Indictments mount against former President Donald Trump, but Republican voters apparently still want him. That’s what a post-GOP debate poll shows. Not only that, but Trump has become more popular and powerful in the party.
A Morning Consult poll shows that 62 percent of GOP voters think the embattled former president can defeat his successor, Joe Biden, next year. That is up from 53 percent who said he could win on August 20 before the debate.
The Real Clear Politics Average gives Biden a .8 percent edge over Trump for the general election by a 44.6 percent to 43.8 percent margin.
Trump’s nearest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, only had 13 percent of respondents saying he could beat Biden.
FiveThirtyEight.com puts Trump’s support at 50.3 percent, down from 54.5 percent on August 20. At the same time, DeSantis stands at 14.8 percent, down from 18.8 percent on August 1.
Donald Trump Turns Mugshot Into Marketing
The former president’s arrest in Georgia in connection with his effort to overturn the 2020 election the Thursday after the debate solidified Trump as a rockstar for Republicans. The Trump campaign raised over $7 million following the publication of his mugshot.
“His menacing stare underscoring the ironic caption on the mugshot merch: Never Surrender. If you think there was indeed wrongdoing on Trump’s part, then you likely see the mugshot as shameful — and justified. And that’s the power of our worldview. Things aren’t the way they are; they are the way we see them,” Forbes Contributor Marcus Collins wrote. “We’ve seen this subversive refashioning of meaning with regard to the commercialization of mugshots before, whether it was Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, or Rosa Parks.”
Collins continued, “What was once meant to criminalize the actions and reputations of these abolitionists, were reworked as a symbol of resilience, rebirth, and resistance, respectively. Like Trump, their mugshots were also affixed to t-shirts and consumed by those who see these leaders as heroes, not criminals.”
Donald Trump, ever the master marketer, has turned his mugshot into a T-Shirt bearing the slogan “Never Surrender.”
“Today, at the notoriously violent jail in Fulton County, Georgia, I was ARRESTED despite having committed NO CRIME,” Trump wrote in a message that appears on the landing page of the site in his first message on X since he was banned in January 2021. “…Today, I walked into the lion’s den with one simple message on behalf of our entire movement: I WILL NEVER SURRENDER OUR MISSION TO SAVE AMERICA.”
Trump Faces Disqualification From the Ballot
Just as Trump is trying to cash in on his infamy, a movement is underway to litigate his name off the ballot in several states asserting that the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot was an insurrection and that he participated in an insurrection.
Consequently, they want Trump’s candidacy disqualified under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment which bars anyone who participated in an insurrection from holding office.
“Joe Biden, Democrats, and Never Trumpers are scared to death because they see polls showing President Trump winning in the general election,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Chung told ABC News in a statement. “The people who are pursuing this absurd conspiracy theory and political attack on President Trump are stretching the law beyond recognition much like the political prosecutors in New York, Georgia, and DC. There is no legal basis for this effort …”
Never Trump Republican jurists such as Judge J. Michael Luttig, William Baude, and Michael Stokes Paulsen, and Democrats like former Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe have penned journal articles arguing that Trump should be disqualified.
If this trend continues and they succeed polling could become irrelevant.
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
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