Trump’s indictment is ‘a liability’ for the former president’s general election run: Expert

Evercore ISI Senior U.S. Policy & Politics Strategist Tobin Marcus joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss former President Trump's indictment and what it could mean for the 2024 presidential campaign.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Well, former President Trump has been indicted by a New York grand jury. It's the first time in history that a former president has been criminally charged. How is this going to play out on Capitol Hill? And will it affect the 2024 election? For more on that, we want to bring in Tobin Marcus, Evercore ISI senior US Policy and Politics strategist.

Tobin, it's great to see you here. So let's start with what this means on Capitol Hill. How do you see this playing out just in terms of how the GOP is going to react to it? And also, what it means in terms of a response from the Democrats?

TOBIN MARCUS: Yeah, absolutely. So it's pretty clear already that the party is going to rally around former President Trump. You know, this has been most clear from House Republicans who have always been his kind of staunchest base. Within the Congressional Republican wing, senators have been a little bit more skeptical of President Trump, generally a little bit more eager to maintain their distance.

So House Republicans have come out swinging. They're demanding hearings, testimony from Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. A lot of that, of course, is just-- is just making noise, making a show of their support. But certainly no sign that the party is turning against him there. And I do think that they will look for opportunities to try to portray this as a political investigation. They certainly have-- have already leapt to characterize it as weaponization of law enforcement and sort of inappropriate targeting of president Trump. And I fully expect that they will continue hammering those messages really hard.

Democrats, in turn, I think have-- have pushed back as you'd expect them to. But it's not something that I think they're quite as eager to make noise about, not least because I think the soft consensus in Democratic circles is that this is not the strongest of the cases against President Trump, not necessarily the one that you would want to lead with.

And so I think that probably they're not trying to sort of go to the mat or stake their reputations on defending this particular case, not that they think that there is anything inappropriate that that that's happening. You know, they obviously forcefully reject the Republican claims that this is kind of weaponization and targeting. But I don't know that this is the thing they want to focus the political system's attention on.

SEANA SMITH: What about obviously what this means for the general election. We talked to political strategists in the last hour saying that he thinks it would actually help the Democrats, might help some people swing and vote for Biden. Do you agree?

TOBIN MARCUS: Yeah, I mean, I think-- I think this is probably a benefit for Trump in the primary. I think that now is kind of conventional wisdom. It's something that I've been saying for a while. But certainly, you look at how the parties rallied around him. And it's hard to disagree with that. In the general, though, I think it's pretty clear that this is a liability that the kind of witch hunt messaging that Trump loves to lean on plays very well to his primary base. I think a lot less so with swing voters in the center.

And we saw in 2022, a fairly clean test case of how moderates and independents and swing voters react to these kinds of Trumpified candidates that the Republican party nominated in a lot of senate races who are really focused on kind of relitigating the 2020 election and other sort of hobby horses of former President Trump.

They did very poorly. Democrats won. Independents by two, which is fairly uncommon in a midterm election for the president's party. And I see no reason to believe that we'd get a different reaction when the Republican candidate is facing one or potentially multiple indictments next year.

SEANA SMITH: Yeah, Tobin, that's a very good point here. When we talk about a divided Congress, if more GOPers here come and back and continue to back former President Trump, what does that mean just in terms of reaching any sort of bipartisan agreement over the next two years? Obviously, the Congress was already very divided before this indictment. Any hope here of bipartisan agreement? Is that now hope-- has that been dashed?

TOBIN MARCUS: I don't think it makes a big difference one way or another. I think that for the most part, the bipartisan legislating that we're going to see over the next 18 months before things fully turn to the 2024 election is going to be under duress that we will need a bipartisan resolution to the debt ceiling over the summer. After that, we'll need bipartisan bills to fund the government to do the kind of annual defense policy setting that congress is very committed to.

And then there's a few things that have an outside chance of getting done. The TikTok ban proposal is certainly something that's in the mix, although, I'm less convinced about how much momentum that has than some analysts. But even those, I think are probably going to have to ride along with one of those very few pieces of must-pass legislation that have a chance of getting done.

So not a lot of room for kind of effective bipartisan deal-making and legislation anyway. And some of the things that have to get done have to get it done essentially regardless of how much bad feeling there is between the two parties. So I think probably not a big influence in either direction there from the polarization around Trump here.

SEANA SMITH: All right, Tobin Marcus, always great to get your perspective. Thanks so much for joining us.