Trump went from hero to zero and it's only going to get worse

It was a hectic scene outside of the New York courthouse where Donald Trump was arraigned over an alleged hush money payment to exotic actress Stormy Daniels, but will the 34 charges facing the former president ruin him and his election hopes?

The question of what will happen next has been on the minds of Americans since the former president announced that a Manhattan grand jury was planning to indict him after investigating $130,000 in payments to Stormy Daniels at the end of his 2016 campaign.

Things moved quickly after the grand jury announced Trump’s official indictment and the former president’s attorneys quickly squared away the details of his surrender to police, letting the public know he was planning on cooperating with authorities. 

“President Trump has been indicted. He did not commit any crime. We will vigorously fight this political prosecution in Court,” Susan Necheles and Joe Tacopina said in a joint statement according to NBC News. 

The former president of course took to the internet to lambast the indictment as more political pandering by Democrats, saying it was “Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history," according to a statement from Trump published by various media outlets.

“The Democrats have lied, cheated and stolen in their obsession with trying to ‘Get Trump,’ but now they’ve done the unthinkable—indicting a completely innocent person in an act of blatant Election Interference,” the former president added. 

Unfortunately, the Republican's diehard base has latched onto Trump’s indictment as a compelling reason to swing their support back behind the former president, and some polls are showing that instead of ruining Trump, the indictment made him even more popular. 

A recent Marist Poll survey completed on behalf of PBS NewsHour and NPR and administered before Trump's indictment was announced, found that 80 percent of Republican respondents said the former president was facing a “witch hunt.” 

On April 1st, Axios reported that Trump raised $5 million dollars on the news of his indictment, $4 million of which came within the first 24 hours of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's announcement that the former president had been indicted. 

“The donation gusher validates the view of most top Republicans that the expected indictment from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, at least in the short term, will help Trump's effort to build a formidable lead for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination,” Axios journalist Mike Allen wrote. 

Trump campaign advisor Jason Miller put things a little more succinctly, saying according to Yahoo News: “There’s a whole new group of Trump supporters who are angered by what they see as this political persecution."

However, the numbers favoring the former president may be misleading and data from CNN’s latest poll administered on April 3rd indicated that while most Americans surveyed believed Trump’s indictment was done for political purposes, 60 percent still approved of it. 

Such a plurality of Americans endorsing Trump’s indictment could mean the former president is heading for a big election loss after clinching the GOP nomination, especially since 62 percent of independents surveyed by CNN approved of his indictment. 

Moreover, if Alvin Bragg's indictment doesn’t make a difference in Trump’s electability, then it’s possible one of his other looming indictments could be the final nail in the coffin of the former president's political career, and there are two he should be worried about. 

Georgia’s Fulton County special grand jury has already recommended multiple indictments in Trump’s state election tampering case according to one of the forewomen, and Democrats are still hoping to charge Trump for the four laws the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack found he broke that day.

Trump’s Manhattan indictment may be a boon to Trump’s popularity now, but in the end, it's going to cost him according to Brown University Political Science Professor and Director of the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy Wendy Schiller.

“He will sort of push all of the other contenders out of the media sphere and suck up all of the oxygen,” Schiller said, adding that it wouldn’t be without its consequences. 

“So in the short term, it helps him. But in the long term, it simply reinforces (among key voters) that he comes with liabilities, that he doesn’t necessarily respect the law. And I think there will be other indictments,” Schiller remarked. 

Whether or not any of the current or future indictments will finally stick to the Teflon Don has yet to be seen, but one thing is clear from this week's chaos. Trump is becoming more of a hero to his base, but looking like more of a zero to the rest of the nation.