An indictment for any alleged crime, the accompanying perp walk and ensuing court hearings may sound like a death knell for a politician on the ballot. But for Donald Trump — hardly a normal politician — it’s a gift.

The former president has long thrived on chaos and turmoil as he’s successfully portrayed himself to his supporters as a victim of the establishment, the "deep state," liberal forces and the mainstream media.

And Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign quickly capitalized on the announcement Thursday that he would become the first former president in U.S. history to be charged with a crime.

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"The Radical Left – the enemy of the hard-working men and women of this country — have INDICTED me in a disgusting witch hunt," Trump claimed in one of a handful of fundraising emails his campaign committees sent to supporters in the hours after Thursday’s breaking news. 

"Please make a contribution — of truly any amount — to defend our movement from the never-ending witch hunts and WIN the WHITE HOUSE in 2024."

The Trump campaign announced on Friday evening that they hauled in over $4 million in fundraising following the indictment announcement. The campaign touted the grassroots nature of the donations - with an average contribution of $38 - and that a quarter of the money came from first-time donors to the Trump campaign.

Word of Trump’s indictment came on the eve of the final day of fundraising in the first quarter of the year, and the surge in contributions should boost the former president’s campaign cash numbers when they’re likely revealed in the coming days.

Trump is expected in New York City Tuesday after a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict him. He allegedly gave hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in 2016 to keep her quiet ahead of that year’s presidential election over her claims she had sexual encounters years earlier with Trump. The former president denies sleeping with Daniels and denies falsifying business records to keep the payment concealed.

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In the hours after the media frenzy, nearly all of Trump’s actual and potential rivals for the GOP nomination defended Trump, most charging that the move by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was a "political prosecution."

The indictment firmly puts the 2024 spotlight back on Trump — where he wants it — and will make it more difficult for any of his rivals to gain traction, effectively freezing Trump’s position as the clear front-runner during the early legs of the primary battle.

"In the short term, there’s a rallying effect, there’s a fundraising effect, which Trump is going to fully employ," longtime Republican strategist David Kochel, a veteran of numerous presidential and Iowa-based campaigns, told Fox News.

South Carolina-based conservative consultant Dave Wilson noted that "it gives Trump a bump in the polls. It’s a natural thing because he’s getting news coverage again."

With the indictment looming, Trump had seen his lead in the polls over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis grow in the most recent surveys. Among those polls is one from Fox News released Wednesday that indicated Trump’s lead over DeSantis had doubled over the past month, from 15 to 30 points. 

While DeSantis remains on the 2024 sidelines, he’s expected to launch a campaign later this spring or summer and is seen as Trump’s top rival for the nomination.

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"The rumor that Trump is going to be indicted by the district attorney in Manhattan has helped him quite a bit among Republican primary voters," Republican pollster Daron Shaw, who conducts Fox News surveys with Democrat Chris Anderson, said earlier this week ahead of the indictment news. "They view the case as politically motivated, and it reanimates feelings that Trump is still fighting forces they see as corrupt and out of control."

Shaw said the indictment "is rallying Republicans to Trump, making Trump’s claims sound more legitimate" and making it "more difficult … for the other Republicans to get oxygen."

Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire’s survey center, noted that "based on past performance, the kind of bad news that would typically bury a candidate will likely fire up Trump’s base."

But the big question is whether a short-term bounce is sustainable. And as details of Trump’s alleged involvement with Daniels grabs outsized attention in the days and weeks ahead, will the former president suffer repercussions with social conservative voters who play an outsized role in Republican politics in Iowa and South Carolina, the first and third states in the GOP’s presidential nominating calendar?

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"Longer term — we need to know more," Kochel noted. "That stuff will roll out over the next several weeks and months as you go through the process. Iowa evangelicals aren’t going to like hearing about the former president paying off a porn star. There’s the potential for it to be a negative in the long term."

But Kochel emphasized that "Trump is very good in going to guns when he’s challenged like this."

Wilson said the question is whether Trump’s initial bump will be "sustainable over time."

"There’s going to be a question among certain evangelical voters as to whether or not this is something they want to wrap themselves around when it comes to Donald Trump. It’s a turnoff for some people, especially in the evangelical community," Wilson said.

