According to new polling done by Ipsos in collaboration with Politico Magazine, most Americans do not accept the claims from former President Donald Trump that the criminal charges that he is facing are fundamentally corrupt. Instead, regarding the federal case that covers his attempts to stay in power, 59 percent agreed that the charges were “based on a fair evaluation of the evidence and the law.”
The polling was completed August 21. Trump has very consistently clamored against the criminal charges he is facing in what are now four cases, claiming he is the victim of so-called election interference because he is running for president as these cases have emerged — though all four underlying investigations were publicly known before he officially started that campaign. Ultimately, the former president’s rhetoric is not sticking.
He has also claimed that multiple jurisdictions in which he’s faced criminal charges, including Washington, D.C., and Georgia’s Fulton County located in the Atlanta area, are experiencing essentially apocalyptic travails. He repeatedly called D.C. “filthy,” and he has spread false claims about purportedly high crime rates in the Fulton County area.
The accompanying implication or outright assertion from many figures on the far-right that the prosecutors targeting Trump are ignoring real-world issues of crime in their areas is simply false, just like it’s false that the areas known as sanctuary cities or states are simply allowing undocumented immigrants to commit crimes without consequence. (In fact, the moniker simply means local authorities are working to keep federal immigration enforcement out of local law enforcement operations.)
Republicans simply have a history of misleading claims on crime, like their incessantly false descriptions of the protests seen across the United States in 2020. While yes, some of these protests were turned into expressions of violence, it is flatly absurd based upon the actual factual record to broadly characterize what took place that year as just a wave of violence. Yet, that conspiracy theory recently came up again. In Congress, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) introduced a proposal to censure federal Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is handling the federal case against Trump over alleged election crimes. Gaetz accused Chutkan of support for violence because of her supportive comments towards the social movement seen across the U.S. in 2020.
