Recent polling from YouGov and CBS News finds that most Americans believe that former President Donald Trump was planning to stay in power after the 2020 presidential election. The consensus, then, is against the idea that Trump was prepared to simply leave the presidency, an idea that some may use to try and discredit concerns about the actions that the then-president and his allies did undertake.
Those who believe Trump was planning to keep presidential power after that election are divided between those who believe in claimed legality of what Trump was doing and those who say it was illegal, with significantly more respondents in the latter category. From the overall group, 49 percent said they believed Trump “planned” to remain president via illegal methods, while 30 percent said they observed those plans from Trump but characterized them as permitted under the law. Only 21 percent said they didn’t think that Trump planned to stay in the White House.
Trump now faces two indictments at both the state and federal levels that directly deal with his attempts to remain in power after the last presidential race, after which he’s even raised the prospect of him just retaking the presidency without even another election. He infamously claimed at the time that the imaginary fraud he credited for Biden’s victory meant that ordinarily controlling rules, including measures from the Constitution, could — and should — be superseded. Now, he will soon be processed by local authorities in Georgia, where he’s among 19 defendants named in a recently issued indictment alleging a criminal conspiracy targeting Georgia’s election results from 2020. Other prominent figures also named in that indictment include Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Mark Meadows.
Trump remains the front-runner in the GOP presidential primary, amid which the first debate will be held on Wednesday. He is not participating. None of the other contenders who will be onstage regularly come anywhere close to Trump in polling from the primary contest, amid which Trump routinely captures an outright majority of the support.
