Chris Christie, former Republican governor of New Jersey, now a television commentator, summed up what at least half the US has been thinking: “The circus continues.” It was a direct reference to how the legal entanglements surrounding Donald Trump are shaping American politics and – already – the campaign for president in 2024. Trump declared his candidacy in November.
Christie and Trump are no longer buddies. Once head of Trump’s transition team in 2017, Christie broke with him over the mob attack on the Capitol two years ago, a fitting end to the chaos that characterised Trump’s four years in office. That’s not a criticism. That’s reality. And Trump seems to like it that way, and so do his supporters.
There is no prohibition against an indicted, arrested or imprisoned candidate
Even as charges bore down on him from Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg over Trump’s role in a $130,000 payout to porn actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election (to hush up an alleged affair), Trump and his legal team spun it inside out – accusing Bragg of another Democrat “witch hunt”. The thinking was it could all play to Trump’s advantage, revving up supporters to protest and maybe even sack another building.
Legal challenges litter the Trump biography. And often they have juiced his popularity. It’s political genius in a way, playing the witch hunt card. Is it any wonder he remains the leading Republican choice for president next year? And if past is prologue, the major legal battles ahead will only keep it that way.
If you include the New York case, unresolved at the time of writing, Trump is facing a four-ring showdown between now and election day. And bear in mind, no matter how any case turns out, there is no constitutional prohibition against an indicted, arrested or imprisoned candidate running for president – even a former president who has been twice impeached.
Here’s a rundown of the other pending cases. After Trump left office in 2021, a number of documents turned up at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago. The problem is they didn’t turn up all at once when the government asked for them. Presidential papers remain property of the United States, not an outgoing president. After investigators found several hundred documents in their initial search, some marked as classified, they suspected there were more to be found. They had to use a subpoena to find them.
How and why did official documents wind up in Florida? Did Trump lawyers or Trump himself intentionally mislead federal agents searching his residence, telling them they had turned over everything when they hadn’t? Why would Trump even bother to hang onto property that was clearly not his? As Jimmy Stewart told Kim Novak, the big reveal in the Hitchcock thriller Vertigo: “You shouldn’t keep souvenirs of a killing. You shouldn’t have been that sentimental.”
The Justice Department has brought on a special counsel, Jack Smith, to make a case that could lead to a raft of federal charges, including obstruction, conspiracy, contempt of court and a violation of the Espionage Act by holding documents that could endanger national security.
The third case is in Georgia, one of the pivotal states that helped Joe Biden defeat Trump in 2020 and two Democrats win Senate run-off elections. The district attorney for Fulton County, Fani Willis, is investigating Trump’s role in efforts to overturn Biden’s victory there. The key piece of evidence is unambiguous: a recorded, then leaked, telephone call Trump made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Secretary of State, asking him to “find” the 11,780 votes that Trump needed to flip the result in his favour. Testifying before last year’s House panel investigating the Capitol attack, Raffensperger said he assured Trump the numbers were accurate as reported. “The numbers are the numbers,” he said. “The numbers don’t lie.”
The fourth case could pose the greatest legal risk for Trump. Smith is also investigating all of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, a sprawling probe that could result in serious felony charges. Smith’s work here began as a parallel effort to the House panel but is presumed to expand on it. He has the option to consider criminal charges the panel recommended but is not limited to them.
His ultimate decision could take into account the numerous ways Trump and his associates tried overturning results, from pressuring state officials to change outcomes, to specious law suits alleging fraud, to replacing legitimate electors (whose votes determine the outcome) with fake electors for him, to inciting a mob to storm the Capitol as a way to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to nullify the official tabulation of elector votes that certified Biden as the winner.
Whew! That entails a lot of lawyers and legal fees. No matter. Trump’s usual strategy when facing investigations and court challenges is to drag them out in time and up in venue – if possible to the Supreme Court which he packed with conservatives. Best-case scenario? Stretch things out until after 5 November, 2024, election day.
As all of this is playing out, leading Republicans are circling the wagons behind him, attacking prosecutors for a “political agenda” but ever mindful that a convincing prosecution could turn public support against them. They’re also aware that he backed some questionable candidates last year, leaving Democrats in control of the Senate, and Republicans with only a razor-thin margin in the House.
