Donald Trump’s decisive win in Monday’s Iowa caucuses, the first contest of the Republican primary calendar, may be quickly overshadowed Tuesday with another expected court appearance.
The collision of Trump’s political and legal lives is becoming more stark as voters begin casting their ballots, a reminder that the current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination — if not the White House — is facing multiple criminal and civil charges across the country.
Trump has said he plans to attend Tuesday’s opening of a defamation trial where E. Jean Carroll is seeking damages after Trump attacked her publicly a day after a civil trial sided with her and found him liable for battery and defamation. He has said he may testify in the trial as well.
If he does appear in court in Manhattan, it will follow a pattern of Trump attending civil and procedural trials he’s not legally required to attend. Those appearances have instead appeared to serve as opportunities for him to rail against what he says is an unfair legal system bent on blocking his re-election.
“He clearly sees this as part of his campaign strategy,” said Caroline Fredrickson, a visiting professor at Georgetown Law.
“He’s used a lot of the trials … to fan the flames of his far-right base about the ‘deep state’ and about the conspiracies against him and the ‘stolen election’ and all of that.”
The strategy was in full view last Thursday during the final day of the civil fraud case in New York targeting the finances of Trump’s real estate empire. At the end of his defence team’s closing arguments, Trump launched into a nearly six-minute diatribe that included a stream of personal and political attacks.
“I’m an innocent man. I’ve been persecuted by somebody running for office,” Trump told the court, speaking from the defence table despite having been barred from giving a formal closing argument by Judge Arthur Engoron. “They want to make sure that I don’t win again.”
After being cut off by the judge, who had warned the defence team to “control your client,” Trump held a press conference at one of his properties in Manhattan where he continued his attacks on Engoron, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and others in front of a crowd of media and supporters.
Engoron is now weighing the case and will determine how severe a penalty Trump and his company will face. He has already ruled that fraud was committed, and James has asked for fines up to US$370 million and a ban on Trump doing business in New York.
How will the rest of the year play out for Trump?
At Thursday’s press conference, Trump said he plans to attend “all of my trials” — not noting that he won’t have a choice but to attend the most serious, criminal ones.
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By the time his first scheduled criminal trial begins on March 4, in the federal case accusing him of conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss, the first state primaries and caucuses will have come and gone, potentially securing his path toward the Republican nomination.
New Hampshire will hold the first primary after Iowa on Jan. 23, followed by Nevada’s Feb. 8 caucus and the South Carolina primary on Feb. 24.
The election subversion case is currently on hold as an appeals court weighs Trump’s argument that he’s immune from prosecution for actions he says he performed as part of his official presidential duties. That issue could ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
If the currently scheduled trial date holds, then it will start one day before Super Tuesday, when 13 states hold their primaries. The Republican race could be effectively over by the time those results are in.
The final states will hold their primary votes on March 19 — six days before Trump is due to face his second trial, this time on business fraud charges in Manhattan related to alleged hush money payments to a porn star to hide an affair during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The trial in the federal classified documents case — in which Trump is accused of unlawfully taking White House materials to his Mar-a-Lago estate after his presidency and refusing to return them to the government — is set to begin on May 4, less than two months ahead of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee where the party’s presidential candidate formally accepts their nomination.
A trial date for Trump has yet to be set in his fourth criminal case in Georgia, accusing him and over a dozen other defendants of a racketeering conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in the state. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has requested a trial date of Aug. 5, but the complex case is facing a series of procedural delays.
In between all of these trial dates will likely be multiple appeals and arguments for presidential immunity — including, potentially, before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Mary Fan, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law, said she expects Trump and his defence team to do all they can to delay the trials, or at least their verdicts, until after November’s general election.
“Trial dates are rarely set in stone,” Fan said.
“Most cases in the American criminal justice system plead out. … However, this case is special in the sense that we have a defendant who is less likely than your typical defendant to plead out.”
That refusal to admit alleged wrongdoing or plead guilty to avoid trial has appeared to endear Trump to a growing number of Republican voters. Ever since his first indictment last April, in the Manhattan hush money case, his polls have only continued to rise, according to the FiveThirtyEight national polling average — and Trump’s team has suggested he won’t stop.
“President Trump is always going to defend himself,” senior adviser Jason Miller told the Associated Press last week. “We’re not going to allow any free shots on goal of Joe Biden’s legal henchmen trying to commit election interference.”
The extensive media coverage, combined with the higher name recognition enjoyed by all former presidents, seems to have left his Republican rivals struggling to make an impact in the polls.
The strongest contenders for second place, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, still poll less combined than Trump does nationally and have failed to overtake him in the early state races.
“Trump is in such an unusual position … (that) he can run a different type of campaign than everybody else did,” said Tim Hagle, a political science professor at the University of Iowa.
Much remains up in the air for how the rest of the year plays out for Trump legally. It’s not yet clear if a verdict in any of the cases can come before November’s general election, or even the party conventions this summer.
Fan says Trump will face difficulties having to appear in court if the various trials begin running into each other. Prosecutors in the various jurisdictions have likely been in contact with each other to ensure their trials don’t overlap and force Trump to be in two or more places at once, she said.
Such cooperation has been seen before in multi-jurisdiction criminal cases, Fan noted. But those precedents have rarely involved politically-affiliated alleged crimes.
“If you think about people who have committed fraud in multiple states, or someone who has murdered people in different jurisdictions over a period of time … that’s where the precedent has been set,” she said.
Political watchers, meanwhile, have only grown more certain that none of this is likely to affect Trump’s standing with Republican voters.
Whether that changes in the general election remains to be seen.
“Even Republicans who have criticized him … have said they would vote for him if he’s the nominee,” said Matthew Lebo, a political science professor at Western University. “So it appears they’ve made their choice.”
—with files from Global’s Jackson Proskow and the Associated Press
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