Trump’s tricky dual-purpose campaign – win elections and stay out of prison

Former US President Donald Trump’s campaign to return to the White House is facing obstacles the size of Mount Everest: 91 criminal charges in four jurisdictions and possibly four criminal trials in 2024, the year of the election. At stake is an answer to the oft-repeated assertion that “in America no one is above the law.”

How his campaign team and his lawyers are planning to scale these mountains remains to be seen but it is already clear that Trump intends to employ a method he has used through much of his business and political careers when dealing with lawsuits – delay, delay, delay. In mid-August, his attorneys requested that one of his trials, on charges of blocking the peaceful transfer of power, a bedrock of democracy, be postponed until April 2026.

That would be more than a year after the elections, in November 2024, and appears to be based on Trump’s hope that he would be president again and therefore could tell the Department of Justice to drop that case and a slew of other federal felony charges. Legal scholars say that would not work in the latest indictment under Georgia state law brought by a grand jury in Atlanta. 

It focused on election interference in Georgia and named Trump and 18 others, including some of his most prominent lawyers,  as participants in a conspiracy to fraudulently change the election results in Georgia, whose Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensberger, rebuffed Trump when he asked him to “find” 11,780 Georgia votes to make him the winner.

That indictment was based on the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, a legal instrument originally designed to bring the mafia to justice. The effective use of RICO catapulted former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani to national fame. Giuliani, Trump’s long-time lawyer and advisor, is one of the conspirators accused in Georgia. For Trump, the Georgia indictment is the most problematic.

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Unlike in federal cases, Trump could not shut down the Georgia proceedings, or pardon himself, if he were re-elected next year.

Barring a miracle, Trump will be elected the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. He has a commanding lead in polls among Republican primary voters, partly because most of his Republican rivals have shied away from directly criticizing him for his role in the January 6, 2021, assault by Trump supporters on the Capitol in Washington.

 It was the first time in American history that a loser in presidential elections attempted to stop the peaceful transfer of power.

Though Trump looks assured of the Republican nomination, betting on the outcome of the general elections would be a fool’s game. Trump would need to widen his appeal beyond the “base” of supporters who believe his every word, think that the 2020 elections were stolen and that President Joe Biden heads an administration of left-wing extremists bent on destroying the United States.

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Of the Republicans aspiring for their party’s nomination, one stands out in tackling Trump head-on. He is Will Hurd, the only black Republican representative in the House of Representatives from 2014 to 2019, representing a swing district in Texas. Hurd has no chance of being nominated but his observation on Trump’s motivation for running again is worth noting.

“Donald Trump is not running to make America great again,” he said in a television interview. “Donald Trump is not running for president to defend our interests overseas. Donald Trump is not even running to represent the people who voted for him in 2016 and 2020. Donald Trump is running for president in order for him to stay out of jail.”

This is toxic talk for the estimated one-third of Republicans who believe every word Trump is saying, think that the 2020 elections were stolen by Democratic cheating, cheer the hundreds of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol, consider those serving prison sentences for the assault political prisoners, and agree with Trump’s constant assertions that the legal cases against him are a witch hunt and aimed to keep him from running again. His phrase, often repeated, is “electoral interference.”

Now that the most extensive charges against him – racketeering under the RICO Act – have been filed, legal scholars have begun debating which, if any, of the cases brought by three prosecutors in four cities will be tried next year in the midst of his election campaign. 

The April 2026 date Trump lawyers suggest for a trial on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 elections contrasts sharply with the date proposed by the federal special counsel, Jack Smith: January 2 of next year. The Georgia district attorney who assembled the racketeering case wants Trump to stand trial on March 4.

In the view of prosecutors pressing for a quick trial, the voting public deserves to know whether a candidate for the highest office of the land is guilty of previously having used that office to subvert the will of the people and attempt a coup. 

The rationale Trump’s legal team has provided for the 2026 date is the tremendous amount of material the government has provided to prove its case. The defence says there are 11.5 million pages of documents to review and point out that to do that by next January would be the equivalent of reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace 78 times a day, every day until a jury is selected.

There are legal experts who doubt that Trump will face a jury in any of the pending indictments. Michael Mukasey, a former US attorney general with years of experience as a Manhattan federal judge told the New York Times that “the odds are slim to none that any of them gets to trial before the elections.” (They are scheduled for November 5, 2024).

The big question is how the ex-president’s monumental legal problems will affect the elections. As it looks now, it will be a rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden. The Democrats are confident that Biden will prevail even though there is concern over his age. He will be 82 in November 2024 and 86 at the end of his term if he wins re-election.

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)

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