Voices: Trump’s indictment puts his Republican opponents in an impossible position

Presidential primaries are inherently thorny races. Ostensibly, candidates agree on most of the issues, or that certain problems exist, and they differ on how to tackle them. Those differences are often minute.

Think back to how Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton agreed on almost everything when it came to health care except on whether to mandate people buy health insurance.

As a result, primaries mostly boil down to questions of personality and electability. Ronald Reagan’s sunny disposition and optimism about America propelled him against the more stoic George H W Bush, whereas Democratic voters’ fear of another term of Donald Trump meant that they picked Joe Biden instead of the fresher faces or candidates with more progressive policies.

The Trumpified Republican Party adds a peculiar new wrinkle to this conundrum. Trump’s presidency made that fealty to the former president and the belief he can never commit any crimes or do any wrong essential criteria for conservatism.

Mr Trump’s indictment and the 37 charges he faces in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into his handling of classified documents should give Republicans an opportunity for his opponents an argument to say they are a better fit. But the wrath of GOP voters means they cannot offer even the mildest critiques of him.

No men epitomise this predicament more than Florida Gov Ron DeSantis and former vice president Mike Pence. Mr DeSantis hopes to run to Mr Trump’s right on everything from abortion to vaccines to restricting the rights of LGBT+ people, and as someone who has the temperament to actually implement a conservative agenda. Meanwhile, Mr Pence has to overcome Republican apprehension about him after he refused to overturn the 2020 presidential election results on January 6 and instead show that he is a constitutional conservative who has the virtue and moral clarity to be president.

Now they find themselves having to spend precious time defending Mr Trump. The day after Mr Trump announced his own indictment, Mr DeSantis spoke at the North Carolina GOP’s convention, where he received a rousing reception when he touted some of his victories. But he found himself having to defend Mr Trump, though he didn’t dare say the former president’s name.

Indeed, Mr DeSantis’s numbers began to deflate when he deigned to criticise Mr Trump for allegedly “paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair.” Similarly, last month, he pledged to consider pardoning Mr Trump if need be were Mr DeSantis win the White House.

Mr DeSantis cannot criticise Mr Trump lest Republican base voters consider him a heretic. At the same time, every second he spends defending Mr Trump from supposedly unfair prosecutions is one he cannot spend making his case that he is a conservative “fighter” who actually can implement the agenda voters want.

On the other end of the coin, Mr Pence has struggled to simultaneously argue why he was right to break with Mr Trump on January 6 and say that Mr Trump is being unfairly persecuted. That same weekend in Greensboro, he spoke to a smaller reception room and received applauses barely louder than golf claps throughout his speech, save for when he co-signed Mr DeSantis’s pledge to restore the name of Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg after a Confederate General who betrayed his oath to the US Constitution to uphold the practice of enslaving people.

In addition, while he called the indictment a “sad day for America” in that speech, he later said he could not defend Mr Trump against the allegations in the indictment. Mr Pence is hoping to simultaneously say that Mr Trump betrayed the US Constitution while at the same time calling him a victim of an overzealous government.

Few people are buying it. This week, he said he could not defend Mr Trump against the allegations in the indictment after previously saying the indictment was a “sad day for America.” Similarly, while Mr DeSantis told conservative talk hosts Buck Sexton and Clay Travis that he would consider pardoning Mr Trump, Mr Pence hemmed and hawed on the same question, calling it a hypothetical.

But the central problem for both of these men is if Mr Trump is being unfairly targeted and they defend him constantly, then why would any voter choose them instead of Mr Trump? This is to say nothing of the candidates lower on the card like Nikki Haley or Tim Scott, who because of their low name recognition, don’t get to introduce themselves to voters (at that same conference in Greensboro, I saw only one person with a Haley shirt in the style of the “Reagan-Bush ‘84” logo, as if to signify how much in the past she is).

Ultimately, Mr Trump winds up doing what he does best: sucking the oxygen out of any room and keeping the attention on him.