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There's no contradiction between these being sincere efforts to take Trump down, and also that Trump benefits from these investigations, and acts in a way to generally make them more likely to happen, and in my opinion, intentionally so. That's the point of a bait, to say "come and get me," and then turn that into an advantage. It's what DeSantis is trying to replicate, but he isn't so bold as Trump as to actually bait intelligence agencies, settling for the media and Disney instead.
Trump has only been doing better in the primary polls since people have been getting in the race, and the only noteworthy thing he has really done is get indicted. so it's not clear what evidence there is that these latest cases have caused any issues.
It's hard to say for me whether Russiagate overall harmed him because it was bored into everyone's brains, but it also imploded. The worst thing it did really was edge the Democrats who then went totally nuts, and some undecideds got swept up in it. I think there were other ways the establishment got their jabs in and actually made Trump's life worse. But I think the investigations are where Trump wins because that is actually where you have to put up or shut up, it's an actual game that Trump can play, and he's won every time.
As a long-term phenomenon I think the cases look even better for the anti-establishment right (and left even) because there's a immediate effect where people get swept up in them and want to see Trump lose, and then there's a tail effect where people become bitter and cynical towards the prosecutors who are bringing faulty cases they can't win. Biden's win was at the height of one of those anti-Trump pushes, but I think things look incredibly dire for the Democrat establishment going forward, since they have spent so much political capital on nonsense.
No, the investigation absolutely harmed Trump in a real way. The first and most obvious was that it prevented him from normalising relations with Russia, but the domestic effects were far worse. Crossfire Hurricane meant that his campaign was spied upon by the intelligence community for the majority of the election, and the head of the FBI (even though he was an incompetent buffoon) actively tried to intervene in the election to make sure that his opponent won. The exact same people running that investigation eventually moved on to the Mueller probe, which was effectively designed to hide the evidence of Crossfire Hurricane while also preventing Trump from hiring good people, by serving as a process-based punishment for anyone who decided to seriously join his team and help him achieve his goals. The investigation imploded, but it did actually achieve its actual goals - hamstringing Trump's presidency and covering up the crimes/mistakes of the intelligence community after they surveilled the communications of the successful presidential candidate while exchanging multiple text messages about how desperate they were to make sure his candidacy failed despite the wishes of the voting base.
Crossfire Hurricane, and the Mueller special counsel that it turned into (this is not hyperbole, huge portions of the exact same people were involved in both) were a massive problem for Trump, and I think it is extremely likely that the declassified documents he held onto and the government forcibly removed were the proof/evidence regarding what happened. It is true that he benefits in some sense politically from what are obviously nakedly political prosecutions, but I don't think those effects actually make up for the problems that those investigations caused. If you actually care about political prosecutions like this as opposed to "no bad tactics, only bad targets" then you are already most likely going to be supporting Trump anyway.
You can pick that out as an issue but I don't think it derails my argument. It just means Trump may have bit off more than he could chew. Ultimately I do think Trump baits these investigations and the broader elite ire as a way to foster the kind of indignation you see in this thread. Sure Trump gets treated unfairly, but he purposefully acts unsympathetically in order to bait out the unfairness. In other words, he's not acting in good faith and everyone outraged on his behalf are being played.
The people outraged on his behalf, perhaps, from a certain point of view. Unfortunately, the underlying problem didn't start with him and won't end with him.
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