CNN’s Zakaria: NYC ‘Prosecutors Are Politically Motivated’ Against Trump

ZAKARIA: “But first, here’s my take. When President Biden made clear he was going to run for reelection I had a sense of what his election strategy was and thought it was an intelligent path to victory. After the chaos of Covid and Trump, Joe Biden would stand for normalcy and a rising tide of good economic news. Donald Trump would divide Republicans with significant chunks of the party wishing that someone like Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis would be their nominee. Meanwhile, Trump would unite and motivate Democrats, allowing President Biden to focus on the votes of independents and swing states who threw the Electoral College to Trump in 2016 and to Biden in 2020. I have to admit None of this is playing out as I thought it would. Trump is now leading in almost all the swing states. But behind those numbers lie even more troubling details. As someone worried about the prospects of a second Trump term, I think it’s best to be honest about reality. I understand that polls are not always accurate, but in general, they have tended to underestimate Donald Trump’s support, not overestimate it. I doubt that there are many shy Biden voters in the country. The economy has been in a robust recovery for more than two years now, with unemployment hitting a 54-year low in 2023 and increasing only slightly since then. But Biden is getting little credit for it. The shift here is stark. On the question of whom voters trust more to deal with the economy, Trump has a 22-point lead over Biden, according to an NBC poll from January. This marks a 15-point bump for Trump compared to the same poll in 2020.Perhaps this is because inflation is a far more pervasive problem than unemployment, affecting all Americans every day. Perhaps it’s because people’s views on the economy now are largely derived from their broader attitudes towards the candidates. But whatever the reasons, it’s a stunning reversal in the midst of a relentless stream of good economic news. On cultural issues, Biden and Democrats benefit from the opposition to the Republican Party’s position on abortion. But on the other great cultural issue, immigration, Biden is 35 points behind Trump as to who would handle it better. And I do wonder whether abortion will be as large an issue in a presidential race, given that reversing Roe v. Wade threw the issue to state governments and legislatures, and not the federal government. Perhaps the most worrying new trend for the Democrats is that far from being the more unified party, they are now bitterly divided over the war in Gaza. Bernie Sanders has said the eruption of pro-Palestinian protests could be Biden’s Vietnam and even invoked the specter of Lyndon Johnson choosing not to run for reelection in 1968 because of the opposition to that war. The analogy is far-fetched. America then was itself sending hundreds of thousands of troops to Vietnam, with more being recruited from college campuses every week. But there’s no denying that the party seems more openly divided than it has been in decades. Only 33 percent of Americans said they approved of Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, which is now opposed both by people who think he is too soft and people who think he is too hard on Israel. Meanwhile, Republicans seem to be uniting behind Trump. Whatever opposition he faced in the primaries has largely melted away, and the trials against him keep him in the spotlight, infuriate his base who sees him as a martyr, and even may serve to make him the object of some sympathy among people in general who believed that his prosecutors are politically motivated. This happens to be true in my opinion. I doubt the New York indictment would have been brought against a defendant whose name was not Donald Trump. A majority of Americans are skeptical that Trump will be able to get a fair trial, according to a CNN poll. And I haven’t even mentioned Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And Cornel West and Jill Stein, all of whom would probably take votes away from Biden. Things could change. Polls do suggest that were Trump to be convicted of a felony, it could shift votes in Biden’s favor. The administration may be able to pull off a ceasefire in Gaza and then a broader political settlement that gives Palestinians political rights and Israel diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia. Trump could always embroil himself in some kind of scandal. But trendlines are not working in Biden’s favor. He needs to do something bold and dramatic to seize the initiative — on asylum policy, for example — and reverse these numbers. The one that troubles me the most is on the question of who was the more competent. Joe Biden led Donald Trump by 9 points in 2020, but Trump now leads by 16 points in January 2024. That 25-point shift could be a reflection of people’s sense that the president’s age is affecting his capacity to govern. And there’s very little that Joe Biden can do now to change that perception.”