Donald Trump is maxing out his outraged victim card, prison mugshot and all

Donald Trump’s popularity in the opinion polls has been rising ever since the indictments began, as have donations to his campaign. (Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons 3.0)

Donald Trump is back with a bang. Of course, he was never really away and has been polling comfortably ahead of all the other candidates for Republic Party nominee of the US Presidential election next year. But events in the last few days have made him the principal topic of political conversation in the United States.

Trump refused to participate in the first TV debate between his party’s candidates on Wednesday. But a couple of hours before the live debate, a 45-minute-long interview by the former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson was released on Carlson’s channel on X (formerly Twitter). Within the first 15 hours of the interview airing, a staggering 228 million people had viewed it.

A poster made using Donald Trump's mugshot. (Image: @realDonaldTrump/Twitter)

On Thursday, Trump surrendered at the Fulton County jail in Florida and had his mugshot taken as per procedure. And then, he made that mugshot of him glowering at the camera viral. He rejoined X and posted the picture; Twitter had banned him from the platform in the last days of Presidency in 2021. By Saturday morning, his follower count had crossed 68 million.

As soon as the mugshot went public, the Trump campaign created a line of merchandise products featuring it and the phrase “Never surrender”. These include T-shirts, bumper stickers and coffee mugs. Trump is trying to leverage his outraged victim card as much as possible.

This is the fourth indictment that Trump has received since he lost his Presidency—though of course, he maintains that the election was rigged and he had actually won. The other three accuse him of trying to stop Congress from officially signing off on the election results and make Joe Biden President; paying a former adult actress, Stormy Daniels, to keep quiet about a one-night stand he apparently had with her many years ago; keeping classified documents that he took from the White House when he was leaving and stored at his home in Florida.

The fourth indictment is the most serious one, because here, the Fulton County district attorney is charging Trump of attempting to influence voters and voting processes and intends to prosecute him under the sweeping Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).

RICO was formulated to break up organized crime groups, especially the Mafia, by criminalizing participation in an “enterprise” with criminal goals. Thus, mere affiliation with a targeted group allows prosecutors to charge a person as a “co-conspirator”. The law makes it easier for prosecutors to go after criminal organizations, right from mob bosses who may personally have not got their hands dirty, down to the foot soldiers. That is, you can be prosecuted for the crimes of others.

Also read: Covfefe to Nuclear Button: 11 most outrageous tweets of Donald Trump

Even legal experts on CNN, a news network that has rarely expressed a favourable opinion about Trump, warn that applying RICO here is a dangerous political move. It opens up the possibilities of politicians using RICO to carry out personal vendettas on rivals. To use it against a former President when the US already has enough laws to tackle election fraud, is absolutely unprecedented.

Under Georgia law, the charges that have been slapped on Trump draw a jail term of one to five years. But under RICO, the defendants can be sentenced to between five and 25 years.

The use of RICO may even help the narrative that Trump has been pushing relentlessly, that all his legal troubles are pure political harassment by the Biden government. He has pleaded “not guilty” to all charges he is facing. According to him, this is a ploy to keep him busy with the lawsuits so that he will not have the time to campaign in earnest for the 2024 election.

Trump supporters firmly believe his version. In fact, Trump’s popularity in the opinion polls has been rising ever since the indictments began, as have donations to his campaign. In fact, some polls place him slightly ahead of Biden. The question, of course, is whether he will also be able to swing some independent voters—neither traditionally Republican nor Democrat. Even within the Republican Party, many despise his erratic behaviour and wild statements.

Another theory doing the rounds is that the Democrats actually want Trump to be the Republican Presidential candidate. After all, a big reason that Biden won the 2020 election was simply the fact that he was “not Trump”. Can that work in 2024 too? The reasoning goes that it will be less risky for the octogenarian Biden to be facing a fuming Trump rather than expose him to a much younger and more energetic Republican candidate such as Vivek Ramaswamy or Ron DeSantis. The world is in for some interesting 15 months, from now till election day.