It’s the mugshot, stupid! This election campaign is all about Trump 

PITY the eight hapless contenders on the stage during the first debate of the 2024 Republican primary season last Wednesday night (Aug 23): Even in his absence, former president Donald Trump – the “elephant not in the room”, as the Fox News moderator referred to him – dominated the evening.

With his campaign’s high command ruling the stage in Milwaukee while he appeared on a pre-taped interview with Tucker Carlson on X – the social media platform formerly known as Twitter – who really cared what North Dakota Governor Douglas James Burgum had to say about Chinese control of the global batteries production?

Or who paid much attention to the jumbled utterings of 38-year-old businessman Vivek (“the only person on the stage who isn’t bought and paid for”) Ramaswamy, and the retorts by former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who described him as a “guy who sounds like ChatGPT”?

In fact, as demonstrated by the next day’s scenes from the Fulton County Jail in Georgia where he was placed under arrest and became the first former American president with a mugshot, Trump is emerging as the main star of the tragicomedy also known as the 2024 presidential election.

And there is no doubt that the Republican audience loves the star of this political opera. When former governor Christie, who has been most relentless in attacking Trump, said during the debate that it was time “to stop normalising” Trump’s conduct regardless of the fact that he is facing multiple indictments, his criticism was greeted by a chorus of boos and pushback from the other candidates.

Meanwhile, in his interview with Carlson, Trump – who has been indicted four times this year – again defended those who attacked the US Capitol on Jan 6, 2021, and refused to rule out further political violence.

Most opinion polls put Trump’s standing among the Republican contenders at 40 percentage points ahead of his closest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who in his performance on Wednesday sounded like he was recycling lines from his stump speech.

And while former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley had a good night at the debate and even demonstrated the courage to criticise the former president by name, her support among Republican voters remains in the single digits. There are also no indications that another South Carolina Republican primary contender, African-American Senator Tim Scott, would pose an electoral threat to Trump.

Yet, presidential nominations are not decided by national polls but by state caucuses and primaries. As far as the first test goes – the Iowa primary early next year – a Selzer NBC-Des Moines Register poll suggests that Trump would win 42 per cent of potential Republican voters, although, interestingly enough, most Iowa Republicans do not consider the former president their favourite candidate.

In New Hampshire, Trump was polling at 34 per cent among Republican primary-goers; but then, 66 per cent of the voters there remain undecided, which theoretically allows the other Republican contenders some room to manoeuvre.

Much will depend on the effect of Trump’s mounting indictments – and the possibility that he could end up in the courtroom facing a trial before November 2024 – on Republican voters.

A recent Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center poll suggests that only 16 per cent of Republican and independent voters believe that the former president did something illegal in Georgia regarding the 2020 election. It’s possible that the trials are not going to improve Trump’s position in the race, but it seems unlikely at this stage that his continuing legal problems are going to lead the majority of Republicans to abandon the former president in the coming primaries.

If anything, Trump is expected to use the so-called legal “witch hunt” by the “elites” against him to rally the support of the loyal members of his political base.

In any case, there were some indications that Ramaswamy, the wealthy biotech entrepreneur, may have emerged as the main beneficiary of the debate on Wednesday, enjoying the spotlight and beating Governor DeSantis to second place in the race.

Invoking a line used by then-Illinois state senator Barack Obama in 2004, Ramaswamy referred to himself as “who the heck is this skinny guy with a funny name”, launched personal attacks on his adversaries, and marketed himself as a Trump 2.0, echoing some of the former president’s major positions on domestic and foreign policies while defending him from criticisms by the likes of former governor Christie.

Hence, reflecting Trump’s isolationist agenda, Ramaswamy called for cutting the US funding for Ukraine war efforts and even suggested reducing American aid to Israel, while urging the deployment of American troops to defend the southern border from the entry of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Born in Ohio to Hindu Tamil Brahmin immigrant parents, Ramaswamy has been blasting the so-called “elites”. During Wednesday’s debate, he described his adversaries as “professional politicians, super PAC (political action committee) puppets”, igniting angry responses from the other candidates who referred to him as an “amateur” and a “rookie”.

“You have talked down everybody on this stage, but you know what? You have no foreign policy experience, and it shows!” said former governor Haley.

“Now is not the time for on-the-job training,” said former vice-president Mike Pence. “We don’t need to bring in a rookie.”

These attacks could actually help Ramaswamy, the first millennial to run for the Republican presidential nomination, among some young voters. And some of Governor DeSantis’ fans may switch their support to him.

But it’s unlikely that Ramaswamy would challenge Trump for the nomination, and the Indian-American may be hoping that the support he enjoys would eventually translate into a vice-presidential pick.

But the problem with that scenario is that most opinion polls indicate that Trump’s legal problems and his entire personal and political baggage would make it difficult for him to win the votes of independents in the general election – and that he could also lose the support of moderate Republican voters.

And that could pose a problem for him, if you consider that in the 2020 election, then-president Trump carried 94 per cent of Republicans and 41 per cent of independents, but still ran well over seven million votes behind Joe Biden.