• House GOP requests Manhattan DA's testimony as they seek to discredit investigation • Video: How would the Secret Service handle a possible Trump arrest? Ex-agent explains

New York Times senior political correspondent and CNN political analyst Maggie Haberman breaks down what's happening behind the scenes ahead of a possible Trump indictment.

• Analysis: Why a Trump indictment would have huge national implications • DeSantis needles Trump as he breaks silence on hush money case • Video: How would the Secret Service handle a possible Trump arrest? Ex-agent explains

If Donald Trump’s prediction pans out, he’ll be arrested tomorrow (Mar. 21).

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Prominent Republicans disagree about a lot these days, but on one point they have found consensus: Getting charged with a crime would be great news for Donald Trump.

After the former president predicted that he will be arrested in Manhattan tomorrow—a forecast that seems questionable, though an indictment from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg does seem to be imminent—conventional wisdom quickly developed on the right that Trump would be the big winner.

“The prosecutor in New York has done more to help Donald Trump get elected president than any single person in America today,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said. “Mr. Bragg, you have helped Donald Trump, amazing.”

[Tom Nichols: Trump did it again]

At National Review, Rich Lowry announced, “It’s going to be very bad for the country and good politically—at least in the short term and perhaps for the duration—for Donald J. Trump.” (Lowry didn’t bother to offer any basis for this claim.)

The former Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich, now running a pro-Trump super PAC called MAGA Inc., said in a statement that an indictment “will not only serve to coalesce President Trump’s support, but it will become the single largest in-kind contribution to a federal campaign in political history.”

Other Republican contenders for president didn’t make predictions quite so firm, but they either hastened to criticize Bragg or kept their mouth shut, both indications that they see this as a moment of strength for Trump, rather than a good opening to bury their own daggers in a weakened rival’s back.

[David A. Graham: A guide to the possible forthcoming indictments of Donald Trump]

The immediate spin, backed by so little actual argument, is a bit dizzying and bit déjà vu. Back in the 2008 presidential campaign, when the GOP nominee, John McCain, forgot how many houses he owned, the pundit Mark Halperin became infamous for a prediction: “My hunch is this is going to end up being one of the worst moments in the entire campaign for one of the candidates, but it’s Barack Obama.”

That became a notoriously bad take, but Halperin is unchastened. “You are about to increase the odds that Donald Trump will win another four years in the White House,” he wrote in italics on his Substack. “You could in fact be increasing his chances of winning dramatically, maybe even decisively.”

But don’t dismiss Halperin’s prediction because he’s a washed-up source of conventional wisdom who’s been badly wrong in the past. Dismiss it because it makes so little sense in light of what we know now. Politics is contingent and volatile, which means that any prediction about what will happen is worth the pixels it’s printed on. The future here is especially hard to guess because nothing really like it has ever happened. As the Republican pollster Whit Ayres dryly told Politico, “I have never studied the indictment of a former president and leading presidential candidate, … and I’ve never done any polling on the indictment of a former president and leading presidential candidate.”

[David A. Graham: America has an anti-MAGA majority]

But the assumption that Trump will profit seems to spring from hubris (among his allies) and self-protective fear (on the part of his critics and rivals). They are operating on a shared, obsolete conclusion that nothing can ever harm the former president. For a long time, this made sense. Despite a series of scandals that would have ended the career, much less the candidacy, of any other politician, Trump won the 2016 presidential election and then embarked on an even more scandal-ridden administration. Yet he seemed to chug away, indifferent to bad press. A narrative of Trumpian invincibility developed as an antidote to callow, wish-casting predictions of walls closing in on Trump.

Caution is understandable, but we know enough now to realize that although Trump is exceptionally resilient, he’s also not invulnerable. In 2018, after he decided to frame the midterm elections as a referendum on him personally, Democrats won big in House and governor elections. In 2020, the House impeached him; when the Senate did not vote to convict, some observers took this as proof that he couldn’t be stopped. But it did damage Trump, and later that year, he lost his reelection bid narrowly but decisively, losing the popular vote for the second time. After his extended attempt to overturn the 2020 election, voters once again punished candidates flying his banner and rallying around his causes in the 2022 midterms.

