Twice-indicted Trump dominates GOP race, as support for DeSantis stalls

CONCORD, N.H. - The primary was effectively over for many voters who came out to hear Donald Trump’s speech at a GOP women’s luncheon this week. “It’s Trump all the way — don’t even ask me about anyone else,” said Suzanne Pesaresi, a 62-year-old office manager.

Forty miles south, at a town hall with Ron DeSantis, plenty of others were convinced the party should move on from the former president. “I have a non-top choice, and that’s Donald Trump,” declared former Republican state lawmaker Bill Ohm. But like many around him, Ohm wasn’t yet sold on the Florida governor — or anyone else, for that matter.

“I could vote for DeSantis if nobody else got traction,” said Don Hallenbeck, a business owner who identifies as an independent and plans to vote in the Republican primary. He worries the governor would “have a tough time finding his way back to the middle” in a general election.

Facing newly combative opponents, millions of dollars’ worth of competing advertising and two indictments, Trump is in a dominant position in the GOP presidential race halfway through 2023. He has a wide lead on the competition, polls show. He draws enthusiastic crowds. And even some of his rival operatives acknowledge he has an unshakable grip on a sizable part of the electorate.

DeSantis — who once ran more competitively against Trump in the polls — doesn’t look as threatening after slipping to a distant second and then stalling out. The picture is more complicated at the state level, with one new Wisconsin survey showing Trump and DeSantis neck-and-neck. But overall the non-Trump vote is splintered and surveying a crowded field of alternatives, according to interviews with voters in this state and elsewhere, as well as polling of the GOP race.

Allies and advisers to Trump rivals say there’s plenty of time to reshape the race with debates, intensive field organizing and early state momentum. But few deny that Trump has only grown more formidable in the first half of the year while the race to displace him is more unsettled than ever.

Some see a path to toppling Trump by targeting his electability as he comes under growing legal threats. They argue a Trump nomination would help President Biden win a second term.

“We’re going to get killed” if the general election focuses on Trump’s legal woes, said Sean Van Anglen, a GOP consultant supportive of DeSantis who called Trump a liability for down-ballot candidates. “It’s going to be a field day for Biden and the Democratic Party.”

But many Republicans are not voicing such concerns. Trump’s strength with the GOP base was on display this past weekend at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference, a Washington gathering of Christian conservatives, where many presidential candidates spoke but none came close to matching Trump’s enthusiastic reception. The former president took his time basking in the adulation of the crowd as he took the stage to the strains of “Proud To Be an American.”

Audience members swayed to the music and held up their phones, some standing on their banquet chairs to get better shots. “Ron DeSantis should lead by example, along with every other candidate — drop out, endorse Trump — and even donate the maximum amount that’s allowed,” said Corey Check, a 21-year-old Republican attendee from Butler County, Pa., who wore a red “Make America Great Again” hat.

Trump is delivering a combative message to Republican primary voters that is resonating with many of them. He has adopted policy positions and rhetoric that have grown more confrontational and extreme and continues to make false claims, including about his 2020 election defeat. Trump has responded to his indictments with relentless attacks on the justice system. “When I get back at the Oval Office, I will totally obliterate the deep state,” he said Saturday at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference, drawing sustained applause.

DeSantis remains the most competitive challenger to Trump and has the support of more than 1 in 5 GOP voters in recent polls. Speaking several hours after DeSantis on Tuesday, when both candidates campaigned in New Hampshire, Trump bragged about his lead in the key early state and acknowledged he’s relentlessly attacking DeSantis rather than other candidates.

It’s “because he’s in second,” Trump told the crowd to laughter. “We don’t have to attack the one in third — don’t attack third, fourth, fifth or sixth. Worry about two. As they keep coming up to two, we keep sending them back to the dry cleaners.”

DeSantis’s official entrance into the race last month didn’t give him the boost many supporters were hoping for, leaving Trump-weary Republicans in a familiar position — waiting for the former president’s own conduct to catch up with him someday, somehow, despite recent history.

“I think over time people are going to say, ‘There’s just too much chaos in Trumpworld.’ The chaos is only going to grow,” said Hal Lambert, a former Trump donor who is now fundraising for DeSantis, even as he attributed some of Trump’s strength to a rallying effect from his indictments.

