Editorial: Why Joe Biden might welcome Donald Trump back to the race

Republican candidate and former president Donald Trump now faces four substantial legal indictments and a total of 91 charges. Photo / Charlie Neibergall, AP

EDITORIAL

Former United States president Donald Trump will have Georgia on his mind this week and for a long time to come.

He has asserted that charges of alleged fraud in Georgia should be dropped. But Trump and his co-defendants have also been given a week to surrender to the state’s authorities.

It’s now less than six months out from the start of voting to choose a 2024 presidential nominee, with the first Republican primary debate to be held on Thursday.

The party and its presidential frontrunner seem caught in a legal pincer movement. Trump faces two substantial conspiracy indictments over his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.

Earlier this month Special Counsel Jack Smith brought four federal charges against Trump. Smith hopes to get a trial underway in January but Trump’s lawyers are trying to get it pushed back to 2026.

This week, Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis in Georgia accused Trump of 13 state crimes. He has now been indicted four times and faces 91 charges.

Even as some big names in the party flail in his legal slipstream, polls show grassroots Republicans are set on nominating Trump for a return bout with Biden. Willis is planning a Trump trial with co-defendants for early March – which might mean two legal dates smack in the middle of the primary voting season between January and June.

Her indictment was a body blow in the way it stripped away the respectability that surrounds a former US president, putting Trump under the glare of racketeering legislation normally aimed at mobsters.

Trump appears to have been clinging to presidential status in part for the insurance of a pardon but, under state law in Georgia, a key battleground in the 2020 election, a pardon wouldn’t apply.

Cartoonist Rod Emmerson's view.

Former New York mayor and lawyer Rudy Giuliani being one of 18 people charged with Trump was a Shakespearean touch. Giuliani built his reputation as a federal prosecutor decades ago by using an anti-racketeering act to target crime groups.

There are still major unknowns about how this will play out, especially with two trials covering similar events.

At present, US polls show two different things: strong Republican support for Trump, putting him in a tight race with Biden nationally; but clear warning signs should the former leader get to a general election.

An AP-Norc poll on Thursday showed 63 per cent of Republicans supported Trump running for president. But 53 per cent of Americans overall said they would definitely not support him as the Republican nominee in November 2024. And another 11 per cent said they would probably not support him. For Biden, the numbers were 43 per cent and 11 per cent.

In a new Marist poll, 52 per cent of Americans said Trump should quit the race because of his indictments. Ipsos polling found that 63 per cent of Americans thought the Georgia charges were serious and 50 per cent thought he should suspend his campaign.

A Quinnipiac University poll found that 57 per cent of independents thought Trump should be prosecuted in the federal case. According to Gallup monthly surveys of political affiliation, Republicans and Democrats each made up between 25-30 per cent of voters. Independents were about 45 per cent.

The GOP needs the enthusiasm of Trump’s core supporters but, alternatively, a more traditional candidate might have more success with non-Republicans. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been sliding back to the pack of contenders with his Trump-lite campaign.

One interesting aspect of the US election race is Biden’s own political weakness, even though historians will probably judge him well in handling hard times.

Despite Donald Trump's continuing travails, President Joe Biden's support remains weak. One recent poll found only 24 per cent of Americans wanted him to run for re-election. Photo / Alex Brandon, AP

Compared with Trump, he’s less disliked. In a Fox News poll, Biden’s unfavourables weren’t as bad as Trump’s among various demographic groups, except for white voters without a university education.

While the US has done better than most wealthy countries at taming inflation (3.2 per cent) and keeping unemployment low (3.5 per cent) that isn’t translating to enthusiasm for Biden. On the economic downside, US national debt has topped US$32 trillion this year for the first time.

Biden has his own political problems with probes into classified documents and his son Hunter’s previous work in Ukraine.

This week, there has been criticism of his lack of urgency in visiting Hawaii after the devastating fires on Maui that killed at least 110 people. He said, a week after the disaster, that he would visit “soon” and didn’t want to disrupt recovery efforts.

The public appears to broadly believe that an 80-year-old president isn’t the right fit for the future.

Only 24 per cent of Americans want him to run for re-election, according to the AP poll, while the Quinnipiac poll shows his ratings are poor, in historic terms, among important Democratic-voting communities such as black Americans and Hispanics.

In such circumstances, Biden may prefer a familiar and wounded opponent in Trump.