Federal charges against Donald Trump will only keep him in the media spotlight and help his bid for the presidency, commentators say.
Trump is due to appear at a federal court in Miami later in Tuesday for the first hearing over boxes of White House documents found in an FBI raid on his Florida mansion at the Mar-a-Lago golf resort.
Writer and editor Jim Kavanagh told Sputnik that the charges would only help Trump as the Republican primaries to select a candidate for the 2024 election loom.
"For some reason, they're terrified of Donald Trump. This is what this just demonstrates, their political fear of Donald Trump. And that's going to be the problem," he said.
"Clearly they hate Trump for some bizarre reason," Kavanagh said. "Normally people in his position, people who are oligarchs or people who are party presidents, even when they do investigations of them, they do the limited hangouts. They don't go too far with it."
In the wake of charges levelled against Trump in New York for alleged campaign finance violations, the editor of online magazine The Polemicist said President Joe Biden's Democratic Party administration and "never-Trump" Republicans were looking for any charges to pin on the former president.
"I think what it does is it proves to everybody that they're afraid of Donald Trump," Kavanagh said. "And that's the most damning thing I can think of, damning for the Democrats and damning for the American political situation as a whole, that Donald Trump is such a big political presence."
The writer called the obsession with attacking Trump "bizarre."
"The franticness, the obsessiveness with which they need to feel the need to attack this guy is bizarre to me," Kavanagh said. "It demonstrates their weakness. They're helping him, they're helping to keep him at the center of the political conversation... there's no use to this for anybody."
Attorney Steve Gill told Sputnik that while federal prosecutors had a strong case against Trump, the case was still "obviously politically motivated."
"The only reason Melania didn't testify is she would have had to have talked about why did the FBI agents ramble around in her underwear drawer," Gill said, while Trump could legitimately ask when the Justice Department would act "over all of the documents Joe Biden was stashing completely unsecured in his garage."
The attorney also stressed that the charge sheet against Trump was excessively long.
"Out of the 15 boxes that were at Mar-a-Lago, they're talking about 131 documents, so they're overcharging," Gill siad. "Of these 37 counts, 31 of them are repetitive. So they have to keep saying the same thing over again."
Fellow attorney Robert Patillo believed Trump was guilty, but asked why the Democrats and the "deep state" would risk making Trump more popular by casting his as a martyr.
"This makes Trump look like he's persecuted, makes Trump seem that he's the victim in this situation," Patillo said. "So why would you want a political persecution against Trump that helps him in the polls, to basically clear of the entirety of the Republican field."
"There's no more conversation about the other candidates," he added. "You've made Donald Trump the nominee by indicting, effectively."
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