Trump did in fact face continued criminal prosecution over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his conduct around January 6. Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained a four‑count federal indictment on August 1, 2023 in Washington, D.C., charging Trump with conspiracies to defraud the United States and obstruct the January 6 certification of electoral votes, explicitly tying the case to the Capitol attack. Georgia separately indicted Trump and 18 co‑defendants under its RICO statute in August 2023 for a broader scheme to overturn the state’s 2020 results, before that case was ultimately dropped in 2025.(en.wikipedia.org)

Those prosecutions themselves became highly polarizing issues. An August 2023 Quinnipiac poll found a bare national majority favoring federal election‑subversion charges against Trump (about mid‑50s percent), but views were almost perfectly split along party lines: roughly the entire Democratic electorate supported prosecuting him, while a large majority of Republicans opposed it.(cnbc.com) A 2025 Marquette Law School national survey similarly found 58% of Americans saying the 2023–24 criminal cases against Trump were justified, but 90% of Democrats versus only 23% of Republicans agreed—while 77% of Republicans called the cases unjustified—showing how the prosecutions crystallized perceptions of a weaponized justice system.(law.marquette.edu)

Over the subsequent election cycle, multiple indicators show political division worsening rather than easing. Pew Research reported that between 2023 and mid‑2024 the share of Americans who saw even “some common ground” between the parties on major issues fell by an average of 12 percentage points, and later found that most adults now say Republican and Democratic voters cannot even agree on basic facts.(pewresearch.org) A Johns Hopkins SNF Agora poll in 2024 found nearly half of Americans describing members of the opposing party as “downright evil,” a striking marker of affective polarization.(nypost.com) Ahead of the 2024 vote, about two‑thirds of Americans told Reuters/Ipsos they feared election‑related political violence, and Chicago Council and AP‑NORC polling showed large majorities in both parties convinced that U.S. democracy itself was at serious risk—each side primarily blaming the other candidate.(reuters.com)

It is impossible to isolate the prosecutions as the sole cause of this worsening division, since other events (the 2024 campaign, economic and foreign‑policy crises) were also important drivers. But the data are consistent with Sacks’s directional claim: the January‑6‑related criminal cases against Trump became a central partisan flashpoint and coincided with, and plausibly contributed to, a further hardening of attitudes and a more fractured, mutually hostile electorate over the next election cycle. The rhetoric that they would literally “tear the country apart” is hyperbolic—institutions did not collapse—but in the more measured sense of deepening and entrenching political division, the prediction was borne out.