Facing 91 felony counts across four different criminal cases, former President Donald Trump can count on many of the 2024 Republican presidential candidates aspiring to beat him to have his back as he works to publicly discredit his criminal cases and the prosecutors who brought them.

The two rivals closest to him in primary polling — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy — rushed to his defense as news of Trump’s latest indictment in Georgia became public. Ramaswamy offered to write an amicus brief to the court, arguing the prosecutors charging Trump with interfering with the 2020 presidential election are themselves interfering with the 2024 election.

“Prosecutors should not be deciding U.S. presidential elections, and if they’re so overzealous that they commit constitutional violations, then the cases should be thrown out & they should be held accountable,” Ramaswamy wrote Monday on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter, hours before the indictment was official.

In remarks to New Hampshire media on Tuesday, DeSantis declined to attack Trump, instead opining on crime in Atlanta and detailing his campaign promise to “end the weaponization of federal agencies,” like the Department of Justice and the FBI. He also pledged to “lean in” against some of these local prosecutors if they are not following the law or are abandoning their duty to enforce the law evenly.” 

He pointed to suspensions handed down by his administration in Florida in the last year to two local prosecutors, both elected Democrats, over disagreements on policy. 

Trump is facing federal prosecutions over his alleged mishandling of classified documents in Florida and accusations that he sought to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. A local prosecutor in New York is pursuing crimes connected to alleged hush money payments he made to two women who said they had affairs with him. And in Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fanni Willis charged Trump and 18 others with a variety of charges under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act for their attempts to award Georgia’s electors to Trump in 2020 despite Joe Biden winning the vote.

At the Iowa State Fair on Tuesday, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott wooed voters and palled around with the state’s popular Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, as he tried to establish himself as a legitimate contender to beat Trump and the rest of the field in pursuit of their party’s nomination.

But he, too, echoed DeSantis' and Ramaswamy’s concerns about political prosecutions and calls for reform of the Department of Justice.

“We’ve seen the legal system being weaponized against political opponents, that is un-American and unacceptable,” Scott said. “At the end of the day, we need a better system than that. Frankly, hopefully as president of the United States, we’ll have the opportunity to restore confidence and integrity to all our departments of justice across the country.”

Scott said “we just draw different conclusions” when asked by a reporter about the January 2021 phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top election official, when the then-president said he wanted to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than” the margin he lost by in Georgia. The call is central to Willis’ case against Trump. 

When asked whether he would make a similar call as president if he found himself in the situation, Scott turned away from the reporter and refused to answer, saying “next question” until another journalist asked him about an unrelated subject.

Even Trump’s most frequent critic in the race, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, called the Georgia indictment “unnecessary” on Fox News because of its overlap with special prosecutor Jack Smith’s indictment in Washington. He also said Willis pursued charges as an “ego boost,” not because of their merits.

“Don’t forget that these prosecutors all have egos,” the former federal prosecutor said, arguing Willis went forward to get a piece of the attention Smith was getting for his indictments. Instead, Christie said, she should have charged the other 18 defendants and left the prosecution of Trump for his actions after losing the 2020 election to the federal courts. 

But on CNN, Christie was willing to describe Trump’s conduct as “very disturbing.”

Another of Trump’s opponents who has grown more willing to criticize him, former Vice President Mike Pence, discussed the latest indictment in a speech to the National Conference of State Legislatures in Indianapolis on Wednesday. 

But while Pence did again rebuke Trump’s claims about the election in Georgia and whether the vice president has the constitutional authority to overrule the Electoral College, he did not celebrate the continued legal struggles of his chief rival or express fury at the man whose supporters chanted “Hang Mike Pence” as they stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Instead, Pence spoke somberly of the development.

“I’ve said many times I had hoped the judgment about those days would be left to the American people or to history, but such is not the case,” Pence said. “No one is above the law and the president and all those implicated are entitled to the presumption of innocence that every American enjoys.”

Pence has previously said he would “clean house” at the Department of Justice if elected president, arguing new leadership is necessary to avoid political prosecutions. 

The caution from many of Trump’s rivals may be a result of their desire to woo his voters, which they will need if they hope to win a primary where he currently commands an average of 53.7% of the electorate in national polls, according to aggregator FiveThirtyEight. As of Wednesday, his closest competitors, DeSantis and Ramaswamy, are averaging 14.7% and 7% in national polls, respectively. 

Trump stormed the party to command an unexpected lead in the 2016 primary and was the GOP candidate in 2016 and 2020. Loyalty to the man has defined the last eight years of Republican politics. And his polling has steadily increased with each indictment. 

Since March 18, when Trump first said he was going to be indicted in the New York case — the indictment ultimately didn’t arrive for a couple weeks — his national polling average among GOP primary voters has grown nine percentage points. 

“Every time they file an indictment, we go way up in the polls,” Trump said in a speech in Alabama earlier this month. “One more indictment and this election is closed out. Nobody has even a chance. We’ve already defeated the Republicans.”