Fear and Bravado: Inside Trump’s Reaction to the Indictment (2023)

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From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

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Today, what the indictment and impending arrest of Donald Trump means for both him and his party. My colleague, Maggie Haberman, has the inside story of how it’s been playing out.

It’s Monday, April 3.

Maggie.

Michael.

I was thinking in preparation for this interview how much the history of “The Daily” has been defined by you coming on to talk about Donald Trump, right? There’s the kind of presidential phase, then there’s the post-presidential phase. Now there’s the indictment phase of Maggie explaining and translating the world of Donald Trump.

It is always a privilege to be here with you on what I think is now our seventh year.

Yes, seventh year, maybe our seventh lifetime. And of course, now that Trump has been indicted over these hush money payments made during his first presidential campaign, we want to understand how he and those around him and really, the entire Republican Party have been processing this really extraordinary moment. And if we can, I want to start the clock back just a little bit to the days before the indictment when the possibility of it, based on your reporting, seemed to be very much on Trump’s mind.

Sure. So you have to remember, Michael, that for Trump being under investigation is not a new phenomenon. He’s been the subject of criminal investigations on and off for the past nearly 45 years from when he was a young developer working with his father, Fred, in New York real estate. And he developed a playbook for dealing with investigations, throwing all kinds of wrenches into cases to delay them, trying to run down the clock, and in some cases, trying to schmooze prosecutors.

But he’s never, not once before, been charged with a crime. And so the possibility that what is essentially a winning streak might end has been simply put, terrifying for him. The thought of being indicted was terrifying for him. And you saw that when you could see he was aware it was likely coming. And he began trying to focus his supporter’s energy.

So on March 18, he posted Truth Social, the social media website —

And he said that he would be arrested three days later on Tuesday, March 21.

And look. It’s not the normal behavior of a target of an investigation.

Right. To announce that he’s about to be arrested.

Right. And more importantly, it wasn’t true.

He had put out this day that was as best as anyone can tell, a guess that his lawyers were making, but it hadn’t been reported.

But why? Would you tell the world you’re about to be arrested when you have no knowledge you’re about to be arrested and you’re basically just guessing at it?

So it’s a great question. And I think to a large degree, it was a projection of his anxiety. And at the same time, it was a way to try to control the narrative and media attention and to project his power.

And how in that strategy is he actually projecting his power?

So remember, there are a huge group of Republicans who after 2020 and the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol have concluded that Trump is bad for the party. They feel he hurt the party in the midterm elections when the party did nowhere near as well as it could have or seemed like it was on track to do. But after Trump’s post about an arrest, you already see the party starting to have to contend with the reality of this enormous place and poll he still has over the party.

Explain that. How does that start to reveal itself?

Well, within hours of Trump saying this on Truth Social, one of the most powerful figures in government, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, announced that he would have committees investigate the Manhattan district attorney who’s leading this case against Trump, Alvin Bragg.

Right. In other words, he would use the Republican-controlled House as a kind of weapon against the people who would soon, in theory, be charging Trump.

Yes. That was not actually what he said, but that is the actual practical effect. And allies of Trump then used this unverified claim of an impending arrest to try to pressure and almost beat down his biggest rival in the 2024 presidential race, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, to say something supportive of Trump. Until Trump posted Truth Social, DeSantis had really been avoiding, wading into this case, he was staying silent.

But Trump’s advisors and his campaign saw an opening. Trump’s campaign war room issued a statement saying it has been over 24 hours, and some people are still silent. History will judge their silence.

So some people here, everyone understood to mean, Ron DeSantis. He was one of the somes.

He was one of the somes. He was a big some.

So what does DeSantis do in response to this pressure campaign?

So for two days, DeSantis didn’t say anything. And then at an event in Panama City, Florida, DeSantis was asked by reporters about what Trump had said. And he attacked Bragg in sort of standard terms at this point, denounced him as a district attorney. But then twice, made a point of saying that he doesn’t know anything about hush money payments to porn stars.