Republicans opposed to Trump Redux have been more circumspect in their public remarks, fearing the well-known Trump slash attacks against those he deems disrespectful or disloyal. Irrespective of his legal issues, he remains the most popular Republican in the land by far, and that keeps even anti-Trump Republicans in check.
Still, the primary field is growing. Trump has one serious challenger in Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has not yet declared his candidacy; one long-shot contender in former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who has; and one no-shot declared candidate in Vivek Ramaswamy, a wealthy entrepreneur. Pence and a few others, including Christie, are still mulling it over.
DeSantis, a smart politician but a wooden campaigner, basically ignored Trump during a recent book tour widely interpreted as groundwork for a presidential run. He sidestepped opportunities to criticise him but more recently sharpened his words. Responding to questions about the New York case, he attacked Bragg for pursuing it but made clear the issues were outside his knowledge zone. “I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair,” he said, twisting the knife.
Recent polls show Trump with a comfortable lead over DeSantis, by more than two to one in some. But they’re almost meaningless this far ahead of the election, especially with sticky judicial wickets commanding the biggest spotlights as the year grinds on. Trump has already called the New York prosecutor a “degenerate psychopath” and predicted “potential death & destruction” if he were indicted. So step right up and enjoy the show.
Return of the radical Democrat
Almost a year after she announced her candidacy for president in 2020, Marianne Williamson dropped out. It was pretty clear why. In a race for the Democrat nomination eventually won by Joe Biden, she campaigned far to the left of all other contenders.
An author of self-help books, social activist and spiritual leader for many, including Oprah Winfrey, she favoured reparations to Black Americans for slavery, a single-payer healthcare system and creation of a Department for Peace. She also favoured issues that continue to resonate, such as raising the federal minimum wage, fighting social inequalities, accelerating efforts to combat climate change and raising taxes on high earners. Alas, her positions proved too extreme and after two primary debates her fundraising stalled and she dropped out.
Progressives have not gone away and see a kindred spirit in Williamson
Well, she’s back. While other would-be Democrat contenders are deferring to Biden, Williamson announced her return as a candidate on 4 March, picking up where she left off. That makes her easy to dismiss, especially as Biden pivots to the centre after two years of doing what he could to placate party progressives who pushed for more aggressive steps to improve the nation’s healthcare protections, infrastructure and climate policy.
But even as Biden has moderated his goals to attract more independent voters, progressives have not gone away and see a kindred spirit in Williamson as a force to yank Biden leftward again for the sake of middle- and working-class people squeezed by inflation and concerned about the planet.
“I am not naive about these forces, which have no intention of allowing anyone into this conversation who does not align with their predetermined agenda,” she said in her announcement address, acknowledging the doubters. “I understand that, in their mind, only people who previously have been entrenched in the car that brought us into this ditch can possibly be considered qualified to bring us out of it.”
She has a long way to drive. One early poll among Democrats found Biden leading her 77 per cent to four.
Drilling into a deep controversy
In another move that disappointed his left-wing and environmental groups, President Biden approved a massive oil-drilling project for ConocoPhillips inside the Arctic Circle, projected to produce nearly 600 million barrels of oil over 30 years.
While the decision follows America’s biggest-ever investment in climate programmes, it comes as petrol prices remain stubbornly high across the country, in part because of western bans on Russian-produced crude oil. It also conflicts with Biden’s efforts to encourage a shift to electric vehicles.
An administration analysis of the project, known as Willow, said the area where the project would be built is one of the fastest-warming places in the world but that emissions would equal less than one per cent of 2019 totals, the equivalent of 280 million tonnes of carbon through the burning of the oil after capture.
Willow has environmentalists weeping. “The decision undermines Biden’s climate promises and again demonstrates how political and industry interests put ‘business as usual’ before the health of people and the planet,” two dozen Alaska and national groups said in a statement. “If built, Willow will be the largest new oil extraction project on federal lands in the United States. It will have devastating impacts to the entire western Arctic region, posing serious health, environmental, and food security threats to nearby Alaska Native communities.”
As a presidential candidate, Biden had promised “no more drilling on federal lands, period”. But politics of the day prevailed. With a Republican House to deal with, his decision on the drilling could help him win key Congressional votes on other big issues, not to mention the moderate votes he needs next year for re-election.
Meanwhile, environmental groups say they intend to sue to stop the project.
Michael Janofsky is a writer and editor in Los Angeles. He previously spent 24 years as a correspondent for The New York Times
