‘That 10 percent is important’: Trump forgoes moderates to juice the base after his conviction

In the days since his criminal conviction in New York, Donald Trump has warned that placing him under house arrest would push America to a “breaking point.” He has suggested that if reelected, he could try to prosecute his political enemies. “Revenge,” he said, “can be justified.”

And at a rally in Arizona on Thursday, the former president declared that if he is unable to overturn his guilty verdict on appeal, “we are not going to have a country anymore.”

If Republicans had any hope of Trump tempering his hard-line rhetoric in an effort to win back more moderate voters he lost to Joe Biden in 2020 — something more traditionalist Republicans have pushed for — his post-conviction messaging shows the former president may be unwilling to do so.

“The former president is never going to get away from those components of his rhetoric,” said John Watson, a former Georgia Republican Party chair. “He has made a decision that this is how he wants to litigate this election.”

Watson’s “only encouragement is that there is a pivot, and he again talks about those issues that are going to decide, in the minds of the electorate, which person they choose is best to lead the country forward.”

Trump has little record of modulating in his political career. After his defeat in 2020, the riot at the Capitol and a GOP primary in which his path to the nomination has been lined with protest votes, some Republicans urged Trump to adopt a more conciliatory tone. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, the only Republican to beat Trump in a primary this year, warned when she announced she planned to vote for him last month that the former president “would be smart to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me … and not assume that they’re just going to be with him.”

Such concerns are resurfacing in the wake of Trump’s trial in New York.

Asked about Trump’s rhetoric on the verdict, Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said in an interview that Trump “should be conscious" of the impact it could have on voters.

“And I hope he is,” Bacon said. “Ninety percent already have their mind made [up], but that 10 percent is important.”

Polling immediately following the verdict in the hush money case suggests the trial may be a losing issue for Trump to harp on. A redo of a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, for instance, showed Trump’s 3-percentage-point edge over Biden before he was convicted shrank to just 1 percentage point when respondents were quizzed after the decision. Most Americans do not agree with Trump’s claim that the Manhattan trial was “rigged,” according to a CBS News/YouGov poll that showed 56 percent of adults believe the former president got a fair trial.

“Trump has not figured out how to appeal to more center-right voters, and I think he doesn’t think he has to,” said Sarah Longwell, executive director of Republican Voters Against Trump and publisher of The Bulwark. “I think he thinks that frustration with Biden and the economy is enough to sort of drive these college-educated suburban swing voters back to him.”

While “there is a little bit of that,” she said, “a lot of these sort of suburban swing voters will look at Trump and say ‘I can’t do it.’ Especially with the conviction — and not just the conviction, but Jan. 6.”

That bore out in a focus group Longwell conducted the day after the verdict with nine two-time Trump voters who were already unlikely to cast their ballots for him again. They saw the conviction, she said, “as just more confirmation of how unfit he is.”

Trump’s campaign pointed Friday to some polling in which voters do not appear to be defecting from Trump, saying in a statement that “the weaponization of our nation's legal institutions is a scam that voters are seeing through, and it will go down in American history as one of the greatest political miscalculations ever.”

And Trump is doubling down on that idea, taking his stolen-election rhetoric from 2020 and recasting it onto the judicial system. He began arguing that “our whole country is being rigged” from the moment he stepped out of the Manhattan courtroom last week. And he has since refused to take the off ramps provided to him by friendly interviewers, countering Phil McGraw’s charge that he doesn’t “have time to get even” by saying that while “revenge does take time,” it can be “justified.”

It’s the kind of heated messaging that helped Trump juice his base in his previous presidential campaigns. And it seems to be having the same effect post-conviction, with his campaign raising enormous sums of money from online donors.

“Look at his fundraising,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a longtime friend of Haley who endorsed her in the GOP primary, told POLITICO. “People know what they're doing to him is wrong. Let him keep doing that. Let him put him in jail. See how that works out.”

Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), chair of the Republican Study Committee, said he would not advise Trump to change his tone, arguing that independents and moderates “are concerned with the law — very concerned.”

“You have to state it as you see it,” Hern told POLITICO. “And he was the one sitting in the courtroom every single day for weeks, and had to be immensely frustrating.”

That frustration flared when Trump rallied Thursday in Arizona, a swing state he lost to Biden in 2020. Even there, he made little effort to expand beyond his fired-up base, instead demanding that an appeals court reverse his conviction.

“It is easy for Donald Trump to convince his most ardent supporters that first they stole the election and now they’re trying to put me away for good,” said Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in the state.

But for the moderate, right-leaning independents Trump will need to win the general election, Marson said, “it’s incumbent on Trump to give them a bit more reason” to vote for him. “Talk to us about how you are going to bring down gas prices or bring down interest rates or bring down inflation.”

Anthony Adragna and Jordain Carney contributed to this report.