Why Democrats want Trump

Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of an even more prominent fat man seems a big win for Donald Trump, regardless of how the case is decided. If convicted, Trump is a martyr, managing to portray himself once more as a persecuted Washington outsider, a status that’s quite a feat for a politician to retain after setting up shop in the White House for four years. If found not guilty, Trump is exonerated, a contrived case likely to rely on tentative legal reasoning exposed as an overtly partisan manhunt. After all, in a Quinnipiac poll last week, a plurality of Americans (42 per cent) considered the charges in New York either ‘not too serious’ (16 per cent) or ‘not serious at all’ (26 per cent). A hefty majority (62 per cent) believed the Stormy Daniels criminal case is mainly motivated by politics – including 93 per cent of Republicans, an electorally crucial 70 per cent of independents and a not-insignificant 29 per cent of Democrats.