In New Hampshire, which votes second in the GOP primary schedule, Neil Levesque, longtime director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, weighed in. 

"This will mean that Trump is front and center as we go into the nominating process, whether good or bad. How much of a distraction and how much will other candidates be able to get attention is a big question," Levesque said.

"As this goes forward, how much will Republicans say, ‘Is this the best candidate we can put forward against Biden?’ Or will they double down and say, ‘He’s part of our tribe, we need to get behind him?' Those are the great unknowns."

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been waging a battle for the last several months over what he called "woke" artificial intelligence, a fight that appears to have factored into his call for a six-month pause in the development of next generation AI systems.

Musk was one of several signatories to a letter this week that warned of advanced AI technology that could pose "profound risks to society and humanity." The letter said one of those risks is that AI might be used to "flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth."

The letter was signed by several notable technology experts, and it’s not clear who might have pushed for the inclusion of that specific phrase. But it jibes with the public fight Musk has been having since late last year over the ability of AI to constrain what people can say and read on digital platforms – a fight that involves a company Musk had a role in launching.

In 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI, the company that released GPT-4 this month, a few weeks before the letter was released. GPT-4 is the latest edition of a language system that underlies the company’s ChatGPT tool that can receive inputs and generate human-sounding outputs.

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Musk left the board of OpenAI in 2018 and explained that one reason why he left was that the company was chasing profits instead of serving as an open-source "counterweight" to Google.

"Now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft," Musk tweeted in February. He was referring to the $10 billion it received from Microsoft, an infusion that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has defended by noting that Microsoft doesn’t sit on the board of his company and does not control it in any way.

But Musk’s opposition to OpenAI went beyond its funding model. Late last year, Musk made it clear he opposes the way OpenAI has been developing its AI chatbot.

In December, Altman defended the rules developed to limit the ability of ChatGPT to produce controversial or insensitive outputs. "’AI needs to do whatever I ask’ and ‘I asked the AI to be sexist and it was, look how awful!’ are incompatible positions," Altman tweeted.

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Musk tweeted in reply, "The danger of training AI to be woke – in other words, lie – is deadly."

In February, Musk had a similar reaction when a Musk ally tweeted that ChatGPT lists former President Trump and Musk himself as "controversial" figures, while President Biden and Bill Gates are not.

Musk replied by tweeting, "!!"

Also in February, Musk replied to a tweet that showed ChatGPT was unwilling to write a poem about the positive attributes of Donald Trump because it can’t produce content that is biased or partisan, but was willing to write a poem about President Biden. "It is a serious concern," Musk replied.

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OpenAI has a set of rules for using ChatGPT that get to the heart of Musk’s complaint about a "woke" AI system. According to the company, its tools can’t be used to generate "hateful, harassing, or violent content." That includes content that "expresses, incites, or promotes hate based on identity," "intends to harass, threaten, or bully" someone, or "promotes or glorifies violence or celebrates the suffering or humiliation of others."

Just days after Musk tweeted "!!," press reports said Musk was recruiting AI experts to create his own non-woke chat AI system.

A spokesperson for Musk at SpaceX declined to respond to a request for comment for this story. But one policy watcher in Washington agreed that Musk’s open battle against woke AI seems to be a significant factor in his call for an AI development pause.

"Elon has been on the front line of the Twitter files, so he’s seen how bad the censorship can be," said Jake Denton, research associate in the Heritage Foundation’s Tech Policy Center. "This is just so evident to everyone in this space… that [AI tech] is exceeding the pace of our ability to control it."

Denton said that while AI will have countless applications in the future, the early application most people are seeing today are things such as ChatGPT.

"The consumer-known issue is the ChatGPT bias," he said. "It’s obviously on a path to replace search. The average person will soon go to a chat-based AI system rather than a search bar."

"And that means the response, the information that they get when they enter a search query, is going to be… a curated thing with the restrictions of the AI company reflected in that answer," he added. "That’s a major danger."

The letter signed by Musk and others called on governments to enforce a pause on AI research, a position that conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation seem inclined to support given the evidence of bias in current AI systems, even though it isn’t normally looking for a government solution.

"I think regulation is absolutely what’s needed, government intervention in some capacity," he said. "I don’t think we should move forward without such a thing. Our future shouldn’t be decided by unelected elites in Silicon Valley."