Now Trump, we should note has denied either having an affair with the porn star in question, Stormy Daniels, or paying her off. But DeSantis knew what he was doing. And it was a tweak at Trump. It was a dig at the personal conduct.

Got it. OK, so what happens next? At this point in the chronology, Trump has claimed, without any verification, that he’s about to get arrested, thereby forcing people like Ron DeSantis to have to react and kind of genuflect, but not quite. So what happens next?

So Tuesday, March 21 comes and goes. And Trump is, of course, not arrested, because there never was a plan to arrest him that day because he had not been indicted. But then something interesting happens. Trump and those around him immediately start developing a new message. They start insisting that the case against him is falling apart.

Interesting. That is a big change. And what is behind that?

So this was fueled primarily by a lawyer named Bob Costello.

Costello testified before the grand jury as a witness for Trump.

Costello had had interactions with Michael Cohen, the key witness in this case, who is the one who made the hush money payments.

And so Costello goes on this media tour. And he is telling one reporter after another that in his testimony, he had completely attacked and crushed the credibility of Michael Cohen.

And then from there, the Trump folks appear to start believing their own hype, claiming that the case is falling apart and that nobody would rely on the word of Michael Cohen as a witness because Costello was so strong and that Bragg, according to them, was now having concerns about bringing this case. They never provided any evidence of what they were saying.

And so by the time we got to mid last week, Michael, around Wednesday Trump’s team was so convinced that nothing was happening, there were reports that the grand jury was adjourning for a month. One of Trump’s own top advisors was assuring colleagues that things were on ice, possibly forever, that Trump aides started leaving Palm Beach and going to other places, in some cases flying out of the state entirely, because they believed they were just fine.

I mean, this is kind of remarkable, because Trump goes in, I think the span of just a few days, from being so freaked out that he tells the world he’s about to be arrested to suddenly, it seems, deciding, nothing to see here, folks. Everybody can just leave Mar-a-Lago. I’m fine.

To the point that he posts on Truth Social that he has strange new respect for the grand jury system and the grand jurors because according to him, this is all going so well for him. And it’s a real window, Michael, into the way Trump world operates.

There’s one advisor in particular who other aides refer to as the “good news guy,” somebody who just feeds Trump what he wants to hear and positive information, regardless of whether it’s true or not. And Trump has this whole reliance on the so-called power of positive thinking. And he believes that it really does impact events, or at least claims that he believes that, and he has for decades.

And then you have all of these people around him who both fear him and want to please him. And so they end up feeding this back to him. And it becomes this kind of self-fueling ecosystem, where facts are what you make them.

Right. And where reality can be distorted very powerfully.

And where legal problems can be conflated with public relations problems and media strategy problems. And it all becomes part of one big feed.

Fascinating. And then, of course, it turns out, all of that is entirely misplaced.

Yes. None of what they were saying was going to happen happened. In fact, it was quite the opposite. And so when the indictment finally comes last Thursday late in the afternoon, it really catches Trump and his advisors off guard because of what they had been telling themselves, and in some cases, telling each other.

And so what is, as best you can tell, Trump’s reaction when this indictment that he was so scared of and then suddenly not worried about it all becomes real?

He was furious. You know, he’s very, very angry.

And he delivered a statement with aides —

In which he calls it political persecution, a witch hunt, and says the justice system is being weaponized against him.

All of which feels like standard Donald Trump language in a situation like this. But as you hinted at earlier, no situation like this has ever existed for him.

No, that’s right. And in fact, so many predictions of his demise didn’t come true. So this indictment actually happened. And this is then the moment when the entire Republican Party has to figure out how it is going to react to this historic development.

The former president has just been indicted. He’s the leading Republican candidate for president in 2024. And they have to figure out what to do.

We’ll be right back.

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So, Maggie, what kind of response do we see from Republicans once this thing that had seemed so theoretical becomes real?

So I think it’s fair to say that their reactions break down into two categories.

