Many Americans continue not buying Donald Trump’s defenses of the various actions of his that have landed him with an array of investigations — some criminal — at the local, state, and federal levels.
New polling arising out of a partnership between the Associated Press and NORC at the University of Chicago found that 53 percent of overall respondents felt Trump did something illegal in his actions targeting the presidential election results from 2020 in Georgia, where Biden was surprisingly the victor.
After that race concluded, Trump infamously got in touch with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to (unsuccessfully) seek action on the results, but it didn’t end there. Mark Meadows, then the White House chief of staff, showed up to the site of an audit of mail-in ballot signatures in central Georgia in what could easily be seen as an attempted show of intimidation, and Rudy Giuliani presented lies to state legislators. Even federally, Jeffrey Clark, who was an ally to Trump in the Department of Justice, prepared a draft letter targeting Georgia officials that would’ve pushed the idea of a special legislative session where Trump’s desired actions could be taken.
A criminal investigation in Georgia led by local prosecutor Fani Willis is continuing. In recently calling for the dismissal of an opposing lawyer from the case, she recently said in a court filing at least one sham elector for Trump from after the 2020 election had implicated at least one other such individual in potentially provable crimes, though she didn’t further elaborate.
In the Associated Press’s polling, which was conducted just recently from April 13 through April 17, near-majorities also felt Trump did something illegal with regards to what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and the recovery of classified documents from his southern Florida resort Mar-a-Lago. In the case of the charges in Manhattan arising from an attempt to cover up the hush money infamously given to Stormy Daniels, the portion agreeing Trump had done something illegal dipped to 41 percent of the overall total, although an additional 33 percent said he’d behaved unethically. Very few claimed he’d done nothing wrong in that case.
