Tina here, taking over your Tuesday email for a special Trump Indictment Day issue of The Best & The Brightest. Never in American history has a former president been arraigned on criminal charges, and that’s certainly newsworthy on its own. But at Puck, our stories begin where the news ends, and Trump’s arrest is the beginning of a whole new chapter about the MAGA movement in American politics. And trust me: it’s going to be a dark one.

Tina

At a strategic level, Trump’s fixation on Smith might reflect the reality that the former president faces greater legal jeopardy from investigations by the D.O.J., into election meddling and mishandling classified materials, and by the Fulton County D.A., who is investigating Trump’s effort to “find” more votes in Georgia, than he does from Bragg’s tawdry, years-old, arguably dubious campaign-finance and hush-money case. But it also validates a creeping realization in some corners of the G.O.P. that Trump’s 2024 campaign, now anchored by his arrest and pending fights with federal prosecutors, has become a political jihad akin to the events of Jan. 6.

Trump had already previewed his strategy last week, when he opened a rally in Waco, of all places, by playing Justice for All, a single performed by a choir of men imprisoned for their participation in the Capitol riot. Top Republican lawmakers criticized him for that stunt. But in the days since, as Trump was indicted and boarded his plane in Palm Beach to fly north for his arraignment, the decision to align himself with these prisoners appears to be part of a more calculated primary campaign strategy that reframes Jan. 6 from a day of shame to a seminal moment for his movement. “They have now built this mythology around the people from January 6, not that they were a bunch of assholes trying to overrun the Capitol, but they were valued freedom fighters protecting democracy from the pedophiles,” Rick Wilson, a G.O.P. consultant and co-founder of the anti-MAGA Lincoln Project, told me. “And that’s a very top-of-mind thing.”

It’s a subversive narrative—practically guaranteed to turn off moderates, independents, suburban women, and every other demographic that Trump needs to win a general election—but it’s one that’s gained potency. For months, Ron DeSantis has been edging rightward, hoping to out-MAGA the movement’s founder. Now, however, Trump may have end-run him by portraying himself as the movement’s first full-blown political prisoner. “The charges might be different” from the Jan. 6 prisoners, “but their goal is the same,” explained the MAGA-aligned political strategist Alex Breusewitz. “Punish and persecute the opponents of the ruling party.”

In the early months of 2021, the conventional wisdom held that the events surrounding Jan. 6 might effectively disqualify Trump from running again. But as last year’s F.B.I. raid on Mar-a-Lago proved, the ex-president’s tussles with law enforcement have only solidified the notion, formerly confined to hardcore supporters, that Trump truly is a victim of the “deep state.” Now, as he faces multiple legal threats in New York, in Georgia, and at the federal level, the Republican base is rallying to his cause. Even the rioters who stormed the Capitol have come in for reconsideration, not just on right-wing forums but on Fox News, too. We are living in strange times, indeed.

The operative’s observation bore out within hours, with some of Trump’s fiercest G.O.P. critics coming to his defense after the full charges were unsealed. “Speaking as someone who very much does not want Trump to get the presidential nomination, I’m extraordinarily distressed by this document,” John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor, said Tuesday, dismissing Bragg’s charges as “even weaker than I feared they would be” and predicting that the case would be dismissed. Libertarian ex-congressman Justin Amash, who’d been one of the few Republicans who lent credence to the outcome of the Mueller investigation, called it “flimsier than we were led to believe.” Even Mitt Romney, who caveated his statement by describing Trump as “unfit for office,” said that Bragg had “stretched to reach felony criminal charges in order to fit a political agenda.” (“When was the last time the Republican Party was this much in agreement? 9/11?” the operative quipped afterwards.)

Obviously, Trump’s indictment has also sucked the life out of the DeSantis campaign and paralyzed the rest of the Republican presidential field. Perhaps if DeSantis had a broader, deeper base of support—if more primary voters aligned with the elite hope that the Florida governor could be the superior populist candidate, manifesting all of Trump’s policies and culture war instincts, but without the embarrassing character deficits and legal baggage—this might have been the moment for him to turbo-charge his candidacy. Instead, the opposite has come true: Even with DeSantis on a nationwide media tour promoting his New York Times bestseller, every recent poll shows that Republican voters are ditching DeSantis, not Trump. Other candidates and would-be candidates, such as Nikki Haley and Mike Pence, saw their numbers hold firm, but there isn’t much room to fall when you’re already at 1 percent.

The DeSantis spiral bears scrutiny, especially because of his misread of the MAGA movement he’s been hoping to lead. “What people don’t understand is like, almost 100 percent of DeSantis’ support is disaffected Trump people that were just like, Maybe I can get all the good stuff of Trump without half of the embarrassment,” a well-wired G.O.P. comms official, with ties into the MAGA movement, told me. Like many, he compared the governor’s spat with Disney to the greatest hits of the Trump presidency—fighting Colin Kaepernick and Rosie O’Donnell, bashing the NBA, etcetera. “Trump rightly diagnosed the fact that he was losing all of his supporters to DeSantis because DeSantis was a hardliner and was willing to tackle the cultural fights.”

But, in recent weeks, DeSantis seems to have lost his MAGA fastball. DeSantis’s first misstep, this official continued, was his flip-flop on Ukraine—taking the MAGA position of dismissing the conflict as a “territorial dispute,” then pivoting to the establishment position supporting the Ukrainian fight—and then whiffing on the opportunity to defend Trump against extradition from Florida. Both of these were major moments that would have strengthened his support with his newfound base—people who cringed at Trump the man, but who cheered Trump the warrior—and they instead did the opposite. “What Trump supporters wanted him to do was put pettiness and interpersonal politics aside and say, this is a president getting indicted for the first time in our country’s history. You better believe I’ll fight like hell, I don’t care if his name is Trump. So all the Trump voters that are wanting strength or wanting to crush the establishment, wanting to drain the swamp, whatever the vernacular you want to use—they all were like, He’s not the guy. All those rumors about him being a RINO are true.”

Of course, the media’s 2016-era Trump fixation was famously parasitic—a cynical, myopic bet by ratings-obsessed editors and producers that Trump was nothing more than an eyeball-grabbing, circus sideshow traffic waterfall before an inevitable Clinton presidency. Notably, the cable news networks were right back at it on Monday, as reporters breathlessly covered Trump’s flight to New York like he was O.J. in the white Bronco, to the frustration of the usual ivory tower media critics. But in very real ways, this time is different. The prosecution of a former president for the first time in American history far exceeds the lower bound for what makes an important news story, and the trial itself—not to mention other looming indictments, whatever their merits—will be covered as such. It will be an unstoppable, steady jet of pro-Trump steroids directly into the carotid vein of the Republican party, from now until the election.

“What’s going to be on TV for weeks and weeks and weeks? All this, all the time,” said Wilson. “And it will just make them feel more intensely pro-Trump and more intensely loyal to Trump. If he were just sitting at Mar-a-Lago and playing golf at Doral twice a week, it’d be easy to sort of let other messages leak in and maybe DeSantis would have had a play. But it’s not. It’s gonna be Donald Trump and the Jan. 6 people and Jack Smith.”