The first are those who come out and defend him because they genuinely are behind Trump and believe that this indictment, which they don’t the details of yet, to be clear, is wrong and unjust.

So there was Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has said she’s going to New York to support Trump in person, although it remains to be seen if that will happen.

There’s Congressman Jim Jordan.

Using his position in the House to subpoena district attorney Alvin Bragg —

And these are MAGA Republicans who are fiercely loyal to Trump. But then on the other side, you have Republicans who aren’t actually loyal to Trump at all, but who feel the need to defend him and to attack this indictment because they fear crossing him.

So Governor Ron DeSantis calls the indictment on Twitter, the weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda, refers to it as un-American.

Wow.

And also vows not to extradite Trump from Florida to New York.

And we also saw Mike Pence, the former vice president under Trump, who has been trying to establish some distance from Trump in various ways, compelled to denounce the indictment.

So what starts happening after the indictment is real is, they’re starting to offer much more full-throated and explicit defenses of Trump.

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It feels worth talking about the strength of this reaction that comes after this indictment, this instinct to defend Trump from people who, in the case of DeSantis and Pence, are very likely to run against him for the Republican nomination in 2024. That’s just not normal behavior from people in politics who are trying to beat you. That’s weird.

Viewing Trump’s antagonists as part of a liberal overreach has become a bar for entry in Republican politics for Republican candidates in primaries. And the fear for candidates, not just for president, but up and down ballots, is that they will be punished by the voters in those primaries if they don’t do just that.

Right. And that’s because Trump created that universe. And we talked to you about this so many times during his presidency. He created a world in which any effort to hold him accountable is the, quote, unquote, “weaponization of the justice system.”

Correct. And furthermore, he tells those voters, I’m for you, so they’re coming after me. And so in our reporting, we talked to a lot of Republican leaders who said this indictment is making it harder to push Trump aside. For example, David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth, who has no love lost for Donald Trump — he leads a conservative anti-tax group seeking a replacement for Trump as the face of the Republican Party — he said the indictment had already generated sympathy for the former president.

So the argument for someone like McIntosh is basically that given the dynamic you just described, an indictment of Trump makes Trump a stronger Republican candidate for the nomination.

It bonds a group of Republican voters more tightly to Trump and that therefore, makes it harder for any other candidate to pull them away.

I mean, that’s really interesting because in that sense, if you’re an anti-Trump Republican, and there are a lot of them at this point, you may be wishing that this indictment had never happened.

There are a lot of Republicans who have said privately, Michael, that they wish this indictment had not happened, even if they disliked Donald Trump intensely, and as you say, many do, but they recognize that this one in particular, because it involves personal conduct, because of the dynamics of it, the timing of it, the fact that it happened before he was president, they feel this one is not the test case that should have happened.

Right. Because that’s kind of the ultimate capstone version of the story Trump has been telling Republican voters about how they’re out to get me.

Or at least it makes it easier to sell it that way, yes.

Right. And I think that brings us to how Trump will now use this indictment in his campaign for press. And what do we know about that?

Well, it’s interesting.

We really got a taste of that when he held a campaign rally just over a week ago in Waco, Texas, right after he had claimed falsely, that he was about to be arrested.

Right.

And the indictment was a huge focus of that rally.

And already he was claiming during the rally —

— that even the potential of an indictment was helping him do better than ever before in the polls.

And is that true? I mean, he said it before he was indicted. Now he has been indicted. Is there any evidence that this is going to help him with Republican voters?

In some polls. For instance, there was a Yahoo poll right after the indictment that showed Trump with his biggest lead yet over DeSantis. It went from an 8 point lead before the indictment to a 26 point lead after. And so at least for now, Trump is showing real signs of strength after this indictment, among Republicans.

So given that, is it safe to assume that Trump will be openly embracing the indictment as a kind of political asset?

I think, at least for now it’s safe to say that the indictment is basically going to be Trump’s running mate as he’s a candidate for president. The Trump campaign says that it raised more than $4 million within 24 hours after the indictment happening.

Which is an extraordinary amount of money.

