- Former President Donald Trump is to be arrested and arraigned on Tuesday afternoon on charges related to hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016.
- Prominent Republicans have strongly criticized the indictment and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, calling the charges politically motivated.
- Republican leaders such as Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, Senator Ted Cruz and Governor Ron DeSantis have all condemned the indictment.
The impending arrest and arraignment of former President Donald Trump appears to have united Republicans in anger and condemnation of the decision to indict him and the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.
Prominent elected Republicans have strongly criticized the indictment and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg since a grand jury voted to indict the former president on March 30. Widespread criticism of the indictment comes ahead of expectedly contentious 2024 presidential primaries as more Republican challengers to Trump are expected to enter the race despite his lead in most recent polls. It also follows the hard-fought election for the speakership of the House of Representatives in January, which divided allies of the former president and led to multiple ballots for the first time in a century.
Trump traveled to New York on Monday and he is to be arrested and arraigned on Tuesday afternoon. The charges he’s facing are not yet known but they relate to Trump’s alleged role in hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016.
Gotham/GC Images/Getty Images
The former president has denied any wrongdoing and has denied ever having had an affair with Daniels. He also strongly criticized the probe.
GOP reaction to the indictment focused on criticism of Bragg, who is a Democrat, and claims that any charges against Trump were politically motivated.
“Alvin Bragg has irreparably damaged our country in an attempt to interfere in our Presidential election,” Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy tweeted on March 30.
“As he routinely frees violent criminals to terrorize the public, he weaponized our sacred system of justice against President Donald Trump,” he said.
“The American people will not tolerate this injustice, and the House of Representatives will hold Alvin Bragg and his unprecedented abuse of power to account,” McCarthy added.
“The Democrat Party’s hatred for Donald Trump knows no bounds. The ‘substance’ of this political persecution is utter garbage. This is completely unprecedented and is a catastrophic escalation in the weaponization of the justice system,” tweeted Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas following reports of the indictment.
McCarthy and Cruz are close Trump allies and the former president endorsed McCarthy in the contentious race for speaker in January.
Republican Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who opposed McCarthy’s bid for speaker through multiple rounds of voting, also condemned Trump’s indictment, describing it as “this terrible witch hunt.”
“We will wake up in a very different America tomorrow because can no longer have moral authority against the dictators and despots who have always found it easier to jail their political rivals than to compete against them in free and fair elections,” Gaetz told Fox News on March 30.
Trump’s forthcoming arrest has also garnered condemnation from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has repeatedly clashed with Trump and who’s considered a strong contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
“This guy is all about politics,” DeSantis said of Bragg during a visit to Nassau County, New York on Saturday.
“His whole thing is he doesn’t want people to be in jail, he wants to downgrade felonies to misdemeanors,” DeSantis said, adding: “Really, really dangerous stuff.”
“And then he turns around, does a flimsy indictment against a former president of the United States. All these legal gymnastics to act like this is a felony—when almost every other time, he’s trying to take the felonies and downgrade them,” the governor said.
DeSantis has not yet formally entered the presidential race but he’s widely expected to do so. That expectation comes amid Trump’s repeated criticism of the governor.
At a rally in Waco, Texas, on March 25, Trump said that DeSantis had come to him “with tears in his eyes” to seek his endorsement during the 2018 Florida gubernatorial election.
Another potential Republican 2024 candidate, former Vice President Mike Pence, called the indictment “an outrage.”
“The unprecedented indictment of a former president of the United States on a campaign finance issue is an outrage,” Pence told CNN on March 30. “And it appears to millions of Americans to be nothing more than a political prosecution that’s driven by a prosecutor who literally ran for office on a pledge to indict the former president.”
Those comments came despite the fact that Trump has also aimed criticism at Pence after the former vice president broke with him over January 6, 2021.
In February 2022, Pence told a Federalist Society event that Trump was “wrong” about the vice president’s role in potentially rejecting Electoral College votes.
“I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people, and the American people alone. Frankly, there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president,” Pence said.
Trump issued a statement following Pence’s remarks saying, in part: “I was right and everyone knows it. If there is fraud or large scale irregularities, it would have been appropriate to send these votes back to the legislatures to figure it out.”
While potential Trump rivals DeSantis and Pence have struck the same note on his indictment—and agreed with Speaker McCarthy’s assessment—that view is not universal among Republicans.
Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson has said Trump should drop out of the presidential race and has announced his intention to seek the 2024 GOP nomination.
When he was asked if Trump should drop out during an ABC interview on Sunday, Hutchinson said: “Well he should.”
“But at the same time, we know he’s not [going to]. And there’s not any constitutional requirement,” the former governor added.
Newsweek has reached out to former President Trump’s office via email for comment.
