As mushrooming criminal probes threaten his political ambitions and his liberty, Donald Trump has been able to console himself with one encouraging constant: blockbuster polling numbers.

“I’m the only person (who) ever got indicted who became more popular,” the former president and 2024 Republican primary frontrunner grinned in Iowa recently, an observation added to his stump speech in recent months.

Trump has been indicted in two criminal cases, with felony counts in two further investigations seemingly imminent, yet his popularity among his ultra-loyal base has not been dented in the slightest.

On Monday, a New York Times/Siena College poll of likely primary voters showed Trump crushing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis by a staggering 37 points.

And the poll is hardly an outlier: the ex-commander-in-chief’s lead has risen from 16 to 36 points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls since he was indicted in Manhattan four months ago for falsifying business records.

During that period he has been found by a jury in a civil trial to have raped a writer in New York and has been charged with a further 40 federal felony counts over his handling of national security secrets and alleged obstruction of justice.

“By the time we get on the debate stage on August 23, the frontrunner will be out on bail in four different jurisdictions — Florida, Washington, Georgia and New York,” fellow Republican White House hopeful Chris Christie told CNN on Sunday.

– ‘Entrenched elite’ –

While poor headlines for DeSantis may have contributed to the widening polling gap, Trump’s favorability rating — 39.4 percent — is exactly the same as it was the day he was first charged.

A shift between now and Iowa’s first-in-the-nation vote in January remains possible — but a turnaround that dramatic has never been seen in the modern presidential primary season.

Analysts contacted by AFP to discuss Trump’s poll numbers pointed to the lasting appeal of his populist message among blue-collar Americans.

“Multilateral trade agreements, open borders, forever wars and globalization left many hardworking Americans without jobs and with little future prospects,” said Michael J. O’Neill, counsel at the conservative Landmark Legal Foundation.

“Trump gives a voice to that demographic. His supporters see Trump as a disrupter that is not beholden to the entrenched elite and gives everyday Americans a shot at a better life,” O’Neill added.

For David Greenberg, a journalism and history professor at Rutgers University, 77-year-old Trump and his diehard loyalists have always been able to bond over a “common set of enemies” that has expanded to include the justice system.

“So when Trump is indicted, to them it’s just more proof that their man, their champion, is being targeted by forces they fundamentally distrust,” Greenberg told AFP.

– ‘Controlling the narrative’ –

Trump left office in 2021 after a scandal-plagued single term in which he lost the White House and both chambers of Congress and was impeached twice.

Many aides were convicted of felonies, including his 2016 campaign chairman and deputy campaign chairman, his White House chief strategist and national security advisor, his personal lawyer and two foreign policy advisors.

His company, The Trump Organization, was convicted on multiple charges of tax fraud and its chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg admitted grand larceny, tax fraud and falsifying business records.

Trump himself was found by a jury in a civil lawsuit in May to have raped the writer E. Jean Carroll in New York in the 1990s and he has been accused by more than 20 other women of sexual misconduct.

Trump’s impeachments were both related to alleged attempts to cheat in the 2020 election — first when he was found to have withheld vital military aid from Ukraine as he demanded it dig up dirt on Biden, and again for inciting an insurrection to prevent his opponent’s eventual victory from being certified.

Even some Democrats give him credit for managing to convince millions of Republicans that a never-ending “witch hunt” by a mythical “deep state” is to blame for the whiff of scandal around his presidency.

“Trump has done an excellent job of not only controlling the narrative, but staying ahead of it,” Democratic election strategist Amani Wells-Onyioha told AFP.

“He has consistently told his supporters that he is being unfairly attacked and that any accusations are lies aimed to take him down. They believe what he says because his indictments only feed into that narrative.”

Islamist militants have beheaded at least 10 farmers in Nigeria’s northern state of Borno after attacking their farms, residents said on Monday.

Last week, militants killed at least 25 people and wounded others in attacks on two villages in Borno state, a hotbed for insurgency and the center of a more than a decade-long insurgency in Nigeria that has spilled into neighbouring Chad and Cameroon.

Abubakar Masta, a farmer who escaped, said the assailants attacked their farms in Kawuri village of Konduga local government area of Borno State on Monday around 08:30 a.m. (0730 GMT), on motorbikes, carrying rifles.

An Indian railway security officer opened fire on a moving train in the country’s western Maharashtra state on Monday, killing four people, according to a spokesperson for the Western Railway.

The incident occurred on a passenger train traveling from Jaipur to Mumbai around 6 a.m. local time (8:30 p.m. ET Sunday), the spokesperson told Indian news agency Asian News International on camera.

