Indicted populists have a history of staying in office
Even with former President Donald Trump indicted a third time, 2024 voters may be leaning his way. Many recent polls have the former president running even with President Joe Biden or taking the lead. Trump’s ability to weather his legal storms have led to comparisons with other politicians who have run for office, often successfully, in the midst of legal troubles. The comparisons matter — but what’s most important for understanding the current moment is the dynamic that links the many examples: us-versus-them.
Let’s start at the top. Many people know the story of Boston Mayor James Curley, so popular among the voters that in the 1940s he ran the city for five months from a federal penitentiary. Trump had barely taken office when the comparisons to Curley began. As the former president’s legal difficulties have mounted, they’ve come creeping back. Small wonder. Curley, an ardent New Dealer, was thoroughly corrupt, but whenever another investigation loomed, he appealed to his supporters’ sense of grievance, insisting that the Republican establishment was only going after him because he gave voice to the city’s despised Irish Catholics.
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Then there’s Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, who resigned as mayor of Providence in 1984 after he kidnapped his ex-wife’s boyfriend and burned him with a cigarette and a hot log from a fire (in front of a police officer and a judge, no less). A decade later, Cianci stood for election again. By that time, nearly two dozen of his associates had been convicted of corruption. No matter. Cianci successfully styled himself the anti-establishment candidate. According to biographer Mike Stanton, an internal poll found about a quarter of the electorate so dedicated that they’d vote for him even if, as one aide put it, “He robbed a bank at gunpoint.” Cianci won.
Popular celebration of embattled political candidates is often about class resentment: the workers versus not so much the bosses as the Brahmins. The intellectuals. Thus the belief that the candidate is “one of us” — after all, he’s got the right enemies. The anthropologist Hugh Gusterson describes the feedback loop: “[U]niversity-educated cosmopolitans react to nationalist populists with condescension, which drives the latter deeper into populism, which increases the cosmopolitans’ disdain for them.”
Quite apart from other issues at stake in an election, the disdain is felt as a wound. Small wonder, then, that populist voters so often refuse to abandon a candidate beset by legal troubles. They’re not so much voting for him as they are against the elite — the elite they think has caused both their own difficulties and his.
This dynamic isn’t seen only on the right, or among the White working class. After Representative William Jefferson, a Black Louisiana Democrat, was indicted on corruption charges in 2007, inner-city voters continued to cheer him on. Wrote the Los Angeles Times: “He is treated like a rock star by his supporters, often arriving at venues to standing ovations.” There, too, the public response was us-versus-them, particularly because Jefferson’s legal troubles arose not long after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Here’s the New York Times: “Mr. Jefferson is not blamed for the ruined black neighborhoods, but the United States government — his prosecutor — is.” To his constituents, the embattled member of Congress remained “a godly man persecuted by a racially biased government.” (He lost his reelection bid.)
Why do such strategies work? Because of the same forces that lead large numbers to support the miscreants in the first place. The other side — whoever they are — is guilty of pretty much everything. That’s how we got into this fix in the first place. They hate us; so, of course, they hate those we support.
Which brings us back to Trump.
How the former president became a working-class hero is an issue to be tackled by some sharper social analyst than I. The point is, that’s how many see him. He embodies an us-against-them quality, a sense that “they” would never go after one their own this way. (Which is why Hunter Biden has proven so animating to the right.) The less voters trust the government, the less they’ll trust prosecutors who accuse their hero of crimes. That’s the wave Trump is riding; but he certainly didn’t invent it.