What charges against Trump are certain to do is inflame his most devoted supporters. They will be furious that anyone would dare try to hold Trump accountable, view it as an act of political persecution, and make a great deal of noise about it. But no one should mistake the vociferousness of this group for size. They’ve always been noisy. They’ve always been a minority: As I wrote in November, we now have multiple demonstrations that an anti-MAGA majority exists among American voters. And now, with the country heading into the 2024 election cycle, Trump alternatives are gaining more traction—most significantly, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.

[Juliette Kayyem: The Secret Service’s day of reckoning approaches]

Although Bragg has not announced exactly what charges he might bring against Trump, a consensus has developed among legal analysts that the Manhattan case is the weakest and strangest of the several criminal investigations into Trump. The case involves whether Trump attempted to conceal a $130,000 payoff to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actor who alleges that Trump had sex with her in 2006. In 2016, the then–Trump fixer Michael Cohen arranged a payment to Daniels in exchange for keeping the story private. Trump then reimbursed Cohen in 2017. Prosecutors will probably seek to prove that Trump and Cohen falsified business records to hide a violation of campaign-finance law. (Trump denies the affair and any wrongdoing.)

A case would appear to hinge on some tenuous legal theories, and Trump might well beat the rap. But any suggestion that he’s delighted by this fight is belied not only by his irate response but by common sense. Trump doesn’t want to discuss the underlying facts of this case—there’s a reason, after all, that Cohen paid Daniels six figures to buy her silence in the first place. Beyond that, several other probes—which look from the outside to be more perilous to Trump—are still on deck, regardless of the outcome in Manhattan.

“Look, at the end, being indicted never helps anybody,” former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a lonely dissident from the GOP consensus, said on ABC News yesterday. Trump could be the Republican nominee in 2024, or even win the White House back, but if so, it will probably be despite any criminal case against him, not because of it.

Trump says he expects to be arrested in a case that involves allegations he paid hush money to a porn star.

Investigation centres on a $130,000 payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels during Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

Robert Costello will raise questions about the account of key witness Michael Cohen in hush money case, reports say.

During Barack Obama’s first term, the American right became fixated on the supposed threats of communism and socialism. At the time, it felt like another weird throwback trend from the Cold War, along with flared jeans, gated reverb, or Jell-O molds. The proximate causes were clear enough—huge government spending to bolster the economy (by, uh, bailing out banks, but whatever) and efforts to expand health-insurance coverage—even if fears of a coming socialist America were clearly overhyped.

Seen from today, that moment looks less like a quirky cyclical trend and more like the passing of an era. “Wokeness” has supplanted socialism as the primary bogeyman among conservative politicians and pundits. The eclipse is evident in Google search trends and Fox News time allocation, and it has also been on vivid display over the past week, as leading figures in the Republican Party and right-wing media have portrayed the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank as a case of woke values undermining sound business practices and diversity, equity, and inclusion supplanting the profit motive. Complaints about bailouts have been mostly the province of the left—which objects not to government spending but to helping the wealthy.

As I wrote last week, the claim that DEI crashed SVB makes no sense and is based on practically no evidence. The swiftness with which prominent Republican politicians leapt on the narrative drew some puzzled reactions. “My theory is that a large and growing number of prominent conservatives (politicians, media personalities, etc.) are incapable of even feigning fluency in fiscal policy because they’ve been talking about culture war stuff nonstop for like eight years,” my colleague McKay Coppins wrote on Twitter. He’s right, and the shift is less incidental than intentional, driven by currents both inside and outside of the political right.

[David A. Graham: Why Republicans are blaming the bank collapse on wokeness]

Part of this is because capitalism has won—or rather, it continues to win. Insofar as any real question exists about the merits of socialism versus capitalism, the population has long since reached stasis on it. Though self-described democratic socialists such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are still prominent in the Democratic Party, Joe Biden’s more moderate approach is what dominates the party now.

