“It’s a scam, it’s a sham,” said the former president to reporters huddled outside of a Manhattan courtroom. “It’s a witch hunt and a disgrace.” The tenor of his comments was familiar as he opined on the civil fraud case that saw him accused of inflating the value of his businesses by millions of dollars. But the subject of his ire was somewhat new.
A longtime critic of the United States’ media and political establishments, former president Donald Trump has recently added the American judicial system to his list of targets in a campaign season that once again seems poised to position the iconoclastic businessman as an outsider candidate.
It’s a role Trump is all too eager to play. He briefly waded into US politics in 2000, forming a presidential exploratory committee and promising to challenge the then-bipartisan consensus around free trade, among other issues. He waged his 2016 campaign against perhaps the most well known living representative of the Washington political establishment (former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton). And he spent his turbulent four years as president constantly at odds with detractors from all sides of the political spectrum.
Now Trump can add judges and prosecutors to his long list of adversaries.
“Every time he’s in a courtroom, he’s campaigning,” said Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois who became a fierce critic of Trump from within his own party.
“The courtroom has replaced his rallies and that’s what the next 14 months are going to look like. He’s a showman; he loves this s***. This will be his campaign and it could work.”
Trump’s civil case compounds his recent legal woes, which include 91 criminal charges from four separate indictments and another civil trial that saw the former president held liable for sexually abusing and defaming columnist E. Jean Carroll earlier this year. Then, as now, he decried the case as part of a witch hunt to derail his 2024 presidential candidacy.
The legal proceedings create an unprecedented dynamic in next year’s campaign. In any other election, with any other candidate, they might spell certain doom.
Yet Trump currently remains the overwhelming favorite to win his party’s presidential primary. Most recent polling shows him running even with Biden in the general election, if not leading him.
In 2020 Trump ran as an incumbent, forced to defend his political record and handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. But recently, events have conspired to once again give him the aura of an outsider, running against a political figure who was first elected to national office in 1972.
In the context of 2024’s presidential contest, the judiciary becomes just another aspect of Trump’s audacious challenge to America’s political and social system.
Polling has long shown sharply declining trust in a broad swath of US institutions. Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court remain among some of the least-respected institutions in American public life, but most others fare no better.
Such wide skepticism could create the perfect environment for Donald Trump to triumphantly return to the White House. But whatever the outcome of next year’s contest, the American public may be ready for deep reform in almost every corner of society. Whether our institutions permit such change may dictate their very survival.