Florida: Donald Trump was feeling deflated. For almost 50 minutes, the former US president had been sitting in a room on the 13th floor of the United States District Court of Florida – arms folded; expression grim – as he faced his latest legal reckoning.

After pleading not guilty to 37 charges related to mishandling classified information, Trump and his motorcade decided to make a pit stop on their way back to the airport via Miami’s Little Havana district, home to many Cuban dissidents who had fled Castro’s regime in search of a new life in America.

It was partly a PR strategy and partly a mental reset. Trump’s aides knew they needed to show the world he was unfazed by the latest criminal indictment against him – his second in two months – just as they needed him to be in a good frame of mind for his post-court speech and fundraiser later that night at his Bedminster Golf Club in New Jersey.

Inside the famous Versailles restaurant on Southwest 8th Street, with its pro-Trump crowd and the familiar smell of pastelitos and cubanos lingering in the air, his mood immediately began to shift.

“It was a pretty dark day for him, but I think he left in great spirits after that,” said local businessman Evelio Medina, who has known Trump for years and helped spread the word about his “off schedule” visit on Tuesday.

“He posed for photos, joined a prayer, offered to buy people food. We love him here. Cubans know all about political persecution, so his message resonates. But people need to remember that every time he gets into these situations he comes out stronger. He’s a fighter.”

Trump is indeed fighting for his political life.

“I will never drop out of the 2024 presidential race,” he has pledged.

But Trump’s political fate will do much to shape the game his Republican rivals must play. And just as Medina predicted, the early signs suggest he is withstanding the punches – at least for now.

Still the one to beat

The latest Quinnipiac University poll taken this week shows he is still the overwhelming frontrunner to win the Republican’s nomination to recontest the White House in 2024, leading his closest rival, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, by 30 points.

What’s more, within days of being indicted he raised almost $US7 million in donations, according to his campaign. Of that amount, $US2.1 million stemmed from the fundraising event at Bedminster where he delivered a grievance-fuelled speech branding the Biden administration as corrupt, accused Special Counsel Jack Smith of being a “thug” and lashed out at the “weaponised” US Justice Department. By Wednesday, he was even selling T-shirts of his face in a mugshot, emblazoned with the warning: “They’re not after me. They’re after you. I’m just in the way.“

It’s an incredible situation for a man who now has the notorious title of being the first former US president to a face federal indictment. Thirty-one of the 37 charges against Trump relate to the “wilful retention” of classified material in violation of the Espionage Act, a national security law with a maximum 10-year jail term that has been used to target leakers of government secrets. The rest of the charges involve conspiracy to obstruct justice, concealing documents and making false statements.

With 17 months until the federal election, Trump now faces the prospect of two potential criminal trials in the heat of an election campaign – one in Florida for the documents case; the other in New York over alleged hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels. Legal experts say the possibility of a conviction and jail time is highly likely.

“Yes, he’s innocent until proven guilty, but there’s a huge amount of evidence out there – and none of it is complicated,” says former Justice Department official Alan Rozenshtein, a national security expert and law professor at the University of Minnesota.

“It’s very bad to keep classified information, but it’s particularly bad to do it wilfully – and it’s extra bad to then go to long lengths to obstruct an investigation into it.”

The ‘Always Trump’ loyalists

In any other time and place, the indictment of a presidential candidate would have been a gift for their political rivals, and potentially spell the end of their career. But this is no ordinary time in America, and Donald J. Trump is no ordinary politician.

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His celebrity and ability to command loyalty was in full display on the streets of Miami this week, when fans began gathering outside the US District Courthouse from 8am on Tuesday to show their support. Trump wasn’t due to be arraigned until 3pm but as the temperature continued to rise beyond 34 degrees, his supporters kept coming.

Among them was Gregg Donovan, who had travelled from California and was standing in the searing Miami heat wearing a black top hat, a red tail coat and a gold chain with a laminated photo of Trump. He argued that the Justice Department charged the former president simply because he is “the leading candidate” and noted that classified documents were also found in Biden’s possession (the president is under a separate special counsel probe that is yet to conclude).

