Despite former President Donald Trump's mounting legal problems, his presidential competitors in the GOP primary are "trapped" by the whims of a base that believes he's a victim of a witch hunt, lamented GOP strategist Scott Jennings on CNN Tuesday.
This comes after the Fulton County District Attorney issued a sweeping indictment against Trump and several of his allies, including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Sidney Powell, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Georgia GOP Chair David Shafer, and more than a dozen others.
"91 charges over the course of four-plus months," said anchor Phil Mattingly. "There's no precedent for any of them for a former president. He's leading the Republican primary by 25- to 30-plus points. No one is attacking him that's anywhere close to him in polling on these indictments ... why not?"
"Well, because more than half of the Republican Party, maybe 55 percent of the Republican Party, sees this presidential campaign as a referendum on the treatment of Donald Trump," said Jennings. "And that's the primary electorate. Now the general election electorate will see it much differently. They'll see a referendum on how their lives are going and the economy and so on and so forth. This pool of people, they see it as a referendum on the treatment of Donald Trump. They're not asking themselves, do we want to have a general election about Joe Biden's job performance or about Donald Trump's persecution?"
POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office?
"Here is my question," said Mattingly. "Can you tell me if the other dozen-plus candidates would look at this and think, that's cool, these 98 pages with Trump and his team and the 18 co-conspirators, we're good with that?"
"I mean, look, they're all trapped," said Jennings. "All the Republicans are trapped. They're trapped in a room with Donald Trump. He is not trapped in there with them. They're trapped in there with him. And — but they're also trapped in there with his voters and the people who believe he has been unfairly treated. Those people are highly likely to turn out in this primary. Not a single one has a strategy to deal with this, other than this, maybe Republicans decide, look, I don't want to deal with this anymore. Who else is out there? But that's out of your hands. You're waiting on people to make that decision. Right now there's no evidence that they are. There are people, I think, running interesting campaigns and saying interesting things, but that's different than convincing people to leave Trump by the wayside."
Watch the video below or at this link.
Scott Jennings says other GOP candidates are "trapped" by Trumpwww.youtube.com
