Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign unveiled an unlikely piece of merchandise this week: a T-shirt featuring an artificially created mugshot of the former president above the phrase, “NOT GUILTY.”
The shirt, which is free with a $47 contribution to the campaign or can be bought separately for $36, is a prime example of the campaign’s embrace of the president’s indictment.
“We’ll have a mug shot. For the record, it will be the most manly, most masculine, most handsome mug shot of all time,” former Trump White House spokesman Hogan Gidley told Time magazine last week. “I can say that definitely, before having even seen it.”
Lacking a real mug shot, they decided to make their own.
Team Trump has leaned into the case, which Trump has dismissed as “political persecution.” And it’s clear why: The campaign claims to have raked in more than $10 million since news of the indictment broke last week.
Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records after an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office into a hush-money payment made to porn actress Stormy Daniels. When he surrendered to authorities in New York on Tuesday, he was fingerprinted but did not have a mugshot taken, leaving the campaign to create its own.
The former president was reserved and sullen-looking at his arraignment hearing on Tuesday. While aides told several media outlets ahead of the hearing that Trump planned to stop and speak to the cameras before entering the courtroom, a defeated-looking Trump walked past the cameras without a word, both while entering and exiting the courthouse.
He did, however, address an enthusiastic crowd at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday evening. The event gave Trump an opportunity to redo his lackluster campaign launch. Appearing from the same Mar-a-Lago stage, he gave a nearly identical speech listing his personal grievances — plus a few nods to the latest indictment news and a new-and-improved fundraising pitch.
“I never thought anything like this could happen in America. The only crime that I have committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it,” Trump told the crowd.
“From the beginning, the Democrats spied on my campaign. Remember that. They attacked me with an onslaught of fraudulent investigations. Russia, Russia, Russia. Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine. Impeachment hoax number 1, impeachment hoax number 2, the illegal and unconstitutional raid on Mar-a-Lago right here,” he said.
A sign on the former president’s podium asked viewers to text a number that would direct them to a campaign fundraising page. “As the never-ending witch hunts heat up, please make a contribution to defend our movement and SAVE America,” the page read.
Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) also made an appeal to Fox News viewers for donations on Trump’s behalf. “We got one last chance here to straighten this out,” Graham said during an appearance on Hannity on Tuesday. “2024 is the most important election in my lifetime. America is literally at stake as we know it.”
“Please help President Trump,” he continued. “If you can afford 5 or 10 bucks, if you can’t afford a dollar, fine. Just pray. Make sure you vote as early as you can in your state. Don’t risk anything anymore. Vote as soon as you can. Pray for this country, pray for this president and if you got any money to give, give it.”
YouGov polling conducted in the hours after Trump’s arrest found 58 percent of Republicans believe the charges will strengthen his 2024 campaign, while just 17 percent said it would weaken it. Forty percent of Democrats said the charges would weaken Trump’s presidential bid, while just 18 percent said they would strengthen it.
So far, the Republicans are right.
As the media has returned to focusing relentlessly on Trump — with cable news providing round-the-clock coverage of his travel to and from New York, as if it were 2015 — his support among primary voters surged.
A Yahoo News/YouGov poll of Republican voters shows Trump leading DeSantis 57 percent to 31 percent. Trump has seen an increase of ten percentage points in under two weeks.
A St. Anselm College poll of the 2024 New Hampshire GOP primary offers similarly good news for the former president, with Trump garnering 42 percent, compared to DeSantis’s 29 percent. New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu and Nikki Haley trailed behind, with 14 percent and 4 percent support, respectively.
The next in-person hearing in the trial is set for December 4 — just two months before the 2024 primary season officially begins. The case kickstarts what is likely to be a period of legal turmoil for the former president, who also faces investigations into his alleged efforts to reverse the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, as well as his alleged mishandling of classified intelligence at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump took shots at the prosecutors leading both cases in his Mar-a-Lago speech on Tuesday. He called Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis a “racist Democrat district attorney who is doing everything to indict me over an absolutely perfect phone call,” a reference to his call with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger in which Trump allegedly asked if enough votes could be found to overturn his loss in the state. He called special counsel Jack Smith a “radical left lunatic known as a bomb thrower who is harassing hundreds of my people day after day over the boxes hoax,” an apparent reference to the classified-documents case.
To Trump’s advantage, the news of his legal woes has been all-consuming. Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson joined the 2024 race on Sunday with little fanfare. Hutchinson, who launched his bid during an appearance on ABC’s This Week, immediately called for Trump to drop out of the race.
“I mean, first of all, the office is more important than any individual person,” Hutchinson said. “And, so, for the sake of the office of the presidency, I do think that’s too much of a sideshow and distraction and he needs to be able to concentrate on his due process, and there is a presumption of innocence.”
The former governor said he plans to make a formal announcement later this month in Bentonville, Ark. He explained his decision to run by saying, “I’ve traveled the country for six months, I hear people talk about the leadership of our country. I’m convinced that people want leaders that appeal to the best of America, and not simply appeal to our worst instincts.”
Meanwhile, Nikki Haley became the first 2024 candidate to visit the U.S. southern border this week. She said what she saw during her visit amounted to a “dereliction of duty” by President Biden.
“What I’d say to President Biden is, shame on you,” Haley said during an appearance on Fox News. “Shame on you because you are putting every single American at risk. This is a national security threat . . . This is your job, your job is to protect the American people. You’re not doing it, you don’t deserve to be president.”
Around NR
• NR’s resident legal expert Andrew McCarthy says the Trump indictment “is even worse than I’d imagined.”
Bragg’s indictment fails to state a crime. Not once . . . but 34 times. On that ground alone, the case should be dismissed — before one ever gets to the facts that the statute of limitations has lapsed and that Bragg has no jurisdiction to enforce federal law (if that’s what he’s trying to do, which remains murky).
• Noah Rothman observes that the “notion that the GOP must now renominate Trump to the presidency if only to remedy this injustice has become a common refrain.” He questions why:
What does it gain Republican voters in material terms to renominate Trump merely as a response to his many, many legal troubles (of which this incitement is probably the flimsiest)? Does it chasten progressive prosecutors? Will it restore some sense of propriety among elected district attorneys, right and left, who might be similarly tempted to litigate their political grievances in a courtroom? Probably not.
• A Trump-aligned super PAC spent more than $1.3 million on a 30-second television ad attacking DeSantis’s record of advocating for cuts to Social Security and Medicare — despite the former president’s own record of backing similar cuts, as I reported.
“Think you know Ron DeSantis?” the MAGA Inc., ad begins. “Think again. In Congress, DeSantis voted three separate times to cut Social Security.”
“Worse? DeSantis voted to cut medicare two times,” adds the tv spot, which will run on Fox News, CNN and Newsmax.
• A Mason-Dixon poll found DeSantis’s approval rating in Florida is now four points higher than it was just before his 2022 reelection. But the poll has “odd” results for a potential DeSantis 2024 campaign, Charles C. W. Cooke writes:
Does this mean that DeSantis is a lock for Florida’s primary votes? It does not. In Mason-Dixon’s head-to-head match, DeSantis holds a narrow lead over Trump, 44–39. Personally, I find this a bit odd. Per Mason-Dixon, Republicans in Florida prefer DeSantis to Trump by 16 points, and they can see that, among Floridians in general, DeSantis is 20 points more popular than Trump, and yet DeSantis is their choice for presidential nominee by just five points?