Donald Trump collects indictments – the third is on the way, the fourth would be imminent – but remains firmly in the lead in the race for the Republican nomination for the 2024 elections; and there are polls that show him winning in a possible match with President Joe Biden. But the road from here to the vote is still almost 500 days long: in view of the primaries, starting in August, there will be various debates between the candidates for the Republican nomination: they begin on August 23 in Milwaukee.
The third indictment for Trump
Meanwhile, the unsuccessful attempts of Trump and his cronies to overturn the outcome of the presidential elections in 2020 and to remain fraudulently in the White House are about to lead to an indictment, the third. The special prosecutor appointed to investigate the matter, Jack Smith, has in fact informed the ex-president tycoon in writing that he is the subject of a criminal investigation.
Trump’s efforts to tamper with the outcome of the vote, which he said was the result of unproven fraud, led to theassault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021: Thousands of his mob supporters, whom he had incited with a speech on the esplanade behind the White House, invaded and devastated Congress. There were five casualties and numerous wounded; dozens of people have already been sentenced for that riot, including many members of supremacist movements.
The special prosecutor’s investigation also involves those in Trump’s circle who collaborated with him to alter the outcome of the election.
The interweaving of court cases
When the indictment for early trial in Smith’s letter becomes effective after more than two years of investigations and interrogations, it will be the third for the ex-president tycoon, who, however, continues his campaign for the Republican nomination for the 2024 US nomination. Trump almost seems to draw impetus from judicial mishaps. His thesis is that his indictments are all “politically motivated”: the Biden administration would like to ‘kill’ through judicial channels the most fearsome antagonist for the incumbent president, who is a candidate to be re-elected.
Trump is down process to new york for having illegally bought the silence of a porn star with whom he had had a sexual relationship: he was not supposed to talk about it during the 2016 electoral campaign – the hearings should begin in March -; and in Florida for having stolen from the White House and illegally kept in his home in Mar-a-lago hundreds of classified documents – the hearings, which were to begin before the end of the year, have already been postponed to a later date. The judge who manages the proceedings, Aileen Cannon, appointed by Trump, could try to postpone them after the 2024 vote (if convicted, Trump risks years in prison).
The investigation by the Department of Justice into the events of January 6, 2021, prompted by the conclusions of a commission of inquiry of the Chamber, is therefore approaching the conclusions: the investigators, in recent months, have mainly focused on a chaotic meeting in the White Housewhere, among other things, the possibility of seizing electronic voting machines and blocking the process of transferring powers from one Administration to another was mentioned.
In addition, witnesses have recently been heard about frauds carried out, or planned, by people close to the former president to enroll scores of false Republican voters on the electoral rolls of states won by Biden by a narrow margin. In Michigan, where Biden won by a large margin, 154,000 votes, 16 people have just been indicted for eight crimes, which include forgery and conspiracy to commit forgery. Among them is Meshawn Maddock, a Trump ally, co-chairman of the Michigan Republican Party at the time.
The implications for the electoral campaign and the Ukraine factor
There is consensus that being on trial does not prevent Trump from running for office and campaigning. On the other hand, there is no unanimity among jurists if the fact of being convicted could prevent him from being a candidate or from being elected. But the New York Times anticipates that Trump and his supporters plan, if they return to the White House, a strong expansion of the president’s powers over those of all the other branches of government, including Congress and the judiciary.
In the last few hours, the war in Ukraine it has returned to echoes in the Republican electoral campaign for USA 2024: Biden will have to take this into account, especially if the conflict is not resolved by the end of the year. Trump, on Fox, reiterated: “If I were president I would end the conflict in 24 hours”. The tycoon, who met his supporters in Iowa, explained: “I know Zelensky very well, I know Putin very well. I would tell them to come to an understanding: I just want to end the killing of thousands of people”.
Instead, Trump’s biggest rival for the nomination, the governor of Florida Ron DeSantisinsists that, for him, war in Ukraine is “a secondary issue”. “The main threat for us – he declared to CNN – comes from China (…) We must look at the world no longer with Europe at the center of our concerns, as it rightly was after the Second World War. Asia-Pacific must be to our generation what Europe was to the generation of the Second World War”.
The loose cannons of the grand juries
It was Trump himself who announced on his social network ‘Truth’ to have received Smith’s letter anticipating his indictment. But judicial experts explain, in the US media, that the story remains complex: the letter is not, in itself, an indictment, but it is a kind of guarantee notice and comes together with an invitation to Trump to appear before a Grand Jury to testify (something that the former president, according to what one of his advisers told the Washington Post, does not intend to do).
The investigation focuses on three questions: Did the Trump campaign commit money-raising fraud with claims that the election was rigged, knowing it wasn’t true?; did the then president know about the fake Republican voters in the swing states?; how and to what extent Trump and his cronies exerted pressure on the vice-president Mike Pence why reverse the outcome of the vote? After Pence’s refusal, who presided over the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, to lend himself to what would have been a real coup d’état, Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol and invaded Congress. Pence, for his part, has already testified in front of the Grand Jury.
Trump’s judicial troubles, however, do not end there. A Grand Jury summoned to Atlanta in Georgia must decide soon whether the former president and his cronies committed crimes in an attempt to overturn the outcome of the vote in the state, where Biden won by a margin of just over a thousand votes. According to judicial sources, Trump, who in a phone call explicitly asked the republican authorities of the state to “find the votes” to give him victory, risks a indictment for extortionwhich, if convicted, carries years of imprisonment.
Cover photo EPA/CRISTOBAL HERRERA-ULASHKEVICH