Trump Says He’ll Keep Running If Indicted: ‘It Will Enhance My Numbers’

Former President Donald Trump said he’ll “absolutely” stay in the 2024 presidential race if he’s charged with criminal indictments, arguing that it will boost his standing in the polls.

“I wouldn’t even think about leaving,” Trump said during a brief press conference with right-wing reporters before his weekend speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“Probably it will enhance my numbers,” Trump continued, calling the multiple district attorneys who are investigating him racists, dubbing the Justice Department “the injustice department,” and claiming the separate investigations “a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time.”

Three different criminal investigations into Trump’s actions are likely to burst into the open before voters cast a single ballot in the 2024 presidential race—and will help set the contours of the election.

Those include a grand jury investigation in Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said in late January that charging decisions are “imminent” in her probe of Trump and his allies’ attempts to flip his 2020 defeat into a victory and where a grand jury has already recommended charges against more than a dozen people; Manhattan, where District Attorney Alvin Bragg has re-upped a years-old probe into payments related to Trump’s alleged sexual affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels; and Washington, D.C., where a special counsel is reportedly aiming to finish their investigation into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and attempts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election by mid-summer.

During his speech, Trump explicitly attacked the district attorneys—a precursor to what could be months of attacks on those investigating him as he aims to return to the White House.

He argued that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg should be focused on violent crime in New York City instead because, he claimed, “killings are taking place at a number like nobody’s ever seen, right in Manhattan”—even though the city’s murder rate is nowhere near as high as it was in the early 1990s.

Trump has usually used his legal troubles to rally the GOP base to him. Whether they’re willing to come this time—or decide his baggage is finally too much for them—will go a long way in determining whether he’s once again the Republican nominee for president.