WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — WORTHINGTON: The first thing that a lot of people probably wanted to know: If Trump does get indicted, can he still run for president?
PROF. BENJAMIN TOLL: The answer to that question is yes.
WORTHINGTON: What if he gets convicted?
TOLL: Yes, he can still run. Nothing in the Constitution says that he is precluded or unable to run for an office at the federal level.
WORTHINGTON: Why do you think he went ahead and announced this? Even though it didn't come true on Tuesday, it still could. Why do you think he wanted to get out ahead of this?
TOLL: Well, there's a lot of power in being able to control the narrative. So for President Trump to be able to say, 'I know this is happening,' it allows him to try to take that power away from the district attorney in Manhattan, but it also allows him to try to bring the people that are on his side into his camp, to try to rally his base of supporters, to let them know that they need to be paying attention.
WORTHINGTON: A lot of Republicans right now are accusing Democrats and the prosecutors in this case of dragging this out to distract from the Hunter Biden investigation. Is that plausible? What do you make of that?
TOLL: It's an entirely plausible scenario. I think what we see in politics over the last several years is, unfortunately, we have a lot of politicians and politicians' families that are worthy of investigation and deserve to be investigated for a variety of things. Investigations, Republicans will say this is a politically motivated prosecution, and Democrats will say the exact same thing about Hunter Biden. The difficult thing for those of us who are normal people and trying to make sense of the world around us is who do we trust? And who do we believe about these conversations? Because neither of these families appear to be entirely innocent in anything that's taking place.
WORTHINGTON: It's also going to be interesting to see how this affects other presidential campaigns. We just saw yesterday Ron DeSantis — he has not announced [his candidacy] yet, but people think he's going to soon — started to finally take the gloves off, and they [he and Trump] were trading jabs with each other yesterday. So, it's interesting that this is already having an impact on the 2024 election.
TOLL: President Trump is very popular among the Republican base. And if you look at all the pre-election polling, he's leading the polls. People that are wanting to run for president have to challenge them, have to attack him, in order to try to bring him down to their level. But you have the sort of the political world that we live in. There's also the need to respond to anything that is perceived as being against the Republican Party. And so, the indictment of President Trump will probably help him among some Republican voters, and how do those challengers, those other people running for the presidency, respond to the indictment? How do they try to stick up for President Trump without liking him and trying to position themselves as different is an interesting question.
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