trump’s falsification of business records, which forced Bragg to combine them with campaign finance violations to bring his case forward.
The Trump campaign announced that it raised $34.8 million in the first six hours after the jury announced its guilty verdict.
Trump pollster Jim McLaughlin said Trump skeptics such as McConnell, Collins and Pence are rallying behind the former president because they are genuinely offended by the conviction over conduct the general public has known about for years.
“What’s happened is, people realize this is wrong. It’s flat-out wrong,” he said, citing legal scholars such as Jonathan Turley and Alan Dershowitz who have strongly criticized Bragg’s case.
Turley, a law professor at the George Washington University, predicted on social media the conviction would be reversed on appeal.
And Dershowitz, a Harvard Law professor emeritus, warned Friday on Fox News that Trump’s conviction would begin “a war of weaponization of the criminal justice system.”
McLaughlin downplayed the significant share of Republican primary votes against Trump in states such as Indiana and Nebraska that were cast after Haley dropped out of the presidential race in early March.
“I think that whole thing is overrated; I’m not really worried about Nikki Haley voters. Look at all the surveys that came out before all this: Trump’s getting 90 percent-plus of the Republican vote, and one of the reasons he’s doing as well as he’s doing is because he gets more of his Republican partisans than Biden gets of the Democrats,” he said. “He’s got his Republican base locked down. He gets 90-percent plus of the Republican vote.”
Some GOP senators acknowledge, however, that a criminal conviction could further alienate independent voters, especially college-educated and suburban women who moved away from Trump and the GOP in the 2020 presidential and 2022 midterm elections.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who said in March she couldn’t support Trump for president, said Friday the party would have a better chance of winning back the White House with another nominee.
“A Republican nominee without this baggage would have a clear path to victory,” she posted on the social platform X.
Murkowski said it was a “shame” the presidential election has “focused on personalities and legal problems rather than a debate about policies that would lift up Americans.”
“These distractions have given the Biden campaign a free pass as the focus has shifted from Biden’s indefensible record and the damage his policies have done to Alaska and our nation’s economy to Trump’s legal drama,” she lamented.
Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R), who is running for the U.S. Senate in Maryland, was one of the few Republicans with a significant national profile to break with fellow Republicans who have blasted Bragg’s case and the jury’s verdict.
“At this dangerously divided moment in our history, all leaders — regardless of party — must not pour fuel on the fire with more toxic partisanship,” Hogan said Thursday. “We must reaffirm what has made this nation great: the rule of law.”
But that prompted an angry backlash from Trump’s camp, warning that could spell trouble for Republicans in November.
“You just ended your campaign,” Trump adviser Chris LaCivita wrote on X, reposting Hogan’s comments.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told The Hill before the verdict came out that a conviction would not likely dent Trump’s support among GOP voters.
“I don’t think it will have any impact on his support at all, in part because people have already processed that. They know about the relationship with Stormy Daniels, they know about the payment, there’s been nothing particularly new that’s come out at trial,” Romney said. “What the jury does one way or another probably won’t make any difference in terms of President Trump’s support.”
“When I was running [in the Massachusetts Senate race] against [then-Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.)] in 1994 … people were saying, ‘You need to bring up Mary Jo Kopechne,’” he said, referring to the woman who died in a car crash while Kennedy was at the wheel in 1969.
“People have already thought that through and made a decision and have moved on. Once people have made that decision, raising it again does nothing but irritate them,” he said.