When the Republican presidential candidates gather for their first debate this week, the encounter is likely to center on the legal problems of the man all of them are chasing.
Former President Donald Trump has solidified his lead in the GOP race by convincing most Republican voters to view his four criminal indictments as a politicized “witch hunt” aimed not only at him, but them.
Trump’s success in selling that argument to GOP voters has some immediate causes, key among them the choice by all of his leading competitors in the race, as well as most prominent voices in conservative media, to echo rather than challenge his contention. But the inclination of so many Republican voters to dismiss all of the charges accumulating against Trump also reflects something much more fundamental: the hardening tendency of conservatives to believe that they are the real victims of bias in a society irreversibly growing more racially and culturally diverse. CONTINUED
Ronald Brownstein, CNN
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