Analysis | Mounting legal woes. Weird NFTs. Is Donald Trump’s second White House run still in the cards?

Donald Trump announced his bid to retake the U.S. presidency a month ago, but he has been running a sleeper campaign that is only now showing signs of life.

On Friday, there was an unapologetic speech to American Jewish leaders after the former president was recently discovered supping with the toxic rapper formerly known as Kanye West and West’s plus-one, prominent anti-Semite Nick Fuentes.

Next week, there looms a possible recommendation from members of the Congress that Trump face criminal charges for his role in what has been recognized as sedition.

And then there are the newly unveiled Trump trading cards.

“Very much like a baseball card,” Trump, 76, explained on his social media accounts, “but hopefully much more exciting.”

Never mind that the limited-edition digital cards were trumpeted as a “major announcement” at a time when, in Trump’s words, “America needs a superhero!”

Never mind that they were sold for $99-a-pop when inflation is top-of-mind for American voters.

Never mind that the actual dollar value of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs as they are known, cratered last May and has shown no signs of recovering.

The main point is this: the Trump cards turn the former and potentially future American president into an actual cartoon character — not just a politician who acts like one.

And if he keeps it up, we could soon see the tipping point at which the pregnant silences and quiet reservations surrounding Trump’s bid to return to the White House turn into out-and-out revolt.

“He’s one of the greatest presidents in history, but I’ve got to tell you, whoever and what business partner and whoever in the comms team and anybody at Mar-a-Lago — and I love the folks down there — but we’re at war,” said a sputtering Steve Bannon, Trump’s former political adviser during his War Room online program. “They ought to be fired today.”

Hate the methods, love the messenger, in other words.

There is still, undoubtedly, an unshakeable core — the Trump hardliners, the Make America Great Again (MAGA) Republicans, the swath of the electorate who continue to view the 2024 presidential election as an opportunity to take back that which was, in their minds, stolen from Trump in 2020.

The problem is that growing segment of the Republican party that is starting to make clearer-eyed calculations about Trump’s attributes and drawbacks, says Stephen Craig, a professor of politics at the University of Florida.

There was a time, he said, when opinion polls showed that his backers placed more importance in their identity as Trump supporters than in their identity as a members of the Republican Party.

“That changed after 2020,” Craig said. “A lot of Republicans still feel that way, but not nearly as many as in the past. There’s no question that Trump’s shelf life is wearing thin, even among his base.”

Support has been more steadily eroding for the past five months, since about the time when his Mar-a-Lago estate was raided by the FBI in connection with a criminal investigation into Trump’s unauthorized possession of highly classified government documents.

Seen initially as another example of government intrusion or evidence of the establishment’s politically motivated witch hunt that has been Trump’s rallying cry, his case has been falling apart both in the court of law and of public opinion.

Earlier this month, a U.S. appeals court ended the review by a special master brought in to decide which of the documents seized by police were subject to attorney-client privilege, thus clearing the way for a criminal probe into breaches of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice.

Also this month, the Trump Organization — his real-estate and property management company — was found guilty of criminal tax fraud.

On Monday, the Jan. 6 committee investigating the 2021 storming of Capitol Hill by Trump supporters is set to outline its list of recommendations to federal departments and agencies. That includes the strong possibility that the Department of Justice lay criminal charges against Trump.

Jamie Raskin, a Democratic member of the House committee from Maryland, told MSNBC that the storming of the Capitol to overturn the election results was a “seditious conspiracy” — a crime for which one of the far-right protester leaders, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, was convicted last month.

“Donald Trump’s role in these events was far more central than merely inciting them. He was really behind them and none of it would have happened without him, beginning with his Tweet that he sent out telling everybody to come on Jan. 6,” Raskin said.

There’s no certainty the Department of Justice will proceed to charge Trump even if the House committee makes such a recommendation. And one can only speculate what a charge of inciting an insurrection would do to the former president’s fighting spirit and his poll numbers.

Only a criminal conviction on such a charge would actually disqualify Trump from holding office. But there is a much lower threshold among the voting public.

“There’s a lot of still-strong attachment, strong emotion,” Craig said. “But ‘drip, drip, drip’ — the whole water-torture thing. With each drip, with each revelation, maybe a few more people start having doubts.”

Among them is Utkarsh Jain, a 20-year-old vice-president of the Berkeley College Republicans at the University of California Berkeley.

The economics and business administration major wasn’t old enough to vote in the 2016 election that put Trump in the White House.

But to Jain’s mind, the next Republican Party presidential candidate needs to recreate that same kind of atmosphere for the 2024 race.

“That’s the kind of Trump that I would want, more so than what I’m seeing of him right now,” he said. “The energy in 2016 was just a whole different type of ballgame.”

Jain said he has “started to sour” on Trump because the ex-president appears to be more intent on fighting past battles than on coming up with new ideas and strategies to tackle the problems that face the America of today and tomorrow.

“He really needs to focus on what is the country looking at right now — ‘What are the issues and how can I shape a strategy where I can appeal to voters of all different kinds, whether they are Democrats, Independents or Republicans, and what can I really do for them,’” he said.

There are a host of other candidates who are expected to join Trump in the race for the Republican nomination. The chief contender, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, won a landslide re-election in last month’s midterms while Trump’s slate of endorsed candidates won some races but lost more.

The effect is to leave the former president looking somewhat less like the musclebound superman, the gunslinging sheriff and star-spangled dealmaker he is portrayed as being in his trading cards.

But Trump has overcome his doubters and surprised the world once before.

“A lot of us have made projections about Trump right from the beginning and been made fools of,” said Craig.

“I told a class that I was teaching in the fall of 2015 that I would be president before Donald Trump was, which shows that looking into the future isn’t necessarily something — at least in Trump’s case — that people know how to do.”

Allan Woods is a Montreal-based staff reporter for the Star. He covers global and national affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @WoodsAllan

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