In some ways, it was the turn of events Democratic voters had dreamed of and some of the party’s lawmakers had long demanded: After years of telling lies, shattering norms, inciting a riot at the Capitol and being impeached twice, Donald J. Trump on Thursday became the first former president to face criminal charges.
“We’ve been waiting for the dam to break for six years,” declared Carter Hudgins, 73, a retired professor from Charleston, S.C. “It should have happened a long time ago,” added his wife, Donna Hudgins, 71, a retired librarian.
But as the gravity of the moment sank in, Democratic voters, party officials, activists and other Trump critics across the country absorbed the news of the former president’s extraordinary indictment with a more complex set of reactions. Their feelings ranged from jubilation and vindication to anxieties about the strength of the case, concerns that it could heighten Mr. Trump’s standing in his party and fears that in such a polarized environment, Republicans would struggle to muster basic respect for the rule of law as the facts unfolded.
“They are going to treat him as if he is Jesus Christ himself on a cross being persecuted,” said Representative Jasmine Crockett, a Democrat from Dallas who worked as a criminal defense lawyer before she was elected to Congress last year. She blasted Republican arguments that the charges were politically motivated, saying, “We knew the type of person Trump was when he got elected the first time.”
Mr. Trump, who polls show is the leading Republican contender for the 2024 presidential nomination, was indicted on Thursday by a special grand jury in connection with his role in hush-money payments to a porn star. He was charged with more than two dozen counts, though the specifics are not yet known.
It is one in a swirl of investigations Mr. Trump faces, on a number of explosive matters including his handling of sensitive government documents after leaving office and whether he and his allies criminally interfered with the 2020 presidential election. He could face multiple other indictments.
But the one this week, centered on a tawdry episode that predates Mr. Trump’s presidency, struck some Democrats as a sharp contrast in substance with the other possible charges he might face. Some felt conflicted between their view that no one is above the law, while wondering if this particular case would be worth the political division for the country, especially when there might be other, bigger targets.
“He isn’t above the law and anyone who suggests otherwise is un-American,” said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a centrist Democratic organization. “The question is, is it worth it for this crime?”
In Littleton, N.H., Bernd Weber, 65, a dentist, said he was glad the grand jury had voted to indict Mr. Trump, but he worried about the former president’s ability to “spin it to make it look like a witch hunt, and there are people that are buying that.”
“There were any number of things that he could have been indicted for, and this was probably the least of them,” he said.
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The Biden White House is so far determined to not take part in the public discussion about Mr. Trump’s legal troubles, just as it steered clear of last year’s congressional hearings investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Officials have signaled for weeks that administration officials would not discuss an indictment should one come.
And President Biden himself, asked by reporters multiple times on Friday to share his reaction to the Trump news, declined to address the questions. “I’m not going to talk about Trump’s indictment,” he said before leaving for a trip to Mississippi.
Other Democrats made clear that while they welcomed this indictment, they believed Mr. Trump should be held accountable for far more.
“No one is above the law,” Representative Barbara Lee, a liberal Californian now running for Senate, wrote on Twitter. “Now do the rest of his crimes.”
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Owen Murphy, 22, a student at Iowa State University and a Democrat, agreed. “How has this not happened sooner for something more egregious?” he asked.
Mr. Trump has described himself as “a completely innocent person,” and he and Republican allies have sought to cast the case as politically motivated.
His indictment is forcing Democrats to wrestle in public with thorny questions they have discussed privately for months. There is a broad consensus in the party, supported by ample polling, that the former president would be the easiest Republican rival for Mr. Biden to face next year, if he runs as expected.
Mr. Trump is saddled with legal problems, similarly aged and polarizing even within his own party, and his nomination would let Democrats and Mr. Biden use their 2020 playbook of running as the candidate of normal against a chaos agent.
The White House’s own polling backs up this theory. Surveys done for the White House in recent weeks found Mr. Biden in a more favorable position against Mr. Trump than he finished in 2020 in all of the closest battleground states.
The same polling showed Mr. Biden faring less well against Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a likely contender for the Republican nomination, who has had a rocky rollout on the national stage and trails well behind Mr. Trump in national Republican primary polling. Yet a matchup between the president and the Florida governor is far more competitive, according to people familiar with the polling.
“I would feel better against Trump,” said Marcos Alfaro, the secretary-treasurer of the Wisconsin State A.F.L.-C.I.O. “But if somebody else like Ron DeSantis or something like that would come up that was younger and more vibrant, then we might be in trouble.”
Some Democrats — who have spent years in pundit mode, thinking about how to beat Mr. Trump — found themselves trying to game out how the indictment might shape the Republican primary.
For years, Mr. Trump has faced scrutiny and investigations without confronting criminal charges, and certainly without drawing repercussions from his base. Democrats and other Trump skeptics speculated this week about whether the indictment would prompt Republicans to rally around him, even as they welcomed it as a critical measure of accountability.
Stan Joseph, a 73-year-old Democratic retiree from Alpharetta, Ga., said he could not believe it had taken as long as it did for Mr. Trump to get indicted.
“What more do you need to see?” Mr. Joseph said Friday. “The thousand pages from the Jan. 6 committee is enough.”
Mr. Joseph figured that Mr. Trump could maintain his base of Republican support and win the nomination in a divided primary field. Good news, he said, for Mr. Biden.
“If Trump won the nomination, it’d be the best thing that could happen to Biden,” he said. “Biden would win.”
Other Democrats stressed that, whatever the implications for 2024, upholding the rule of law was paramount.
Former Representative Tom Perriello of Virginia, who served as a special adviser for the war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone, said the United States would never move past the divisiveness — and potential criminal activity — of the Trump years without a full reckoning and accounting for what happened.
“In a constitutional democracy, respect for the rule of law is so much more important than what it means for the immediate- to medium-term polling effects,” Mr. Perriello said late Thursday. “This is just one of those things you have to do or else you’re going to invite greater violence.”
Some Democrats recoiled from the idea of rooting for another Trump nomination on the bet that he would be easier to defeat, casting him as a unique threat to American democracy and to the social fabric of the country. They also cautioned against trying to parse the former president’s political standing so far from the next election.
“He turned Americans against each other, and I think he is a dangerous person to see ever get within shouting distance of the Oval Office again,” Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat who is running for Senate, said in an interview shortly before the indictment. “Anyone who counts out Donald Trump or any other person doesn’t actually have a sense of how much time we have before the election. I mean, the whole world can change.”
Jon Hurdle contributed reporting from Littleton, N.H., Maya King from Alpharetta, Ga., Haley Johnson from Iowa City, and Melissa Delaney from Charleston, S.C.
