Across his decades in public life, Donald Trump has proved so resistant to damaging scandals that he earned the nickname “The Teflon Don.”
As Trump runs for the White House a third time—facing more scandals, more setbacks, and more misfortunes than ever before—that nickname may not fully capture the entire extent of his resilience.
The ex-president’s unprecedented legal woes are such an afterthought with key constituencies that some Republicans are starting to think Trump’s scandals—and his ability to swat them down in a day’s news cycle—are actually a strength.
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“President Trump’s worst enemies are watching in disbelief as he walks safely to the exit of the lawfare furnace they fired up to destroy him,” longtime Trump adviser Michael Caputo, now an executive at Americano Media, told The Daily Beast. “They failed, he survived, they only made him stronger, and they don’t have a plan for that.”
Another top adviser from Trump’s 2016 campaign told The Daily Beast that people are “just tired of all these moral drama-type plot lines because it doesn’t affect their day-to-day lives, when push comes to shove.”
And a current Trump adviser expressed confidence about putting the former president in front of voters and letting him answer questions about his scandals. The Trump campaign apparently sees televised spectacles as a genuine way of reaching marginal voters, despite his approval rating remaining no higher than 45 percent throughout his presidency.
“As we continue to get opportunities such as the CNN town hall to talk to the general election audience, as these additional things come up where the president can talk to voters who don’t watch center-right news, Biden hasn’t hit his floor and the sky is the limit for Trump in the general,” the Trump adviser told The Daily Beast.
After years of anticipation that the law would catch up to Trump, two long-awaited shoes dropped for him at the start of the 2024 campaign: his indictment in a New York federal court over the Stormy Daniels hush money scandal, and a ruling that he was liable for sexual assault and defamation—to the tune of $5 million—against writer E. Jean Carroll. An indictment from a grand jury in Georgia over Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election could also happen any day now.
And yet, there are few indications that these seemingly seismic developments have changed the dynamic of the GOP primary—or broken through to a party that has already accepted a constant cloud of scandal as the price of admission to the Trump show. If anything, GOP voters seem enamored over Trump’s renewed resilience.
In key early primary states, Trump’s pile of legal woes appear to be a moot issue for the classes of state lawmakers and mid-level players being courted by Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and other candidates.
“It’s really not something we’re talking about right now,” New Hampshire state Rep. Juliet Harvey-Bolia, who has endorsed both the former president and the Florida governor, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. But when asked if any further Trump legal entanglements would prompt her to truly pick a side, Harvey-Bolia declined to comment.
As polls show Trump’s lead widening, his rivals for the nomination have either ignored the firehose of bad news or showed sympathy toward him as a way to position themselves against the press and prosecutors.
The costs of doing otherwise have seemed clear. One meager jab at the ex-president from DeSantis after the Manhattan indictment caused the Florida governor considerable heartburn, and a single tweet from DeSantis’ PAC scorching Trump over his legal problems was internally dismissed as a serious mistake, according to Semafor.
And when The Daily Beast presented rival campaigns with an opportunity to ding Trump over his scandals on Tuesday, they all passed.
One GOP strategist backing a GOP candidate not named Trump said that when it comes to attacking the former president on any of his legal issues, the juice is never “worth the squeeze” for another Republican.
“You can draw a line from Bill Clinton to Trump,” said another GOP strategist who asked not to be named to avoid involving any clients, none of whom are in the 2024 presidential race. “He’s done the Clinton strategy where instead of apologizing and holding the line, he gaslights and holds the line.”
Perhaps most remarkably, in his newly adopted mainstream media blitz, Trump has been able to skirt past the few questions he’s faced on his legal entanglements. Just in the last week, he managed to avoid any questions over the hush money indictment in both his CNN interview and sit-down with the newly launched news site The Messenger. When it came to other seemingly sore spots, Trump cut off CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins before she could finish a question about the Georgia grand jury and got the audience to laugh at his attacks on Carroll.
To some extent, it’s not that scandals don’t stick; it’s that they’re simply “baked-in,” as one GOP operative put it.
Still, winning over an enduringly MAGA party is one thing. Getting an Electoral College victory is another. But the Trump campaign is confident swing voters won’t think twice about casting a vote for the first former president to be indicted on criminal charges—and the first to be found liable for sexual abuse by a jury of his peers.
“Right now they want someone to step in and fix the inflation,” a Trump campaign adviser told The Daily Beast, specifically pointing to Black and Latino voters as coalitions open to the former president’s economic messaging and less concerned with the wide range of legal battles he’s fighting.
In a general election that could be decided by tens of thousands of votes, however, it would be hard to argue Trump’s escalating legal blows will have no impact.
Voters have already demonstrated Trump’s brand can be toxic down-ballot. Since 2016, Trump has led the party to three consecutive electoral defeats, the most recent of which—2022—was closely linked to his obsession with election fraud claims.
The desire among non-MAGA diehards to pick a winner is a strong vein to tap into, Republicans on the campaign trail said, but no one has been able to fully harness it yet.
The problem for rival Republicans is that they have to win the GOP primary before they can take on Biden. While DeSantis may poll better head-to-head with the current president, the former president is the heavy favorite to win the Republican nomination.
Meanwhile, Democrats still point to Biden as the candidate best equipped to defeat Trump a second time, and the Biden campaign has started framing his re-election as a fight for democracy in the wake of Jan. 6th, much in the way Charlottesville served as the narrative catalyst for Biden’s 2020 run.
Early voter opinion surveys point to a highly competitive race.
The general election polling between Biden and Trump to date has tightened to the point of a tossup, with Trump leading Biden by 44.2 percent to 43.5 percent in the RealClear Politics average.
But snapshots of a tired electorate a year and-a-half out from the 2024 election only provide a slice of the full picture, and Trump’s dominance of the early primary field is hardly a reliable measure for general election performance.
Longtime Florida pollster Brad Coker was more pessimistic about Trump’s chances and the effect scandals would ultimately play.
“There’s always that athlete who tries to stick around a year too long,” the Mason-Dixon pollster told The Daily Beast, comparing Trump to retired quarterback Tom Brady and his ill-fated final season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
“The danger of these legal battles isn’t that any one of them spelled out a whole lot of danger for Trump,” Coker said. “But if he keeps getting either convicted or found negligent over and over again… there’s that point where people are in a relationship and they’ll put up with stuff for so long, and finally there’s that breaking point where they say, we won’t go there anymore.”
Refuting the Trump camp’s view, Coker described Trump’s central dilemma being that his approval rating “really can’t go up, he can only go down.”
“So the question is, how quickly and when,” Coker said.
Although Trump has defied the laws of political gravity for years, Coker added that something would give at some point among the rest of the GOP base who want to actually win a national election.
“There are antsy people out there right now who think people on a day-to-day basis should be moving their votes around, but I just think they’re not engaged,” Coker said. “It’s a drip drip drip drip, and then the dam breaks and it rolls from there.”
