There’s no reason yet to doubt the conventional wisdom that Donald Trump has become even more politically formidable in the G.O.P. primary since he was charged with 37 felonies last week. In recent days, two polls published after his indictment dropped found that a whopping 81 percent of Republicans voters believed that the charges were politically motivated, 80 percent said he should still be able to assume office even if he’s convicted, and 61 percent said their views of him remained unchanged. 

That’s a tough break for other wannabe candidates, especially when most Republican consultants are warning against attacking Trump, or even staying quiet, lest they aggravate the party’s base. “It’d be political suicide,” a G.O.P. operative told me, noting how former party stalwarts like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger were exiled for criticizing Trump after January 6th. “I don’t care if you’re Kevin McCarthy, with $50 million in the bank, or if you’re Marjorie Taylor Greene. It doesn’t matter where you stood before that. You’re gone.”

Nevertheless, over the last few days, Trump’s rivals have been gingerly testing new lines of flaccid quasi-attack as the scope of his legal jeopardy comes into fuller view. Nikki Haley, who initially decried the news of Trump’s indictment as “prosecutorial overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics,” repositioned on Monday after the charges were unsealed, calling Trump “incredibly reckless” in his handling of classified information. Privately, many Republicans confess they share the same concern. As Mike Pence told the Wall Street Journal, “these are very serious allegations. And I can’t defend what is alleged.”

Of course, neither Haley nor Pence are frontrunners for the nomination, and may be banking on the possibility that Trump is convicted or drops out before 2024. It’s a much more delicate situation for Ron DeSantis, the MAGA-baiting Florida governor who is currently second on the primary leaderboard, and has an outside shot at beating Trump in Iowa or New Hampshire—but only if he can win over a meaningful portion of those 61 percenters whose view of Trump remains unchanged. “DeSantis wants to get the Trump supporters to come to him,” explained a well-wired conservative activist, summarizing the dilemma matter-of-factly. “And he can’t do that by being mean to Trump.” 

The Pardon Question

There may be ways to thread the needle. Earlier this week, Real Clear Politics reported that DeSantis has been working on a plan to break up, purge, and reorganize the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. on “Day One” of his presidency—a mind-blowing, norm-annihilating, establishment-defying middle finger pseudo-proposal that serves up red meat to a base that’s hungry for political retribution, and makes it difficult for other ’24 challengers to outflank him with kookier ideas. (The right-wing animus against the D.O.J. predates Trump entering politics. During the Obama era, activists like James O’Keefe and Dinesh D’Souza were hellbent on proving that they were being targeted by liberal prosecutors. The continued freedom of Hunter Biden in this current administration has only exacerbated this vendetta.) 

The real question, of course, is whether DeSantis’s calculated MAGA pandering will be enough to appease the Hannity–Tucker–Mark Levin crowd when he is asked to commit to outright pardoning Trump. One conservative communications official I spoke with suggested that DeSantis should prepare a lawyerly, lightly-caveated statement to get ahead of the inevitable, leaning on the Presidential Records Act, poking holes in the espionage charges, opining on attorney-client privilege, and so on, before promising the get-out-of-jail-free card. 

Another veteran G.O.P. strategist agreed. “I could even see some yahoo [asking], will you pardon Donald Trump and make him your V.P. and then step aside so he can finish his four years? Absolute utter nonsense, but it would put DeSantis in a weird thing.” The only way to escape ever-more absurd loyalty tests, he posited, was to “take the thing off the table” first. “Say, ‘If they do this, this is political and I would absolutely pardon him, it’s wrong.’”

But at the moment, it seems like everyone, except for ’24 gadfly Vivek Ramaswamy, is nervous about getting out in front of their skis. (Ramaswamy, the indefatigable Y.O.L.O. candidate and green-room regular, was the first to promise a pardon, challenging every other candidate to publicly stake their position.) The Justice Department, after all, may very well have Trump dead to rights on felony charges that could put him in prison for the remainder of his natural life. And as much as MAGA voters love Trump, they also like winning, and there are palpable concerns that multiple trials could consume the front-runner’s campaign. “It won’t blow over; Trump could very likely get convicted,” the activist told me. “Then his people have to land somewhere.” And if there’s anything I know about MAGA voters, if they can’t get Trump, they like the people who stand by him no matter what.” As the comms official put it, “Vivek is showing the way.” 

But is he? I admit that I’d fully expected more people to show up to support Trump on Tuesday, as he was arraigned at a Miami courthouse. Trump himself had tried to rally an imposing crowd via several hyperventilating, all-caps posts on Truth Social, while other MAGA-oriented figures like Kari Lake had openly called for people to descend on Downtown Miami. Surely a 37-count federal indictment was the apotheosis of his martyrdom. Surely this threat, which could put him in federal prison, was the MAGA equivalent of D-Day. But no: Trump only summoned hundreds, not tens of thousands, of supporters to the court, according to reporters on the scene, and they were largely of the stunt-pulling, QAnon-Shaman-esque cosplaying, extremely-online variety. (Or, perhaps, the ones that a Republican donor was able to bus in at the last minute.)

Is that diminished fervor, between January 6 and this week, a sign of some hidden delta between Republican sympathy for Trump and full-throated support, with performative outrage filling the gap? If so, perhaps there’s an opportunity for DeSantis to capitalize on right-wing grievances over government overreach, allowing him to come off as magnanimous yet presidential. “Not enough to get him over the top,” predicted the comms official, “but it would show some backbone.”