Donald Trump will spend the next several weeks sitting in a New York City courtroom, and he's already spent weeks playing himself up to be the victim,
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee will effectively be off the campaign trail through sometime in May, which for an ordinary candidate could prove fatal. But veteran Republican consultant Stuart Stevens said in column for the New York Times that Trump and "normal" don't even belong in the same country, and the courtroom saga could actually help his case for another term in the White House.
"The Manhattan courtroom will be the setting for Mr. Trump to play the role of a familiar American archetype: the wronged man seeking justice from corrupt, powerful forces," Steven wrote. "The former president is good in this role, and that’s no small thing."
Trump's act has gotten stale, and cable news rarely cuts live to the rallies that feed his ego and promote his candidacy, so his courthouse rants and fresh details from his trial keep his name planted firmly atop the news of the day and stokes the anger that drives his support, Stevens wrote.
"The Trump campaign is not about persuasion," Stevens wrote. "It’s about stirring up anger inside every possible Trump supporter so that voting is a righteous act of fury, not a mere civic duty.
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"If you believe the deep state stole the last election, the legal persecution of Mr. Trump is further proof of the state’s desperation to keep him from reassuming his rightful place in the Oval Office. Combine all of that with a less-than-inspiring Biden coalition, and it’s a blueprint for a Trump Electoral College victory."
The quadruple-indicted president's strategy has been to enrage his detractors to create energy for his campaign, so his criminal trials only serve to feed that warped dynamic.
"In this strategic paradigm, indictments and subsequent court appearances are a gift from the political gods," Stevens wrote. "Mr. Trump is a candidate of anger and grievance, which has always had a strange quality for someone who was a millionaire in high school. How can the man with a golden toilet be a victim?
"White grievance was Mr. Trump’s on ramp to the victim podium in his previous runs. That’s still essential to the Trump candidacy, but now, in his telling, he can add the burden of persecution by corrupt (and mostly nonwhite) prosecutors to the cross he carries to that Calvary hill called the White House."