This former bellwether county — and a museum here — both hold lessons for Trump’s campaign.
In recent days Debs, the five-time former socialist candidate who hails from this town in Vigo County — population 106,000 — was on the lips of the chattering class everywhere, namechecked on CNN and Fox News and MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” for mounting his presidential campaign from a jail cell 104 years ago.
Trump faces a maximum of four years in prison following his guilty verdict, but Judge Juan Merchan is not required to sentence him to prison, and could just as well subject him to a lighter punishment. Debs, the museum director said, was only allowed one 500-word press release a week from prison — certainly not the dozens of Truth Social posts Trump routinely fires off on any given day. “But he also relied on a network beyond the prison walls,” she said.
Far from Washington, Terre Haute and Vigo County have long been a point of interest on the presidential map.— like John F. Kennedy Jr., Richard Nixon, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton before him — in 2016, packing more than 2,000 people into the Indiana Theater before the state’s decisive May primary that year. “Terre Haute — we love Terre Haute,” he said.
On Friday afternoon, the contours of what a jailhouse campaign could look like came into sharper view for those at the museum — and, for that matter, across the country as people tried to wrap their heads around a new reality. “Can you be a candidate for office of the presidency and be in prison?” Bergbower asked the students. “And the answer is yes, you can.”
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