Now that the leading Republican candidate for president in 2024 is facing the possibility of years in prison, the American political landscape is scrambled once again, with deep implications for the election campaign and the country.

Donald Trump has pleaded not guilty to what may be his most serious legal challenge in a long, litigious life. A federal indictment of 37 felony charges against him includes conspiracy, obstruction of justice and violations of the Espionage Act for retaining classified documents at his Florida residence that prosecutors say exposed nuclear secrets, military operations and intelligence personnel. It’s the same law that doomed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for spying for the Soviet Union.

After years of bending rules and breaking norms as a businessman and president, Trump has reached a pinnacle of sorts for unprecedented behaviour:

• Never before has a former president been arrested on federal charges.
• Never before has a former president arrested on federal charges been his party’s frontrunner for nomination to the presidency.
• Never before has a former president arrested on federal charges as the frontrunner to nomination been forecast to run against the incumbent whose administration is prosecuting him.

As if that weren’t enough, Trump’s legal turmoil includes a 34-count state indictment in New York for falsifying business records related to hush money for a porn actress, and pending charges involving election interference in Georgia. In what would be separate litigation, the special counsel in the documents case, Jack Smith, is contemplating charges against Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Polls show legal setbacks increase Trump’s popularity

The weight of all this has added yet another layer of public distrust and disgust in government, which has been marinating since the Vietnam war era of the 1960s. In this latest episode, one side hates the US Department of Justice for prosecuting Trump. The other side hates Trump for his alleged crimes. A recent Pew research poll found that only two in ten Americans trust the government to act in the best interest of the country – prosecute or not – compared with three out of four 65 years ago.

In the middle it all are other Republicans running for president, caught in a political bind that mirrors the public’s: they can condemn Trump for acts that could send him to prison and risk alienating his base of supporters, or condemn a “weaponised” justice department for election campaign interference. Most of the challengers are siding with Trump, and why wouldn’t they? They cross him at their peril. One long-shot contender, Vivek Ramaswamy, a wealthy tech entrepreneur, has promised to pardon Trump if he wins and urged the others to make the same pledge. Some have.

Three other long shots, two of them former governors, have sharply criticised Trump for inflicting his own legal wounds. Chris Christie of New Jersey called the 49-page indictment “damning” and wondered why anyone would attack the justice department. “Blame him,” Christie told voters at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire. “He did it.” Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas accused Trump of a “wilful disregard for the Constitution” and called for him to drop out of the running. Will Hurd, a former House member from Texas, has called Trump “a lawless, selfish, failed politician”.

The indictment was loaded with stunning details of Trump’s efforts to hang onto documents, stored in easy public view. Photos showed boxes of them in a closet, on a stage, beside a toilet and behind a shower curtain. Most of the charges arose not from Democrats out to get Trump, but from grand jury testimony by people close to him, including employees and a former lawyer.

Nonetheless, he blasted a “corrupt” justice department for not prosecuting his vice president, Mike Pence, and his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state, arguing that they, too, had retained sensitive documents and information. Except they hadn’t. Investigations found the material benign. A case involving Biden family business dealings is still under review.

Trump’s supporters accuse Biden of initiating the documents case when, in fact, it was a grand jury of ordinary citizens in Florida, a Republican-led state, who voted to charge him. The accusation that Biden used the justice department to end his opponent’s political life might seem reasonable were it not for the fact Trump is the Democrats’ preferred Republican candidate, because Biden beat him in 2020 by more than seven million votes.

“I’M INNOCENT,” Trump screamed on his social media platform after his arrest. At a rally the next day, he proclaimed the latest prosecution “will go down as one the worst abuses of power on record.”

As he has before, Trump is expected to follow a well-worn playbook to mitigate or escape accountability by slow-walking demands for evidence and fighting the admission of evidence against him – all with the usual public remarks that include false allegations, whataboutisms and ugly epithets for his enemies. He called Smith, a career federal prosecutor who has also led cases at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, a “thug”, a “slimeball” and “deranged”.

