Trump asks his supporters for donations to his campaign to support him after the indictment

Donald Trump in Georgia, in January 2021.MANDEL NGAN (AFP)

"I'm an innocent man, I haven't done anything wrong," Donald Trump says in the four-minute video posted Thursday on his social network, Truth Social, after learning that he has been charged. "And we will fight this as we have been fighting for seven years."

In that appointment is contained the strategy of the best-placed candidate in the race of the Republican primaries, with 49% of support, well ahead of his main competitor, Ron DeSantis. The victimization of what he considers a political witch hunt, unleashed by the Democrats, allowed Trump to reap massive adhesions in April, when he was first indicted by the Manhattan prosecutor's office. Support of intention to vote, but also economic for his campaign, after announcing the prosecutor Alvin Bragg the accusation for the Stormy Daniels case (the payment of black money to the porn actress to silence an extramarital relationship). As he argues today in the video, the corollary of innocence, that victimization of which he has flagged, is the promise to combat a state of affairs that, he insists, has a solely political motivation. A pennant of emotional engagement of voters.

The tycoon moves between victimization and capitalization of the judicial offensive against him, but always in the band of short-termism. For analysts, it is unknown whether the punctual impulse that his judicial setbacks have meant so far will be maintained throughout the race to the White House, and there are many who believe that the victimhood of the moment (that is, the immediate, emotional reaction) will deflate as the well-attended Republican primaries progress. Most observers also believe that the more candidates, that is, the more noise, the better for Trump, holder of the most differentiated brand.

This Thursday the script has been repeated without variations, accompanied by the noise of the cash register of his campaign. If at the end of March he raised more than four million dollars in the first 24 hours after the decision of the New York grand jury to indict him for 34 crimes in the Stormy Daniels case, and three million more in the following days, today Trump has directly addressed potential donors, traditional or new.

"We are watching our Republic DIE before our very eyes. Biden's appointed special counsel [special counsel Jack Smith] has INDICTED me in another witch hunt regarding documents I had a RIGHT to declassify as president of the United States," Trump wrote in an email asking his supporters for money. "Please make a contribution to support me and show that YOU will NEVER give our country to the radical left," the note concludes, suggesting contributions of between $24 and $250. In April, of the initial four million raised, 25% came from new donors.

Trump is great at making a virtue out of necessity (or accusation). Any other politician with so many open fronts would have succumbed, or thrown in the towel, on the first turn of the road. But the former president grows up in adverse situations. He has not even apparently been dented by the conviction for sexual abuse and defamation for which in May he was sentenced to pay five million dollars to his victim, the writer E Jane Carroll.

Trump has emerged unscathed from the Stormy Daniels and Carroll cases, but what about the Mar-a-Lago papers, the first federal indictment of a president? If bedroom affairs such as those underlying the two aforementioned processes have not even diminished his popularity among the most puritanical Republican base, it can be inferred that neither will a case, such as the papers, in which he faces none other than the Department of Justice and Smith, the special prosecutor appointed by President Biden to oversee all the cases opened against him. Enemies with names and surnames, all of them democrats.

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