Trump’s warnings of arrest pay off
Ex-president visits Waco with a boost
Former President Donald Trump wasn't arrested as he predicted, but just the threat of it paid off in a big way in Waco this weekend as he tries to re-establish himself as the clear favorite for the GOP nomination for president.
In floating the possibility of an arrest, Trump dominated national media coverage for the last week, boosted his expected crowd in Waco on Saturday night and backed it all up with a new fundraising push that reportedly brought in another $1.5 million in just a few days for his 2024 presidential campaign.
Republican outrage at the possibility that Trump will be the first U.S. president ever charged with a crime has helped Trump weather the surge in popularity that kept Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis floating at the top of the GOP presidential contenders list for weeks.
Trump was firmly back in his element on Saturday night with thousands of red-capped supporters dancing to the Village People's YMCA and roaring at Trump's grievances against prosecutors in multiple states who have escaped him.
“Our opponents have done everything they can to crush our spirit and break our will,” Trump said from the tarmac at the Waco Regional Airport. “But they've failed. They've only made us stronger.
“2024 is the final battle that's going to be the big one. You put me back in the White House, and their reign will be over and America will be a free nation once again.”
It is a replay of everything Trump's political operation has been about since day one, said Kenneth Cosgrove, a political marketing expert at Suffolk University in Massachusetts.
“That's the strategy, to make sure Trump's the center of everything. It has been the strategy for years, and it's worked again,”
said Cosgrove, who recently wrote a book titled “Donald Trump and the Branding of the American Presidency: The President of Segments.”
Cosgrove said it is the speed at which Trump can operate that keeps him one step ahead of his political opponents. By announcing that an arrest was pending, Trump created a political storm around Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who almost overnight became portrayed as a national enemy in conservative media. It was also an effective call to arms to rally the former president’s supporters to Waco.
City of Waco officials braced for 15,000 people at the rally, which Trump billed as the kickoff of his 2024 campaign.
It makes sense for Trump to target Texas, which votes in the Republican presidential primary in less than a year on March 5, 2024, just after the traditional early primary states such as Iowa and New Hampshire.
The Waco visit was also smart politics as it is a place he beat President Joe Biden by more than 20 percentage points in 2020.
“It’s definitely a favorable political environment for him to hold a rally,” said Patrick Flavin, a political science professor at Baylor University. “If he’s going to hold a rally in Texas, it makes sense for Waco to be one of the top candidates.”
Trump has made more than 26 stops in Texas since he took office in 2017, including eight visits since he lost his re-election. But Saturday was his first time in Waco. Trump’s campaign said Friday it was seeing “significantly” more supporters signing up to attend the Waco rally than past rallies in other states.
While Trump has been to Texas before, it wasn’t ever in quite the same political and legal environment that he’s in now.
Bragg, the New York DA, is investigating alleged hush money payments from Trump to porn star Stormy Daniels and is weighing charges now, which likely prompted Trump’s accusation last week that he was about to be arrested.
In a separate case, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil lawsuit against Trump and three of his adult children in September for allegedly misrepresenting the value of financial assets in order to “cheat the system.” That trial is set for October.
Meanwhile, the federal government is investigating his handling of hundreds of classified documents found at his Mar-aLago estate in Florida. Those documents include some marked “top secret.”
And in Georgia, Trump’s attorney has petitioned a state court to stop an Atlanta-based district attorney from filing charges against the former president over his attempts to change the 2020 election results there, where he lost to Biden.
For days leading up to the rally, Trump has been sending out news releases and writing on his social media accounts that he’s a victim of “a degenerate psychopath” in New York and that if that state charges him with a crime, it “could be catastrophic for our country.” In an early morning post Friday, Trump warned of “potential death & destruction.”
It’s not just Trump. His family and his allies have made Waco a rallying point to warn that the cases against him are really aimed at his supporters.
“If they can take him out they’re one step closer to taking you and your freedoms out … and apparently that’s been the plan all along,” Donald Trump Jr. said on social media after the Waco rally was announced.
Trump’s campaign team has used the same theme in fundraising, pitching Trump as the only one standing between “them and you!”
“But even in the midst of the radical left’s threats of arrest, President Trump will never surrender our great country to the left!” said an email to supporters this week that was seeking campaign donations.
In another, Trump warns: “This could be the last time I write to you before a possible indictment comes down.”
Trump’s Waco visit and his message of the government coming for people arrive during the 30th anniversary of the 51-day Waco siege, in which federal law enforcement surrounded the compound of the Branch Davidians religious cult and eventually stormed it.
That event has long been an anti-government rallying call for some on the far right. While the image might fit Trump’s message these days, his campaign said Waco was selected for its central location, not for any larger symbolic meaning.
Whether an arrest is coming, the anti-Trump Republicans who run a group called the Lincoln Project say it has all been pushed to create a circus and to paint Trump as a political martyr for his Make America Great Again base that had shown some signs of slipping from him.
“The arrest secures the nomination for Donald Trump,” said Rick Wilson, one of the founders of the Lincoln Project.
Polls had been showing DeSantis, who has yet to declare for the presidential campaign, starting to make headway against Trump. A Quinnipiac University poll of the potential GOP primary field released in mid-February showed Trump leading DeSantis by just 6 percentage points — the closest national poll yet.
A Fox News poll released Sunday showed Trump up 15 points. While that’s a more comfortable lead, it still doesn’t match his numbers from October, when the New York Times and Politico released polls showing Trump up over 20 percentage points.
And that was all before DeSantis put out a new book and made stops in Houston and Dallas as part of a string of campaign-like appearances that also included visits to California and Iowa.
But suddenly, DeSantis is in the background while Trump is again the center of the political world as he navigates a potential arrest or indictment.
“Trump was having a fair amount of trouble gaining traction again,” said Cosgrove, the political marketing expert. “But I think this whole thing is just giving him energy.”