What could go wrong? Besides potential convictions on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, of course.
This presidential campaign has hurtled through a portal into the Trump Legal Universe, which is like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, except for being real. If you’re like me, you might not have spent a lot of time thinking about just how unprecedented and deeply weird it would be, in an election year, to have the leading Republican candidate for president being tried on criminal charges that could send him to jail. We are about to find out.
It is one thing to see Trump and his eponymous company facing huge civil penalties, as in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case and the New York state lawsuit against the Trump Organization. It is quite another to see Trump’s very liberty threatened — not by “election interference,” as he and his lawyers bray, but by his own alleged illegal acts.
And we will be witnessing this spectacle, Trump in criminal and civil jeopardy, pretty much nonstop.
On Thursday in New York, Trump sat grim-faced as Justice Juan Merchan set that late-March date for jury selection in Trump’s trial. Those charges, filed by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, stem from Trump’s alleged hush-money payoff to adult-film star Stormy Daniels (whose real name is Stephanie Clifford).
“We strenuously object. … President Trump is going to now spend the next two months working on this trial instead of out on the campaign trail,” complained Todd Blanche, Trump’s lawyer in that case.
“What is your legal argument?” Merchan asked.
“That is my legal argument,” Blanche said.
“That is not a legal argument,” Merchan replied. End of discussion.
Meanwhile, in Atlanta, Judge Scott McAfee was hearing testimony about the personal relationship between Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis — who has charged Trump with 13 felony counts for allegedly conspiring to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election outcome — and Nathan Wade, the outside attorney Willis hired to help prosecute the case.
At issue is when Willis and Wade began dating and whether that romance was misrepresented to the judge or presents a conflict of interest. McAfee could go so far as to disqualify Willis and her office from the case, which would mean other prosecutors would have to be found, thus delaying that trial substantially.
But back in New York, Judge Arthur Engoron is expected to rule as soon as Friday in the civil fraud case brought against Trump and his firm by New York Attorney General Letitia James. She has asked Engoron to impose a fine of $370 million and ban Trump and the Trump Organization from doing business in New York real estate.
And in Washington, U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan would likely schedule Trump’s trial — on felony charges based on Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection — to begin soon after the trial in Merchan’s courtroom ends. That timing would depend on whether the Supreme Court decides to consider Trump’s claim of “absolute immunity,” which an appeals court panel has swatted away as not remotely a thing.
So far, Trump has tried to turn all of this into an asset. He portrays himself as the victim of “a Biden directed Political Witch Hunt for the purpose of Election Interference,” as he claimed in a social media post. And the Republican Party base seems to agree.
But while an NBC News national poll this month showed Trump leading President Biden among registered voters, 47 percent to 42 percent, it also found that Biden pulled ahead, 45 percent to 43 percent, when those respondents were asked which candidate they would support if Trump were found guilty of a felony offense. And a Bloomberg poll found that 53 percent of voters in seven crucial swing states said they would be unwilling to vote for Trump “if he is convicted of a crime.”
If Trump really believed that images of him sitting at a defense table and being held accountable in a court of law were a political plus, he wouldn’t be trying so hard to get all of his criminal trials delayed until after the election.
Nikki Haley, Trump’s last remaining challenger for the GOP nomination, warned Thursday on X (formerly Twitter) that “all of this chaos will only lead to more losses for Republicans up and down the ticket.” Her party might not listen, but she might well be right.
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