Two other changes have also pushed the socialism charge to the side, at least for the moment. First, after the initial pink scare of the early Obama years, both parties shifted their focus more toward racial politics, a dynamic that continues today. Second, the dominant faction in the Republican Party, embodied by Donald Trump and now Ron DeSantis, has abandoned its commitment to limited government, instead embracing a muscular role for the state—especially in enforcing conservative cultural values against the progressive ones labeled as “woke.”

Defining what conservatives mean by wokeness is, as the writer Bethany Mandel learned the hard way this week, not easily done. For the purposes of discussion here, it also isn’t necessary. Many people use the term in different ways, to describe a general constellation of progressive ideas on race, gender, and sexuality, but what matters is the fact that they are using it, and using it somewhat indiscriminately. After all, most of what an earlier generation of conservatives called “socialism” wasn’t really socialist, either.

The term woke originates in Black slang and is popular in youth culture, both of which are helpful for understanding their interpretation on the right. The election of Obama, the nation’s first Black president, was briefly hailed as evidence that the United States had transcended race, a moment that was followed immediately by race reasserting its central role in American politics. The reaction to Obama included a huge spike in white identity politics (driven in part by rising immigration), openly racist rhetoric, and debates over police killings of people of color. Trump exploited this opportunity, making appeals to racial resentment one of the foremost elements of his campaign and presidency.

Although some characteristics of the wokeness discourse (including critiques of free speech, a focus on equitable outcomes, and critical race theory, the actual academic movement) are somewhat novel, much of the backlash to wokeness is just repackaged versions of old racial backlash (most notably the frequent use of critical race theory to mean practically any discussion of racism) or critiques of political correctness. Because woke vernacular, like support for progressive causes, is especially popular among younger people, wokeness has also become a battlefield for fighting old generational conflicts between the more liberal young and more conservative older generations.

In perhaps a more subtle shift, right-wing figures may be less inclined to complain about overweening state power because some conservatives have now embraced the possibilities of big government. One form this takes is support for entitlements. Paul Ryan, a dominant intellectual figure in the Obama-era GOP and a man who had dreamed of capping Medicaid since his keg-drinking days, is now a lone voice in the wilderness. Donald Trump beat the GOP presidential field in 2016 in part by promising not to cut Social Security or Medicare, and that view has become mainstream. This year, leading Republican figures in Congress vowed not to cut them, either, which is probably good politics though it renders their budget-slashing aims basically impossible. Fiscal conservatives find themselves marginalized in the party.

But some conservative politicians and pundits have also warmed to the idea of using the state to punish their ideological opponents—just the sort of behavior they warned about under totalitarian communist regimes. Tucker Carlson, the right’s leading media figure, endorses the use of the state to harass the COVID-cautious. DeSantis, a former Tea Party stalwart, has reinvented himself as a lite authoritarian, eager to wield government power to tell private companies how to conduct their business. He’s not alone. Republicans across the country are seeking ways to bully companies out of environmental, social, and governance approaches, deriding them as woke. The irony is that in many cases these companies are adopting the trappings of progressivism not out of any deep ideological commitment but instead because they see it as a business advantage.

Meanwhile, conservatives warning about censorship of conservative views have turned to speech codes and trying to force tech companies to host certain viewpoints at the insistence of the government—oxymoronically pursuing censorship in order to save free speech from wokeness.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: You can’t define woke]

“Socialism” has faded as a rallying cry because this conservative movement can hardly pretend to be horrified by big government, and it has learned that its voters aren’t especially interested in cutting spending programs, either, at least the ones that benefit them. Attacking wokeness fills that void—we might even cheekily call this the GOP’s successor ideology—with an alternative that is malleable enough to apply to nearly any situation. But as the SVB story demonstrates, the malleability is also a weakness. If wokeness is an explanation for everything, it is also an explanation for nothing. Although it’s a good way to gather a range of cultural resentments, it offers little in the way of policy ideas to improve lives, even in contrast to vague promises such as trickle-down economics. No one has yet provided any explanation of what an anti-woke bank-regulation regime might look like—and no one will. This is an attack suited to a party that exists only to campaign, with no interest in actually governing.