Federal charges that Trump mishandled classified documents — he has pleaded not guilty — pose a serious legal risk to the former president, and the Justice Department is requesting that a trial begin in December — shortly before the first GOP caucuses and primaries. That timetable is likely to drag out, however. Trump also faces a Georgia probe as well as a federal investigation into his and his allies’ unsuccessful efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump was also indicted this year in New York on charges related to payments intended to silence an adult-film actress during his first presidential run. He pleaded not guilty.

On the trail, Trump has sought to turn his legal problems into a rallying cry.

“Every time the radical-left Democrats, Marxists, Communists and fascists indict me, I consider it a badge, a great, great, beautiful badge of honor and courage, because I’m being indicted on allegations of you,” Trump said on Tuesday at the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women’s Lilac Luncheon.

George Elicker, a 62-year old Trump supporter from Seabrook, N.H., said he used to like DeSantis but now felt he was disloyal to Trump, who gave the governor a key endorsement in 2018.

“Trump is the only politician I’ve ever gotten into politics for,” Elicker said as he waited for a glimpse of the former president outside his Manchester campaign headquarters Tuesday. “He doesn’t speak down to us — he speaks like an average Joe that you meet on the street.”

“This guy has fought battles, upon battles, upon battles for us — and he’s still here,” said William Spaulding, 45, who was playing “We Are the Champions” on a portable speaker.

DeSantis has focused on his own record for much of his time on the trail and did so Tuesday at his event. It was his first New Hampshire foray into the town hall-style events featuring questions from voters that many have come to expect in the state.

Yet Trump was clearly on voters’ minds. DeSantis listened with a serious expression as a young man asked: “Some people think that Trump’s actions on January 6th, 2021, violated the key principles of America and the Constitution set forth by our Founding Fathers. Do you believe that Trump violated the peaceful transfer of power, a key principle that American democracy — that we must uphold?”

The governor sidestepped the question — saying that Republicans should focus on “Biden’s failures and our vision for the future” rather than “re-litigating things that happened two, three years ago.” The crowd clapped and whistled. Recent polling shows that most GOP voters don’t want a presidential candidate who aggressively criticizes Trump.

DeSantis said pointedly that in Florida, “we had a transition of power, from my first administration to my second. Because I won reelection in a historic fashion.”

Another voter asked why DeSantis would be better than “the other choice” to “drain the swamp” — Trump’s term for the political establishment that he says is hopelessly corrupt.

DeSantis responded with a swipe at Trump’s lack of follow-through on some of his campaign promises.

“I remember these rallies in 2016 — it was exciting! ‘Drain the swamp,’” DeSantis told the 400-plus voters circled around him at a banquet hall in Hollis, N.H. “I also remember ‘Lock her up,’” he added, referring to Trump’s calls to imprison Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent at the time. “And then two weeks after the election — ‘Ah . . . forget about it, forget I ever said that.’”

As Trump holds a wide lead in the GOP race, some Republicans are especially worried about his prospects in swing states such as Georgia that could decide the general election. Yet top Republican leaders have been careful about what they say about his electability, with many wary of crossing him publicly.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) argued to Breitbart News on Tuesday that Trump is “stronger today than he was in 2016″ — shortly after telling CNBC: “Can he win that election? Yeah he can. The question is, is he the strongest to win the election? I don’t know that answer.” The initial comment to CNBC angered Trump’s team, according to a person familiar with the situation, and McCarthy and Trump spoke privately over the phone on Tuesday.

A person briefed on the events, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said that the effort to move on from the initial comments was much easier than the conflict between the two men in early 2021, when McCarthy supported a censure of Trump after a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol over his false claims the election was stolen.

Suzanne Scolamiero, 85 — a resident of both Florida and New Hampshire — said at the Lilac Luncheon on Tuesday that she thought it was “wonderful” that other candidates were “making themselves known” within the GOP.

But she didn’t believe any of them posed a threat to Trump.

- - -

The Washington Post’s Marianne LeVine, Isaac Arnsdorf and Michael Scherer in Washington contributed to this report.