By Jack Phillips
Former President Donald Trump, who polls show is the Republican frontrunner for 2024, was arrested on Tuesday on federal charges in connection to whether he allegedly mishandled classified documents.
Trump is largely ahead of the rest of the GOP pack, according to polls. A Quinnipiac poll shows Trump has 53 percent support among GOP voters, while No. 2 is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has 23 percent. No other candidate reached 5 percent.
Vivek Ramaswamy and radio host Larry Elder publicly denounced Trump’s arrest on Tuesday. In a statement last week, after the federal indictment was unsealed, DeSantis condemned what he called the weaponization of federal agencies but didn’t mention the former president by name.
Ramaswamy, meanwhile, was the only Republican candidate to go to Miami to defend Trump, saying that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is engaging in “police state”-style tactics by arresting Trump.
In an appearance in front of the Miami courthouse, Ramaswamy mounted a defense of Trump and said that “it would be a lot easier for me as a Republican candidate if Donald Trump were not in it. But I don’t want to win this election, unlike others, by eliminating our competition by a federal administration police state arresting my opponents.”
The businessman-turned-candidate then alleged that the GOP “donor class” told “every Republican candidate and telling us to stay away from this … I refuse to abide by being a disciple of the donor class.”
After Trump’s arrest, Elder, who unsuccessfully ran for governor against Gov. Gavin Newsom in a recall election, told Fox News that if he’s elected, “I would instruct my Attorney General to drop the politically-motivated charges against Trump.”
“I can tell you that it is deeply disturbing that Hillary Clinton was not charged for her blatant violation of the Espionage Act when she destroyed her private email server,” Elder continued in a statement. “And why is the special counsel investigation into [President] Biden’s mishandling of classified documents taking so much longer than the investigation of Trump?”
As for DeSantis, both the governor and his team have largely remained silent on Trump’s arrest. Over the past weekend, DeSantis suggested there is a double standard at play.
“I think there needs to be one standard of justice in this country. Let’s enforce it on everybody and make sure we all know the rules. You can’t have one faction of society weaponizing the power of the state against factions that it doesn’t like and that’s what you see,” he said during a speech in North Carolina on Saturday. He made similar comments on his Twitter account.
But DeSantis also said that if “I would have taken classified [documents] to my apartment, I would have been court-martialed in a New York minute” when he was a Naval officer.
Former Vice President Mike Pence, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) signaled they are now willing to criticize Trump after his arrest. For instance, Scott told reporters that the DOJ indictment against Trump is a “serious case with serious allegations,” Haley called Trump “reckless,” and Pence said that he “can’t defend” what the indictment alleged Trump did with classified documents.
“And I can’t defend what is alleged. But the President is entitled to his day in court, he’s entitled to bring a defense, and I want to reserve judgment until he has the opportunity to respond,” Pence said in a Wall Street Journal interview on Tuesday.
Haley, in a statement to Politico, said that she would likely pardon Trump if he is convicted on the federal charges. “When you look at a pardon, the issue is less about guilt and more about what’s good for the country,” Haley remarked. “And I think it would be terrible for the country to have a former president in prison for years because of a documents case.”
Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson and former Gov. Chris Christie, both longtime critics of Trump, appeared to largely agree with the DOJ’s indictment.
“Whether you like Donald Trump or you don’t like Donald Trump, this conduct is inexcusable, in my opinion, for somebody who wants to be president of the United States,” Christie said during a recent town hall. Notably, Christie backed Trump during his 2016 campaign and helped head his transition team, but since then, he’s turned against the former president.
Hutchinson, meanwhile, said during an MSNBC interview this week that it’s “simply wrong” for Republican presidential candidates such as Ramaswamy and Haley to be “discussing a pardon” for Trump.
President Joe Biden has largely remained mum on Trump’s arrest, with Biden saying last week that he did not tell the DOJ to investigate the former president. Democratic 2024 rival Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has not specifically made mention of the arrest but said in a recent interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald that “recent disclosures” make the Trump–Russia investigation “look like the entire thing was fake, the entire thing was fabricated from whole cloth.”
