CNN
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Former President Donald Trump delivered a blunt message to Americans on Tuesday night, speaking outside his New Jersey club hours after pleading not guilty in a Miami courtroom to a vast and damning federal indictment.
“Today we witnessed the most evil and heinous abuse of power in the history of our country,” Trump said of his second arraignment in three months, adding that the “day will go down in infamy.”
The former president and 2024 GOP primary frontrunner may be in dire legal straits, but as a candidate, his tactics are becoming clear to see: Incite anger at those prosecuting him and play the role of martyr to his fans.
But for his presidential rivals, the equation – and the path forward – is much less clear.
No one in the large primary field has delivered a message as politically coherent as Trump’s – who, for all his rambling and chaotic asides, has proven himself a uniquely effective communicator. None have yet been able to compete for attention with their party’s leader, even as some are beginning to quietly test out less sympathetic takes.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has been Trump’s most ardent primary critic, but even his harshest lines have lacked his famous edge. Even then, they’ve been the exception. The most popular responses so far have included, first and most often, a professed ignorance about the case coupled with venom for the Justice Department; half-hearted criticism of the alleged act, though rarely the actor; and, especially among the lowest polling candidates, chest-pounding promises to ally themselves with Trump in his fight with prosecutors.
As the gravity of Trump’s indictment and arrest set in, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Christie, previously a long-time ally of Trump, have become more critical of the former president’s conduct.
“We need to be straightforward about this and not play political games,” Hutchinson said on Tuesday.
Hutchinson – who, as a member of Congress, was a House manager during the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton – said anyone who diminishes the seriousness of the charges Trump faces “provides a disservice to our justice system and our rule of law.”
Christie, for his part, said in a CNN town hall Monday night that Trump’s actions were “inexcusable.” He said the former president is “voluntarily putting our country through this” because he was repeatedly asked by the government to return the sensitive documents long before the issue escalated to a legal matter.
He also slammed the other GOP primary candidates for either hedging or taking Trump’s side by attacking the Justice Department.
“They’re playing political games with you,” Christie told the audience.
But even Christie, who is running with the express intent of taking down Trump and has described him as an existential threat to the country, would not say President Joe Biden is the better option.
Asked whom he thinks represents a bigger “hazard” to the country, the tough-talking former governor demurred.
“It’s a coin flip,” Christie said.
Christie remains the race’s most aggressive Trump antagonist. Other 2024 rivals were more critical of the former president than they had been last week, perhaps in part to due to the details in the now-unsealed indictment, but mostly stuck to their talking points.
Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who was Trump’s United Nations ambassador, said on Fox News on Monday that if the charges he faces are true, Trump’s actions were “incredibly reckless with our national security.”
“I’m a military spouse. My husband is about to deploy this weekend,” Haley said. “This puts all of our military men and women in danger if you are going to talk about what our military is capable of or how we would go about invading or doing something with one of our enemies.”
It was a notable shift for Haley, who last week, before the indictment was unsealed, tweeted that the charges were “prosecutorial overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics” and said it is “not how justice should be pursued in our country.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday told the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board that he believes politics played a role in the Justice Department’s decision to prosecute his old boss – but also criticized Trump’s actions laid out in the indictment.
“Having read the indictment, these are very serious allegations. And I can’t defend what is alleged,” Pence said.
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott called the charges Trump faces a “serious case with serious allegations” while campaigning in his home state Monday.
Even entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who has already promised to pardon Trump if elected, said that while he won’t believe the details contained in the indictment until they are laid out in court, he “would have made different judgments as president than Donald Trump made with those documents.”
It was a notable shift in tone – but one that might be largely imperceptible to voters, and is likely to do little to shift the dynamics of a primary race where few of the best-known contenders have shown any willingness to consistently confront a frontrunner who eagerly belittles his rivals.
A glaring absence from the chorus of 2024 Republicans needling Trump over his actions is Ron DeSantis, even as the wild scene at the federal courthouse in Miami played out Tuesday in the state he governs.
Though the Florida governor has complained about the “weaponization” of law enforcement, he has been silent on the specifics of the allegations facing Trump, his chief rival for the party’s presidential nod.
Those close to DeSantis’ campaign view the reluctance to take on Trump as consistent with his hopes of eventually winning over Trump’s supporters. They are still smarting from the blowback from online surrogates when DeSantis tried to poke fun at Trump over the hush money payments at the center of his first indictment.
Frozen on that front, DeSantis has been largely silent on the most damaging issue now facing Trump’s candidacy, even as the circus surrounding Trump’s arrest takes place in the state he governs.
This week, as Trump’s arraignment dominated news coverage, DeSantis was out of the limelight, signing bills, appointing judges and watching as the Florida political committee he once controlled transferred $82.5 million last month to a super PAC supporting his presidential campaign, according to information posted to the committee’s website.
Seizing on his opponent’s unprecedented legal blow did not make the schedule.
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, some Republicans acknowledged that Trump – who faced a Democratic drubbing in the 2018 midterms, lost his bid for reelection in 2020 and then watched as many of the candidates he had endorsed fell short in the 2022 midterms – could once again imperil the party in the 2024 election.
“I think President Trump is the only serious Republican contender for president right now who could lose,” said Utah Sen. Mitt Romney.
South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds, who has endorsed Scott, said there is “no question” Trump’s legal trouble could hurt the GOP’s effort to take control of the Senate in 2024.
“This is not something the former president should take lightly,” Rounds said. “It’s not going to help.”
Some Trump loyalists on Capitol Hill remained supportive Tuesday. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley said his indictment and arrest “will have a major galvanizing effect on Republican primary voters.”
However, there were some new signs of cracks between Trump and his ideological allies.
Republican Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus and a former prosecutor, told CNN’s Dana Bash the allegations Trump faces “are very serious.”
He compared Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified information to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, which Trump relentlessly hammered during the 2016 campaign.
“I would not feel comfortable with a convicted felon in the White House, so we’ll see how it plays out, the case plays out, and we’ll see how the evidence is presented and what the defenses are,” Buck said.
Still, on the campaign trail, Trump’s enduring hold on vast swaths of the GOP electorate was clear even in the actions of some of his 2024 rivals.
Ramaswamy sought to seize on the media attention around Trump’s arraignment, traveling to Miami on Tuesday to hold a news conference where he urged other presidential candidates to join him in pledging to pardoning Trump.
“I have demanded that every other candidate in this race either sign this commitment to pardon on January 20, 2025, or else to explain why they are not,” he told reporters outside the Miami federal courthouse.