Helping him, too, are the same attack lines – “witch hunt”, “hoax” – he has used throughout other investigations: into Russian interference in the 2016 election, two impeachments, the New York porn actress case, an alleged sexual assault in New York involving another woman and now the charge that he put national security at risk. Even Christian evangelicals suspended their biblical sense of morality to stick with Trump after he was recorded boasting: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything… Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

The judge in the documents case has set 14 August as the trial date, although a delay is virtually certain while lawyers determine such matters as how secret documents might be used in evidence. Timing is critical: the judge in the New York case set a start date of 25 March 2024, and the Georgia prosecutor is about to announce when her case might begin. There is also the question of what Smith does in the 2020 election case.

The longer any of these prosecutions takes, the better it serves Trump, who is vowing to stay in the race no matter what, bolstered by polls that show legal setbacks only increase his popularity. A survey by National Public Radio immediately after his arrest in the documents case found that his “approval” rating among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents jumped by eight points, to 76 per cent. His “unfavourable” rating fell by the same margin, to 19 per cent. Another post-arrest poll showed his lead over his nearest competitor, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, increased by ten points. No one else was close. DeSantis and others are finding it difficult, if not impossible, to get their own messages out.

A clue as to how this might end has been provided by Trump himself. In 2016, after federal investigators determined that emails deleted from Hillary Clinton’s private server did not warrant legal action, Trump underscored the urgency of protecting America’s secrets: “In my administration,” he said, “I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.”
At some point soon, a jury will decide if he was right.

A supreme problem

America’s three branches of government are designed so politics can influence only Congress and the Executive, with the Supreme Court set apart, resistant to outside persuasion.

It would be naive to think justices don’t share some of the same views as the president who appointed them

That’s a lofty goal, considering Supreme Court justices are appointed by presidents who belong to political parties. It would be naive to think justices don’t share some of the same views as the president who appointed them.

Nonetheless, the court is now facing questions of public trust, owing largely to its lopsided composition of six conservative justices (all appointed by Republicans) and three liberals (all appointed by Democrats).

A survey by the Pew Research Center in April found that roughly the same number of Americans have a favourable opinion of the court as those who don’t. That’s a precipitous change from as recently as 2019, when Pew found that nearly 70 per cent of Americans had a favourable view of the court.

The decline largely reflects President Donald Trump’s luck in filling three vacancies with conservatives. While two replaced like for like, the third took the seat of liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in 2020.

The impact of this was never clearer than the court’s 6-3 decision last year to overturn Roe v Wade, ending federal guarantees to abortion after nearly 50 years and ignoring overwhelming public support for abortion rights.

That decision, following the unprecedented leak of the draft opinion months before, helped erode overall trust in the court. This was reflected in other polls: the Associated Press found only 18 per cent of respondents had “a great deal” of confidence in the court while 36 per cent had “hardly any”; a Quinnipiac University survey found the highest disapproval rating among registered voters since 2004.

Additional scepticism has been building for years over issues related to the longest-serving justice of the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas (appointed by President George HW Bush in 1991), and his wife, Virginia.

Mrs Thomas, known as Ginni, is a longtime activist for conservative causes with close ties to Congressional Republicans. Democrats have argued for her husband to recuse himself from cases that involve organisations for which she works. He has declined.

Last year, the House panel investigating the 2021 Capitol attack obtained texts from Ginni Thomas urging Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to help overturn the 2020 election. Again, Democrats called for Thomas to recuse himself from any case involving the election. Again, he declined.

The couple have also drawn scrutiny for not reporting gifts and financial considerations from a wealthy Republican donor. These included luxury vacations, real-estate deals and school tuition for a relative. Nor did Thomas disclose his wife’s earnings from a conservative organisation in the early 2000s.

Another Republican-appointed justice, Samuel Alito, author of the Roe draft and its final ruling, defended his 2008 fishing trip to Alaska with a friend, a wealthy hedge fund manager who had cases before the court. Alito said he was neither required to report the trip nor to recuse himself from cases involving his friend.

All federal judges at lower levels serve under a code of ethics that does not apply to the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts has expressed no interest in extending it.

Michael Janofsky is a writer and editor in Los Angeles. He previously spent 24 years as a correspondent for The New York Times