It’s a lot of money.

But none of that changes the reality that this entire legal saga could end with him being convicted and possibly going to jail, which would negate whatever strength this brings him in a Republican primary because it would fundamentally change the course of his entire life. And I wonder how Trump and those around him think about that prospect?

It is really uncharted territory for them. You know, Trump advisors, in candid moments privately, acknowledge that one reason that he ran for president in 2024 was to use his candidacy as a shield against such a thing happening.

I mean, can you explain that? Is there any kind of legal logic to that, running again after losing in 2020, as a kind of legal protection?

Several people have told me that he believes it is going to be harder for prosecutors to wage a prosecution against him if he is a candidate. Now, his lawyers warned him that a candidacy wouldn’t actually be a shield against prosecution, and the fact that there’s now an indictment proves that point.

Right. And that point is going to become very, very tangible to Trump in the next 48 hours or so. I mean, we’re talking on Sunday afternoon on Tuesday, Trump is going to have to show up in Manhattan and face these charges in person. And that is going to be I imagine, very humbling.

Yes. On Monday afternoon, he will travel from Florida to New York City. He will stay at Trump Tower for the night. And then on Tuesday, he will have to surrender to authorities in a New York City courthouse.

He will be fingerprinted. We don’t think he’s likely to be handcuffed. And then he will be arraigned, which is a court hearing in which all of the charges from this indictment are finally aired and unsealed. We think there will be about two dozen of those charges at least.

Right.

And then in all of those moments, this is all going to become very real for Trump. Now, he has talked to advisors a lot about his so-called perp walk, where he is led down a hall into a courtroom. Should he smile or not? How should he handle it?

And has he concluded one way or another?

I think that we’re not going to know until game time, Michael.

But that does suggest that he’s incredibly sensitive to every single dimension of this, I mean, right down to, am I morose? Or am I smiling? Am I defiant? Or am I sad? I mean, it’s really fascinating.

Yes. And I think two things can be true at once. He can lean into the spectacle of what that day is going to be. And he can also be deeply anxious about what is about to happen to him in this moment that he has been trying to avoid for decades.

Right.

The reality is, Michael, I think this is going to be the lowest point in his career. This is a man for whom the fear of public humiliation has been an animating force for decades. This really is one of his deepest insecurities and anxieties that he could be just another person thrown in jail.

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And we know how much he fears that because in 2021, the former chief financial officer of the Trump organization, Allen Weisselberg, who’s around Trump’s age, was indicted and arrested. And Trump was horrified watching the footage of him on television being hauled into court. He would tell people, could you believe what they’re doing to that old man?

Right. And now he will be that man.

He will be that man. That is correct.

But there’s also the possibility that he’s acquitted.

There is. That’s a very real possibility in any case. And if that happens, it would be its own earthquake because it would be the ultimate vindication for him. It would happen most likely, in the middle of a presidential campaign. And it could just have huge consequences and reverberations in that race, in his ability to tell people that he’s a victim, in his ability to get people to feel sympathy for him.

And perhaps to vote for him.

And even to vote for him.

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Well, Maggie, thank you very much.

Michael, thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. Over the weekend, a series of severe storms tore through the American South and Midwest, leaving at least 32 people dead and injuring dozens more. Tennessee was the hardest hit, with at least 15 people killed, including three in Memphis.

In Illinois, the roof of a concert hall collapsed during the middle of a show, leaving 1 person dead and 48 hurt. The storms are expected to continue into the week.

And an influential Russian military blogger who had called for an escalation of the war in Ukraine was killed on Sunday when a bomb exploded in a cafe in St. Petersburg, where he was delivering a talk. It was the most high-profile attack on a prominent supporter of the war since August, when a car bomb killed Darya Dugina, the daughter of a prominent ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The United States later linked that attack to the Ukrainian government.

Today’s episode was produced by Rachel Quester and Rikki Novetsky. It was edited by Anita Badejo and Rachel Quester with help from Devin Taylor, contains original music from Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

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That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

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