Former President Donald J. Trump has cast the many charges against him as politically motivated and legally meritless — and most of the Republicans looking to beat him have gone along.
Former President Donald J. Trump faces an expanding collection of felony charges: There’s the indictment in New York City over hush payments to a pornographic actress, plus a federal indictment over his retention of classified documents, plus another federal indictment over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in his supporters’ storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. There’s an investigation into election interference in Georgia, too.
Mr. Trump has cast every investigation as politically motivated and legally meritless — and, with few exceptions, the Republicans looking to beat him next year have gone along.
Here is what the other candidates have said.Ron DeSantis
Like most of the Republican field, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has framed the charges as products of a corrupt justice system, while offering muted criticism of Mr. Trump’s actions.
“The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society,” he wrote on Twitter after the indictment in the documents case. A few weeks later, he suggested in an interview with CNN that an indictment in the election case would show the country “going down the road of criminalizing political differences” — and declared on social media that Washington was such a “swamp” that not only Mr. Trump but also any criminal defendant should have a right to be tried somewhere else.
After the first indictment, in New York, Mr. DeSantis sought to link the Manhattan district attorney to the liberal financier George Soros in a way often used as an antisemitic dog whistle: “Like other Soros-funded prosecutors, they weaponize their office to impose a political agenda on society at the expense of the rule of law and public safety,” he said.
He has allowed that Mr. Trump may have behaved inappropriately, while maintaining that he shouldn’t be prosecuted.
In a jab in March, he pointed out that he wouldn’t know anything about paying off a porn star.
In June, he said he “would have been court-martialed in a New York minute” if he had retained classified documents in the Navy.
And in July, he said Mr. Trump should have “come out more forcefully” to stop his supporters from storming the Capitol.Nikki Haley
Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and former United Nations ambassador, has shifted from an unequivocal denunciation of the first indictment in March to an argument in July that Mr. Trump’s legal troubles were creating an unacceptable distraction.
She called the New York indictment a “political” prosecution. But after the documents indictment, she joined a few other candidates in trying to have it both ways: She said that if the allegations were true, “President Trump was incredibly reckless with our national security,” while simultaneously saying the case reflected “prosecutorial overreach, double standards and vendetta politics.”
She also said she “would be inclined” to pardon Mr. Trump.
By the time the news broke of a likely third indictment, Ms. Haley sounded exasperated. “The rest of this primary election is going to be in reference to Trump — it’s going to be about lawsuits, it’s going to be about legal fees, it’s going to be about judges, and it’s just going to continue to be a further and further distraction,” she said on Fox News, adding, “We can’t keep dealing with this drama.”Mike Pence
Former Vice President Mike Pence denounced the New York case, calling it “an outrage.” But he has been ambivalent on the documents indictment and the election case. In the latter, Mr. Trump’s pressuring of Mr. Pence to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 results is a major component.
Mr. Pence initially said the documents indictment would be “terribly divisive” and would send “a terrible message to the wider world that looks at America as a standard of not only democracy, but of justice.
