And Trump is not the only one to engage in a series of about-faces. So have large swaths of his party.
It has responded to his legal jeopardy and now his conviction by disowning its previously professed principles in a remarkable fashion.
A new YouGov poll this week is perhaps the most striking example.
In April, it showed 58 percent of Republicans said that a convicted felon should not be allowed to become president. But after Trump’s conviction in Manhattan last week, that number plummeted to just 23 percent.
Republicans in April said by a 41-point margin that a conviction would be disqualifying; they now say by a 35-point margin that it’s not disqualifying.
The same poll in April showed 37 percent of Republicans said they would not be willing to vote for a convicted felon “under any circumstances.” That number has now dropped to 14 percent.
It’s also striking that Republicans have flip-flopped (and then flipped again) on the crime Trump was just convicted of.
YouGov has asked repeatedly since 2018 whether people believe it’s a crime “for a candidate for elected office to pay someone to remain silent about an issue that may affect the outcome of an election.”
When the hush-money scandal was first in the news in 2018, just 37 percent of Republicans said that was a crime.
But before Trump’s indictment last year — at a time when many probably didn’t realize the question was about Trump — that number shot up to 73 percent.
Less than a month later, after Trump was indicted for that crime, it dropped back down to 40 percent.
Similarly, YouGov polling even after Trump’s indictment last year showed 36 percent of Republicans said this should be a crime; today, that has dropped to 21 percent.
There’s more where those reversals come from:
- Just 43 percent of Republicans in a January Reuters/Ipsos poll said they would vote for Trump if he were convicted of a felony. That has since risen to 66 percent.
- In April, Republicans said by a 20-point margin that a president shouldn’t be immune from criminal prosecution for official acts. Two weeks later — after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Trump’s immunity claims — Republicans suddenly leaned in favor of immunity, by seven points.
- In 2018, CBS News polling showed 72 percent of Republicans said a president didn’t have the power to self-pardon. CNN polling then showed just 39 percent of Republicans said they would support Trump pardoning himself. But as of January 2024, 58 percent of Republicans favored Trump pardoning himself.
If we’re being charitable, perhaps some people are suddenly truly considering issues they didn’t really think through before — as Trump’s Fox News comments purport he has.
But then we get to the last poll we’ll spotlight. The Marquette University Law School poll has in recent months asked the immunity question in an interesting way. It has asked both whether “former presidents” should be immune and whether “former president Donald Trump” should be immune. And it has asked those things in the same poll.
The most recent results, from May? While just 29 percent of Republicans said presidents writ large should be immune, that number doubles to 61 percent when the question is specifically asked about Trump.
That would certainly suggest this is less about people having epiphanies about presidents and crimes, and more about how their candidate is on the short end of all that right now.
And in that way, Trump’s party is certainly a reflection of his own situational approach to principles.
