According to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the indictments levied against former President Donald Trump have “distorted” the race and are the one factor he would alter regarding the 2024 Republican presidential primary.
According to DeSantis, who spoke in an interview that was made public on Thursday by CBN News, the indictments that Trump is facing have boosted his campaign and “sucked out a lot of oxygen” from his opponents.
If there was one thing I could change about the Trump administration, it would be that none of this had led to Trump’s indictment. Truthfully, I feel like I’ve panned the cases starting with Alvin Bragg. To my mind, it’s terrible that someone like Bragg is twisting justice by bringing that case against anyone other than Donald Trump. According to DeSantis, “those have kind of been the main issues that have happened,” and he also believes that it distorted the primary.
In response to a question about whether the indictments have benefited Trump, DeSantis stated, “it’s both that” and the fact that the primary campaign is being dominated by discussions about the charges against a previous president.
“It’s both that, but then it has also sucked out a lot of oxygen and obscured I think a lot of other stuff,” he commented.
Even though Trump might get an advantage in the primary because to the indictments, Democrats might utilise them to their advantage in the general election, according to DeSantis.
“I believe the Democrats have a strategy on this,” DeSantis stated, referring to the upcoming general election. “I believe they have a strategy for how they’re going to weather this storm,” the source said, “in the event that, in six months from now, Trump is the presumptive nominee and this is all happening.”
It is clear from DeSantis’s forthright comments that the Republican primary is being driven by a fundamental dynamic: opponents trying to rally support among Trump’s detractors are finding it difficult to close the gap with the former president. The politics of the primary were already complicated, and polls released following Trump’s arrests suggested his support consolidated.
Among Republican candidates for president, Trump has a commanding lead in national polls. Last month, a University of New Hampshire AWN Poll found that among likely voters in New Hampshire’s Republican presidential primary, he also maintained a strong lead. Even with his lead in New Hampshire, he still doesn’t have the majority support he gets in national primary polls (42% of likely voters indicate they would choose Trump).
Defending Trump from the indictments has been a recurrent theme for DeSantis.
Four separate indictments have been filed against the ex-president so far this year. The Manhattan district attorney initially filed charges against him in March, pertaining to state-level matters involving a 2016 hush-money payment to an adult film actor.
In June, a federal grand jury in Miami re-indicted Trump on charges related to the theft of sensitive national defence information from the White House following his departure from office and his subsequent resistance to the government’s efforts to recover the documents.
The additional two indictments were the product of two separate investigations: one by special counsel Jack Smith into allegations of attempts by the ex-president and his associates to annul the 2020 election, and another by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, which encompassed the most brazen attempts by the ex-president and his associates to influence the 2020 presidential election.
