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For months, as Donald Trump faced multiple criminal investigations, the former president and his allies launched an aggressive communications strategy, denouncing the probes, condemning the investigators, and insisting that the Republican is pure as the driven snow.
On the eve of Trump’s indictment, those efforts didn’t appear to be working especially well: An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist national poll, released a few days before last week’s indictment news, found that a plurality of Americans — 46% — agreed that Trump had done something illegal, while an additional 29% said Trump has done something “unethical but not illegal.”
The same results found that a 56% majority believed the investigations into Trump have been fair.
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Perhaps public attitudes would change after the indictment news was no longer speculative and GOP messaging became even more hysterical? Apparently not. CNN reported yesterday:
Sixty percent of Americans approve of the indictment of former President Donald Trump, according to a new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS following the news that a New York grand jury voted to charge him in connection with hush money payments made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.
To be sure, the data wasn’t all bad for the Republican: The CNN poll found that most Americans agreed that politics played at least some role in the prosecutor’s decision to indict Trump. But 60% approve of the charges anyway.
In other words, most of the country effectively said, “Politics probably contributed to Trump’s indictment, but I’m glad it happened anyway.”
The same survey found that 21% of self-identified Republicans and 27% of self-identified conservatives also approve of the criminal charges, which is more than I expected given the circumstances.
Indeed, all these results were hardly inevitable and are somewhat surprising. In recent months, there’s been a noticeable asymmetry to the public conversation: One side of the political divide has flooded the airwaves with vitriol, insisting an indictment would be an unjust assault on our constitutional system, while the other side has been largely circumspect, saying very little about the suspect, the process, and the alleged crimes.
Given this, Americans have generally only heard one side of the argument. As Republicans have screamed bloody murder in defense of Trump, Democrats have largely responded, “Anyone want to talk about infrastructure?”
And yet, despite this asymmetry, the polling evidence suggests the public approves of the former president’s indictment anyway — in part because most Americans still don’t like Trump, and in part because it’s very easy to believe he broke the law.