A few metres away, investment banker Ron Solomon, who now runs a side business selling MAGA merchandise, held a similar view: that Trump was the victim of a two-tiered justice system; that Democrats were out “to get him”; that the 2020 election was rigged and the latest indictment yet another example of election interference.

“You’ve got a guy who spent 2020 hiding out in his basement and the few times he got out he couldn’t even draw a crowd of flies,” Solomon says of Biden. “And you’re trying to tell me he got more votes than Trump?”

The adoration of Trump’s supporters goes some way to explaining why many of his Republican rivals have been tying themselves in knots for weeks trying to respond to his legal woes without aliening his hardcore supporters.

The so-called “Always Trump” loyalists make up around 30 per cent of the party.

Trump’s Republican rivals must reckon with them if they hope to win the nomination.

When news of the indictment first broke, former vice president Mike Pence, who entered the race last week, said he hoped prosecutors wouldn’t bring charges against his former boss.

After reading the indictment, he told The Wall Street Journal editorial board that “these are very serious allegations and I can’t defend what is alleged”.

But in a neat piece of triangulation, Pence also added: “it’s hard for me to believe that politics didn’t play some role in this decision.”

Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, who is also seeking the Republican nomination, also tried to thread the needle.

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, she said the Department of Justice and FBI “have lost all credibility with the American people” but noted that “if this indictment is true … President Trump was incredibly reckless with our national security.”

And DeSantis, who perhaps more than any other rival is desperate to woo Trump’s base, came down on the former president’s side – but with little enthusiasm.

A crowded field

DeSantis’ main strategy has instead been to attack the Justice Department, which he has vowed to overhaul if he wins office next year – starting with the sacking of FBI director Christopher Wray.

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But two months before the first Republican primary debate takes place in Milwaukee in August, candidates in an ever-growing field now find themselves in the unwanted position of trying to get coverage for their own campaigns when the news cycle is once again dominated by the former president’s controversies.

The latest addition to the race was Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who is now the third Republican from Florida, after Trump and DeSantis, to seek the nomination.

But the ambitious 45-year-old could barely contain his frustration on Thursday when he announced his plan to run and spent most of his first interview trying to bat away questions about Trump’s indictment.

“This conversation is not a healthy conversation for the country,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos after his numerous attempts to sidestep the issue failed.

“We should be talking about the issues Americans care about. We shouldn’t be talking about candidates being indicted … If my candidacy is going to be about responding to things that former president Trump did, there’s not going to be much of a candidacy.”

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As for Trump, his strategy will follow a familiar theme: deny, deflect, delay. His lawyers are expected to file a motion to dismiss the case, in part by arguing there was “prosecutorial misconduct” by Smith’s team as they sought to build their indictment.

If that doesn’t work, legal experts believe the likely aim would be to slow things down for as long as possible, potentially beyond the November 2024 election. And if forced into an eventual trial, Trump’s argument is that he had the authority to take the documents under the Presidential Records Act (even though it doesn’t actually give presidents such authority once they leave office).

But the former president’s legal woes are far from over. In Georgia, where Trump is being investigated for trying to overturn his 2020 election loss in that state, Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis has indicated that any grand jury indictments in the case would likely come in August.

In Washington, Special Counsel Jack Smith has a second probe into Trump’s role into the former president’s attempt to stop Biden’s election victory from being certified. That case is also expected to come to a head within the next few months.

And in New York, a federal judge this week allowed writer E. Jean Carroll to amend her original defamation lawsuit against Trump to include derogatory comments he made about her during a CNN town hall program last month, paving the way for further damages. A trial has been set for January 15, two months before Trump is due to face trial over the alleged hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.

For the now, however, the twice-impeached, twice-indicted Republican frontrunner remains defiant.

“I will never drop out of the 2024 presidential race,” Trump declared last week in one of his latest fundraising emails. “They can indict me, they can arrest me, but I know – and the American people know – that I am an innocent man.”

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