The spokesperson alleged that Railway Protection Force constable Chetan Kumar killed his colleague and three other passengers.

“A constable, Chetan Kumar, opened fire on his colleague Tikaram Meena and during the incident three other passengers were also shot,” the spokesperson said.

He was arrested by police after he pulled the alarm and jumped off the train, the spokesperson continued.

An investigation is underway, the spokesperson said, adding the reason behind the shooting is “yet to established.”

The victims are still being identified based on the passenger list, he added.

Divisional Railway Manager Neeraj Kumar told reporters that the families are being contacted and compensation would be given to the next of kin.

At least 11 people are dead and 27 missing after heavy rains lashed Beijing, Chinese state media said Tuesday.

Military helicopters have been deployed to deliver supplies to stranded train passengers after the deadly rainstorms wreaked havoc in the capital.

Storm Doksuri, a former super typhoon, has swept northwards over China since Friday, when it hit southern Fujian province after scything through the Philippines.

Heavy rains began pummelling the city and surrounding areas on Saturday, with nearly the average rainfall for the entire month of July dumped on Beijing in just 40 hours.

On Tuesday, state broadcaster CCTV updated the overall death toll for the capital, reporting that “heavy rainfalls killed at least 11 people, 27 are missing”.

A military unit of 26 soldiers and four helicopters launched an “airdrop rescue mission” in the early hours of Tuesday to deliver hundreds of food packages and ponchos to people stranded in and around a train station in Beijing’s hard-hit Mentougou district, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

“On July 31, areas in Beijing including Fangshan and Mentougou suffered serious damage from water, causing three trains to get trapped on their routes, and road traffic in some areas was completely cut off,” CCTV reported.

The broadcaster was running live images on Tuesday morning of a row of buses half submerged in floodwater in Beijing’s southwest Fangshan neighbourhood.

Around 150,000 households in Mentougou had no running water, the local Communist Party newspaper Beijing Daily said Tuesday, with 45 water tankers dispatched to offer emergency supplies.

Local media on Monday published footage of chaotic scenes aboard high-speed rail trains stranded on tracks for as long as 30 hours, with passengers complaining that they had run out of food and water.

– Red alert –

Beijing and neighbouring Hebei province were on red alert overnight for rainstorms, with meteorological authorities warning of potential flash floods and landslides.

The city activated a flood control reservoir on Monday for the first time since it was built in 1998, the Beijing Daily said.

In Handan, Hebei province, rescuers lifted by crane reached a man trapped on his car in floodwaters on Sunday, lifting him to safety before the car was flipped and washed away by the current.

China has been experiencing extreme weather and posting record temperatures this summer, events that scientists say are being exacerbated by climate change.

Experts had warned that the downpour could prompt even worse flooding than in July 2012, when 79 people were killed and tens of thousands evacuated, according to local media.

The country is already preparing for the arrival of another typhoon — Khanun, the sixth such storm of the year — as it nears China’s east coast.

An Australian former childcare worker has been charged with abusing 91 children in what police described Tuesday as one of the country’s “most horrific” child sex abuse cases.

He has been charged with 1,623 separate crimes, including 136 counts of rape and 110 counts of sexual intercourse with a child younger than 10, officers added.

Investigators arrested the 45-year-old man after discovering graphic child pornography posted on the dark web, using visual clues in the background to eventually trace them to a childcare centre in Brisbane.

But it was only when they started sifting through his phone and computer that they realised the gravity of his “heinous” alleged offences, which were depicted on more than 4,000 seized images and videos.

Police said the crimes happened at 10 different childcare centres between 2007 and 2022 and exclusively targeted “prepubescent girls”.

Some of his alleged victims were as young as one, police said.

While 87 of the 91 victims were from Australia, police believe four other unidentified children were abused while the man worked overseas for a brief spell between 2013 and 2014.

Police said they were working with international crime agencies to find those children, without revealing which country they were targeting.

“There is not much solace I can give parents and children who have been identified,” assistant federal police commissioner Justine Gough said.

“This is a distressing time for families, carers and the community broadly.”

New South Wales assistant police commissioner Michael Fitzgerald said it was one of the most horrific cases he had ever seen.

“It’s beyond the realms of anyone’s imagination what this person did to these children,” he said.

“I can only say, you try not to be shocked after a long period of time in the police, but this is a horrific case.”

Some 35 detectives and investigators across the states of Queensland and New South Wales were called in to work on a task force dedicated to sifting through the sheer volume of child abuse material police had discovered.

Police said the man had passed the stringent series of background checks needed to work at childcare centers in Australia.

He is scheduled to face court in Queensland on August 21.

Once those proceedings are finished, he will be extradited to New South Wales to face further charges.