THE LATEST indictment of former Republican President Donald Trump heralds a potentially explosive mix of lawsuit and political wrestling in the 2024 presidential campaign.
At the moment it is very difficult to anticipate what will happen next year on both the legal and political fronts, but the truth is that Trump, 77, has a lot at stake in the coming months.
The former president faces three criminal charges so far and a fourth is looming. He is likely to be charged with trying to rig the outcome of the 2020 election in the southern state of Georgia.
The investigation was opened following a phone call from Trump on January 2, 2021 to Georgia election officials, whom he pressured to “find” 11,780 votes to avoid his defeat against Democrat Joe Biden in this state.
Trump is scheduled to go on trial in New York in March over alleged secret payments made to a porn actress on the eve of the 2016 election.
However, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said he would be willing to move the date to accommodate the two federal indictments, though the final decision ultimately rests with the judge handling the case.
Trump will be arraigned in Florida in May for negligent handling of confidential government documents after leaving the White House.
But the much more serious case is the third. Special counsel Jack Smith accuses him of conspiring to rig the outcome of the 2020 election.
The trial date, to be held in Washington, will be set at an August 28 hearing before District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan.
Trump’s lawyers will try to delay the conspiracy trial as long as possible, ideally until after the November 2024 election.
Ty Cobb, who was a special counsel to the White House under Trump but has become highly critical of the former president, told CNN that it is unlikely that he will be delayed.
Chutkan will try to get it moving “quickly” but at the same time guarantee Trump’s rights, Cobb said.
The defense
Trump sees the charges brought against him as an attempt by Biden, his likely 2024 presidential challenger, to paralyze his campaign for the White House.
“My political opponent has hit me with a barrage of weak lawsuits (…), which consume a lot of my time and money,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. “It is election interference, and the Supreme Court must intercede.”
This week, after pleading not guilty in one of the cases against him, Trump designated himself a “political opponent” victim of a “persecution” and said it is “a very sad day for the United States.”
“This is the persecution of the person who leads by very, very substantial numbers in the Republican primary and leads (against President Joe Biden) by a lot,” he said. “So if you can’t beat it, you go after it or prosecute it,” he said.
It is worth mentioning that previously, Trump had already accused Biden of having ordered the Justice Department to attribute to him “as many crimes as can be invented” and of “unprecedented instrumentalization of “Justice””.
“I need one more indictment to guarantee my election!” in 2024, he defiantly held, on his social network. And he insisted for the umpteenth time, without evidence, that the 2020 election, which Biden won, was “corrupted, rigged and stolen.”
So far, Trump’s spate of legal troubles does not appear to have dented his solid support among Republican voters for his 2024 presidential nomination bid.
Trump leads his closest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, by 54% to 17% in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll.
Nor is he doing badly in the polls with respect to Biden. If the elections were held now, they would tie, a New York Times poll revealed this week.
Trump did not miss the opportunity to remember him at night on the Truth Social platform. “I was arrested by my political opponent, who is losing heavily to me in the polls,” he stated in all caps.
what’s coming
The caucuses and primaries to select the Republican nominee for the 2024 election will begin in January and the national nominating convention will take place July 15-18 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The various criminal trials could see Trump spend as much time in court as on the campaign trail, or even longer.
“We’ve never really seen a major political party challenger try to campaign on multiple charges, so we don’t really know what all of this will lead to,” said Steven Schwinn, a University of Illinois Chicago law professor.
For his part, Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at Columbia University, adds that the law requires the defendant to attend the trial, but “it remains to be seen if the courts will make an exception because the issue is that he shows up for president,” he said.
On the other hand, Carl Tobias, a professor of law at the University of Richmond, believes that the judges presiding over Trump’s trials will try “to accommodate his schedule if he makes reasonable requests for leave.”
Trump can continue in the race for the White House, even if he has been convicted in one or more of the criminal cases because the Constitution does not prevent a candidate with this characteristic from running for the presidency. /AFP- THE NEW CENTURY
Two key backgrounds
Could Donald Trump campaign behind bars? Despite having several court cases pending this remains a highly uncertain prospect, but not a wild assumption. In American history, two men have already done it.
They are Eugene V. Debs and Lyndon LaRouche.
The anti-capitalist: His name is not familiar today, but Eugene V. Debs, born in 1855, was a famous headline-grabbing politician in his day. And he remains quite a figure for American left activists.
He was the Socialist presidential candidate five times. At 1920 he appeared from a cell where he was serving a sentence of ten years in prison for having called in 1918 to resist the compulsory recruitment for the First World War.
“I have been accused of obstructing the war. I admit it. Gentlemen, I hate war,” he told the jury during the trial.
“Inmate Number 9653” garnered more than 900,000 votes that year. His sentence was commuted in 1921 and he was released. He died five years later.
The polemicist
Lyndon LaRouche ran for president eight times. He participated in all of them from 1976 to 2004.
Born in 1922, this far-right polemicist and conspiracy theorist began his post-World War II political career on the far left, before founding the American Workers Party, under whose banner he ran in 1976. .
Subsequently, he tried his hand at being a Democrat (much to the party’s chagrin) or an Independent. Throughout his life his ideology evolved towards extreme right theses and he was accused many times of anti-Semitism, which he denied.
In the late 1980s Lyndon LaRouche was sentenced to 15 years in prison for tax evasion, which did not prevent him from running in the 1992 elections from jail.
He recorded messages about the economy or education that were broadcast while he was incarcerated. He achieved just over 26,000 votes in the elections.
He passed away in 2019 at the age of 96.