Why Trump's Indictment in Georgia Will Likely Cost Him the Presidency | Opinion

Last night, in Georgia's Fulton County, District Attorney Fani T. Willis unsealed indictments against 19 individuals, including former President Donald Trump and a number of his associates, for their role in trying to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia and illegally install himself as president. A number of the 41 counts will be prosecuted under the state's racketeering law, with Trump's coup crew deemed a "criminal enterprise." And despite whatever desperate spin you might hear today from the far right's prolific media apologists, this is in fact not good news either for the former president or for his effort to reclaim the office he so thoroughly slimed.

The indictment goes far beyond what the former president now refers to as his "perfect call" with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, during which Trump unlawfully pressured him to "re-examine" the election and "find 11,780 votes." It includes charges against Trump lawyers Rudy Guiliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro, as well as Georgia Republicans involved in the state's fake electors scheme. And there are also indictments for Trump's disgusting harassment of local election officials and a truly bizarre incident where Trump campaign allies broke into and tampered with election equipment in Coffee County, Georgia.

It's a lot, but of course the usual suspects are spinning it all as just another nothingburger. Failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake called it "an absolute joke." Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said that Willis is "using Communist tactics to interfere in a presidential election," proving once again that Greene does not know what many of the words that she speaks actually mean.

Over the past seven years, we've seen the "LOL nothing matters" theory of Donald Trump proven right again and again. Behavior or revelations that would have destroyed the career of any politician going back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony barely dent Trump's core support among Republicans. So, there's no question that the null hypothesis here should be that these latest charges—Trump's fourth round of this long-awaited Hot Indictment Summer—will have no discernible political impact on his standing in either the Republican primary or the general election.

But it's also wrong.

Georgia might be the critical swing state for the GOP in 2024. The Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan have drifted back toward Democrats since Trump's fluke victories there in 2016. Democratic governors were easily re-elected in Wisconsin and Michigan last year, with incumbent Gretchen Whitmer crushing her hapless opponent by double digits in the latter. Pennsylvania gave Democrat Josh Shapiro a 15-point win over election-denying knucklehead Doug Mastriano, in a Republican-leaning national environment. Even if you give Wisconsin to Trump, Pennsylvania and Michigan would put Biden at 270's doorstep.

If Biden wins Georgia, Trump could pull it out in Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin and still fall short of victory. And if there's one thing you'd rather not see in a must-win battleground state, it's your candidate on trial for election subversion and racketeering. Biden has led Trump in Georgia, albeit narrowly, in almost every single public, non-partisan poll taken since the midterm elections (while usually trailing Trump's top rival for the nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis). How is this going to help?

It's not. As we heard during his arraignment in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 3, Trump is a diminished man inside of a courtroom. These trials aren't going to be Trump rallies—they will be deadly serious affairs where this sad, bitter old man will have to sit quietly for hours as prosecutors lay the cases against him out, one painstaking detail at a time. This is what he'll be doing instead of campaigning—a kind of jet-setting from the site of one trial to another, possibly up through the November 2024 general election and beyond.

Trump also won't have Georgia Republicans to save him or launder the facts like House Republicans did during his 2019 impeachment. The former president has benefited enormously from the ability of his allies in right-wing media and Congress to conjure an alternate reality out of nothing and then to use the subservience of elected officials to get him out of hot water.

But Georgia's governor, Brian Kemp, who has considered his own run for the nomination , survived Trump's attempt on his political life last year when he crushed a handpicked MAGA candidate in the GOP primary and will not be interested in participating in a bailout. And this time the audience Trump needs to convince isn't Jim Jordan and Fox News diehards—it's a jury of his peers and the people of Georgia, who will spend the next year hearing about Trump's efforts to disenfranchise them. Republican political self-interest, the key ingredient in Trump's many escapes from legal jeopardy, will play no role in whether he is convicted.

It also isn't true that nothing matters. Despite crediting him with the roaring pre-COVID economy in 2020, voters handed Trump a resounding defeat, one that seemed close only because America uses the single-most absurd electoral system on the face of the Earth to elect the president. Every indictment is another piece of evidence for the small but potentially critical bloc of wavering Republicans that Trump is unfit to lead the country, lowering his electoral ceiling inch by inch. Remember, 10 percent of Republicans in a recent poll said that Trump should be charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. That might not be enough to cost him the nomination, but it would make his general election task virtually impossible.

And even Republican primary voters might ultimately, to paraphrase Trump's smear of the late war hero Arizona's Republican Sen. John McCain, decide that they like candidates who aren't indicted.

David Faris is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.