How Donald Trump’s trials and the Republican primary will intersect

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There are only FOUR qualifications needed to become the president of America. Article II of the constitution requires presidents to be natural-born citizens who have reached the age of 35 and have lived in America for 14 years. The 22nd Amendment added that candidates should not have been elected twice to the job before. Donald Trump meets those conditions, including the last hurdle despite his insistence that he will win both the 2016 and 2020 elections. Nothing prevents candidates plagued by legal problems, including criminal convictions, from running for president. Several presidential aspirants have even sought office from behind bars.

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Cases and primaries overlap in ways that tend to set the rule of law against the will of the people. This month, Mr Trump was found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll (he is appealing the verdict). She is about to owe more than the $5m the jury ordered her to pay, as Ms Carrolls lawyer seeks new damages stemming from Mr Trump doubling-down in an appearance on CNN the day after the verdict.

Jail time is also a risk. Mr Trump became the first former president to be criminally indicted on April 4 when he was indicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records in a Manhattan courtroom. The indictment involves an alleged cover-up, before the 2016 election, of payments to conceal alleged trials of Stephanie Clifford, an adult-film actress (also known as Stormy Daniels) and Karen McDougal, a model. According to Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, Mr Trump illegally hid the hush-money checks from Ms Clifford and McDougal as well as Dino Sajudin, a former doorman at Trump Tower who allegedly knew about to a child born to Mr Trump out of wedlock.

On May 23rd, the judge in The People of the State of New York v Donald J Trump announced that the trial would begin on March 25th 2024, two months into the primary season. The Republican front-runner will therefore campaign in 15 states for Super Tuesday delegates three weeks before going on trial in New York and, as the proceedings begin, prepare to woo voters in about 20 more states. Mr Trump could serve up to four years in prison for each of the 34 counts. But very few first-time offenders in these cases are put behind bars. And some legal experts have doubts about Mr Braggs’ approach. Falsifying records is a misdemeanor under New York law; Making those charges crimes requires piggybacking them on another crime.

Mr Trump’s attention could be further divided in the primaries and, if he prevails, in the general election by indictments on other criminal matters. Georgia Republicans will hold their primary on March 12th. Meanwhile, Mr Trump may be preparing for a trial focused on allegations that he sought to sway the Peach State in his favor after the 2020 election. A year ago, a special grand jury began considering evidence that Mr Trump and his allies may have made an illegal attempt to disrupt the administration of the 2020 election. The former president enlisted the help of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to find nearly 12,000 votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory there. The investigation also examined efforts by Trump teams to recruit a fake pool of voters to present to the vice-president, Mike Pence, when he counted electoral votes on January 6th.

Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, appears ready to move forward with indictments this summer. The head of the special grand jury said in February that he and his fellow jurors had recommended charges for as many as a dozen people including, he implied, Mr Trump. Ms Willis will present evidence to a regular grand jury in late July. Indictments are likely to appear in August (which is when the first major debate is scheduled), said Ryan Goodman, of New York University, but the case could be tied up in pre-trial proceedings for some time. .

The Department of Justice is gathering evidence in two sets of similarly serious potential cases. Both are in the hands of Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Merrick Garland, the attorney general, in November. Mr Smith is investigating Mr Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election and his role in the January 6 uprising. Last month, Mr Pence testified before a grand jury in this investigation. And Mr Smith appears poised to indict Mr Trump over troves of classified documents the former president removed from the White House and brought to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home.

After months of delay from federal district court judges’ decision to appoint a special master to sift through the documents, an appeals court in December ended the hold-up and delivered all the files to Mr. Smith. His eyes seemed to widen. He recently issued subpoenas looking into Mr Trump’s business dealings in seven foreign countries since 2017. The new line of inquiry could be sparked by an attempt to explain why Mr Trump brought all those files to him when he left the White House. Joyce Vance, a law professor at the University of Alabama and a former US attorney, predicts the charges in the documents case before the summer vacation season.

At every turn, Mr Trump has condemned the investigators for unfairly targeting him. In a letter to Mr Garland on 23rd May, his lawyers accused Mr Smith of bias. No President of the United States, in the history of our country, has ever been baselessly investigated in such a violent and unlawful manner, they wrote, before requesting a meeting with the attorney general to discuss the injustice being committed by your Special . Advice.

The accumulation of charges against Mr Trump could still hurt him. But, so far, their effect on Republicans has been quite the opposite. It fired them, did not lead them to say: You are fired!

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