The criminal charges against former President Donald Trump could have been his downfall. Instead, he’s turned them into an opportunity.
He’s been indicted four times, most recently surrendering on Thursday to Georgia authorities on charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 election. Despite that, he continues to enjoy poll numbers that put him in a historically strong position for a nonincumbent to win his party’s nomination, running nearly 40 percentage points, on average, ahead of his closest competitor. Six of his eight Republican opponents on the debate stage Wednesday night indicated that they would support him as the nominee even if he’s convicted in any one of the four cases against him. A big majority of likely Republican primary voters believe the charges are politically motivated; few think he actually tried to overturn the 2020 election.
Rather than hiding from his legal problems, Trump is leaning into them, arguing that he’s “done nothing wrong,” and that the charges represent a plot against him. By invoking the charges, and using them to his political advantage, historians say that Trump is echoing a familiar playbook.
Many have already drawn parallels between the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection and Adolf Hitler’s failed coup attempt in 1923, now known as the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. The circumstances around the events and the men at their center are very different. But the putsch and Hitler’s trial thereafter, which he used as a platform to advance the ideas behind Nazism and catapult himself into the national limelight, provides a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy in the face of a charismatic autocrat whom the political establishment fails to squash while they have the chance.
“I think it’s particularly on that kind of tactical level or even on the level of demagoguery where there are clear parallels between the two men and between the January 6 insurrection as well as the Hitler putsch,” said…
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