The next president will almost certainly inherit some kind of peace in Ukraine. As the economist Herb Stein said, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” This war cannot go on forever, certainly not at its current intensity. It will stop or dwindle into a cease-fire, official or otherwise. The potential contenders for the 2024 U.S. presidential election talk about how to deal with the conflict, but by the time one of them gets the job, he or she will most likely face the question of how to deal with the aftermath.

So, in assessing the presumptive candidates for president, a crucial question to ponder is: Who would be the most successful peacemaker?

Ukraine will have to be rebuilt, a mission that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Some of that money can perhaps be squeezed from Russia—for example, by transferring frozen Russian assets to Ukraine. But the greater part will likely have to come from Ukraine’s Western allies.

This reconstruction will surely prove a solid investment, as did the outlay to rebuild the liberated former Warsaw Pact countries after the end of the Cold War. From 2004 to 2021, Poland alone received some $225 billion in European Union funds. Over that same period, the Polish economy has nearly doubled in size; the country has roughly tripled its imports from EU trading partners such as Germany, France, and Italy.

[Tom Nichols: DeSantis will betray Ukraine for MAGA votes]

However, it takes vision and generosity to see economic potential amid the ruin left by war. Politicians who shake their heads and mutter about “blank checks” lack that vision and generosity. They follow in the inglorious tradition of Senator Robert Taft, who opposed the Marshall Plan in 1947, because it might cause inflation and raise taxes in the U.S., as well as the creation of NATO in 1949, because the Soviet Union might regard it as provocative.

Russia must somehow be reintegrated into the community of nations. Tough-minded diplomacy will be necessary to offer relief from Western sanctions in return for Russian commitments on peace, security, and economic reconstruction. Russia’s aggression and atrocities have inflamed emotions, especially among its immediate neighbors. Only those Western leaders with clear pro-Ukraine credentials will have the moral authority to persuade all of NATO’s members to accept possibly distasteful compromises and concessions for the sake of peace.

Successful peacemaking will demand creative new ideas about energy security. Russia tried to use gas exports as a weapon against Europe. The weapon did not work as Russia had hoped, but it inflicted cost, pain, and insecurity. After this war, Europe will want to pivot permanently away from Russia as an energy supplier. Organizing a secure transatlantic market in liquified natural gas, and then transitioning away from fossil fuels entirely, will be a huge undertaking that will require close cooperation among its participants. Politicians who distrust European allies as freeloaders—and who reject a transition away from oil and gas as an ultimate goal—are unlikely to succeed in this job.  

The shock of the war in Ukraine has cost Europe dear. Although the EU forecasts no recession in 2023, the outlook is worrying. The energy transition will be expensive. European populations are aging, their workforces poised to shrink. Europe needs a new motor of growth. Trade liberalization is the most promising candidate. Reviving the dormant idea of a Transatlantic Free Trade Area spanning the EU, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the U.S. could help Europe afford its share of Ukraine’s reconstruction. Antitrade politicians will fail as peacemakers.

[David Axelrod: Why neither party can escape Trump]

The peace the next president should pursue is not merely a regional compact. The conflict we all dread most is a war with China, sparked by Chinese aggression against Taiwan or another of China’s neighbors. To safeguard that peace will require new global institutions that have absorbed the lessons of the terrible war in Ukraine—starting with the need for defense cooperation among democratic allies. Politicians who use the word global as an insult will have no grasp of the problems of peacemaking, let alone the capacity to solve them. Both major American parties contain figures who are skeptical of collective security and international alliances. Both also have antitrade politicians. President Joe Biden himself has fallen away from the free-trade principles he held earlier in his career.

But Republicans are the ones who have turned most radically inward. Former President Donald Trump just this month reaffirmed that his idea of peacemaking is not integrating Ukraine into Europe, but conceding parts of Ukraine to Russia. In his response to a questionnaire from Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis explicitly rejected the idea that the peace and security of Europe was a “vital interest” for the U.S. Ominously, recent polling suggests that the Republicans most hostile to aiding Ukraine are also the most resistant to defending Taiwan.

These developments return Republicans to the days of Taft—only worse. At least in the Eisenhower era, Republicans were willing to go toe-to-toe against opponents inside their own party to fight such shortsighted and self-destructive isolationism. We need their like again now, maybe more than ever.