As indictments rally GOP voters around Trump, are opponents keeping ‘fingers crossed’?

Former President Donald Trump’s growing legal exposure has some Republicans asking a once-unthinkable question: how long can he hold on?

Trump’s announcement on Tuesday that he had received a letter from Special Counsel Jack Smith naming him as a target of a grand jury investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol added to the ever-growing list of legal problems and obligations that have swirled around his 2024 presidential campaign for months.

And while Trump has insisted that there’s no circumstance in which he would exit the presidential race, some Republicans are already weighing the possibility that he may eventually be left with no choice but to end his latest campaign.

“It’s the reason why you have so many people in this race,” Saul Anuzis, a Republican consultant and former Michigan GOP chair, said. “If they can just hold out long enough, the idea is that maybe Trump won’t be around in a few months.”

For at least some of his Republican primary rivals, a sense of fatigue with Trump’s legal troubles has begun to set in. Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, appeared weary when asked about Smith’s target letter on Tuesday morning.

“It’s going to keep on going,” Haley said on Fox News. “I mean, 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. And that’s why I am running.”

“We can’t keep dealing with this drama, we can’t keep dealing with the negativity, we can’t keep dealing with all of this,” she added.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who’s seen as the most likely alternative to Trump in the primary but is still polling in a distant second place, offered some of his most explicit criticism yet of Trump’s handling of the Jan. 6 insurrection, saying at a press conference in South Carolina that Trump “didn’t do anything” to stop the insurrection as it unfolded.

Still, he offered a more muted defense of the former president, criticizing what he called the “politicization” of the FBI and Justice Department and saying that Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 did not amount to criminal behavior.

“He should have come out more forcefully,” DeSantis said. “But to try to criminalize that – that’s a different issue entirely, and I think that we want to be in a situation where, you know, you don’t have one side just constantly trying to put the other side in jail. And that unfortunately is what we’re seeing now.”

Another 2024 hopeful, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, reiterated a previous call for Trump to suspend his campaign, arguing that the former president’s actions on Jan. 6 “should disqualify him from ever being President again.”

Vivek Ramaswamy, a wealthy entrepreneur who’s seeking the GOP nomination, responded to the news that investigators are pursuing Trump as a target by saying that he “would have made very different judgments than President Trump did” on Jan. 6, but added that “a bad judgment is not a crime.”

Trump’s campaign did not respond to the Miami Herald’s request for comment.

If he’s indicted in the special counsel’s Jan. 6 insurrection probe – and it appears increasingly likely that he will be – it will mark the third time this year that Trump has faced criminal charges. He was indicted in Manhattan in March on charges related to hush-money payments to a porn star, and again in June on charges that he illegally retained classified documents after he left the White House.

He’s currently set to stand trial in the Manhattan case in March of next year. A trial date has yet to be set for the classified documents case, but during a Tuesday court hearing in Fort Pierce, Fla., U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon said she would “promptly” issue a written order on the matter.

Federal prosecutors in that case wanted the trial to start as early as December, arguing that Trump’s presidential campaign doesn’t entitle him to an indefinite delay. Trump’s attorneys, on the other hand, pushed Cannon to delay the trial until after the 2024 election. Cannon, a Trump appointee, appeared skeptical of both arguments.

Trump has cast the various charges and investigations as part of a political witch hunt driven by Democratic prosecutors who are eager to tamp down his effort to return to the White House.

And for the most part, Republicans have stood by his side; an ABC News/Ipsos poll released last month after Trump’s indictment in the classified documents case found that 80% of GOP voters believe the charges against him are politically motivated.

Yet even as he leads the GOP primary field in most polls and rakes in money for his 2024 presidential bid — he mentioned his possible indictment in the Jan. 6 case in a Tuesday fundraising pitch — some Republicans have begun questioning whether Trump’s legal entanglements could eventually overwhelm his campaign.

“The one thing that I think is a pretty solid prediction is by the end of the year, this guy is going to be facing over 100 separate charges,” Keith Naughton, a longtime Republican strategist, said. “And it’s hard to believe he’s going to go 100-for-100 on acquittal.”

“He’s been playing chicken with the Republican Party for the last five years,” Naughton added. “But Trump can’t play chicken facing up the tractor trailer that Jack smith is driving.”

Trump said in an interview with his longtime ally Roger Stone last month that under no circumstances whatsoever would he drop out of the presidential race. And there’s nothing in the law that prohibits a person facing criminal charges from running for president.

Still, that doesn’t necessarily stop Trump’s Republican challengers from hoping for his political collapse, albeit quietly, said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist and former Florida congressional candidate.

“Privately, they’re all thinking that. Publicly they can’t say that,” O’Connell said. “What this comes down to is all Republicans are supposed to deplore selective prosecution, abuse of power. And beyond that, they keep their fingers crossed.”