How many of Trump’s trials will happen before the election?

Three different prosecutors want to put former President Donald Trump on trial in four different cities next year, all before Memorial Day and in the midst of his presidential campaign.

It will be nearly impossible to pull off.

A morass of delays, court backlogs and legal skirmishes awaits, interviews with nearly two dozen current and former prosecutors, judges, legal experts and people involved in the Trump cases show. Some experts predicted that only one or two trials will take place next year; one speculated that none of the four Trump cases will start before the election.

It would be virtually unheardof for any defendant to play a game of courthouse Twister like this, let alone one who is also the leading contender for the Republican nomination for the presidency. And between the extensive legal arguments that must take place before a trial can begin — knowing that the trials themselves could last weeks — there are simply not enough boxes on the calendar to squeeze in all the former president’s trials.

“This is something that is not normal,” said Jeffrey Bellin, a former federal prosecutor in Washington who now teaches criminal procedure at William & Mary Law School and believes Trump might only be on trial once next year. “While each of the cases seems at this point to be strong, there’s only so much you can ask a defendant to do at one time.”

Any delay would represent a victory for Trump, who denies all wrongdoing and who could exploit the timeline to undermine the cases against him.

If his lawyers manage to drag out the trials into 2025 or beyond — potentially during a second Trump administration — Trump could seek to pardon himself or order his Justice Department to shut down the federal cases. And although he could not control the state prosecutions in Georgia or Manhattan in New York City, the Justice Department has long held that a sitting president cannot be criminally prosecuted, which likely applies to state cases as well.

Ultimately, the judges overseeing the four cases might have to coordinate so Trump’s lawyers can adequately prepare his defense without needlessly delaying the trials. Judges are permitted under ethics rules to confer with one another to efficiently administer the business of their courts, experts said, and they periodically do so.

“The four indictments can appear to resemble four cars converging on an intersection that has no lights or stop signs — but that won’t happen,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics professor at New York University School of Law. “Well before the intersection, the judges will figure it out.”

For now, Trump’s court schedule looks to be nearly as crowded as his campaign calendar, with potential trials overlapping with key dates in the Republican primary season.

A federal special counsel, Jack Smith, has proposed Jan. 2 (two weeks before the Iowa caucuses) as a date for Trump to stand trial in Washington on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. In a Thursday night court filing, Trump’s lawyers countered with a proposed date of April 2026.

Fani Willis, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney who last week announced racketeering charges against Trump, accusing him of orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse Georgia’s election results, wants that trial to begin March 4 (the day before Super Tuesday).

Smith’s recent case in Washington, and Willis’ in Georgia, were filed after Trump was already scheduled for two additional criminal trials next spring: March 25 in New York, on state charges related to a hush-money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels; and May 20 in Florida, on federal charges brought by Smith accusing Trump of mishandling classified material after leaving office.

Although the New York and Florida indictments were unveiled earlier, affording them first crack at the calendar, some experts now argue they should take a back seat to the election-related cases, in Georgia and Washington, in which the charges strike at the core of American democracy. Trial scheduling is not always a firstcome, first-served operation, and deference could be given to the most serious charges.

In a radio interview last month, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said that having been the first to indict did not necessarily mean he would insist on being the first to put the former president on trial. However, he said, the judge in the case, Juan Merchan, ultimately controls the calendar.

“We will follow the court’s lead,” Bragg said.

The most likely candidate to take over Bragg’s March trial date would be Smith and his election interference case. Recently, nearly a dozen Republican-appointed former judges and high-ranking federal officials submitted a brief to the judge overseeing that case, arguing that the trial should take place in January as Smith has proposed and citing a “national necessity” for a “fair and expeditious trial.”

But this is the case in which Trump’s lawyers have asked for a 2026 trial date, citing the voluminous amount of material turned over by the government — 11.5 million pages of documents, for example — that the defense must now review. Trump’s lawyers estimated that to finish by the prosecution’s proposed January trial date would mean reading the equivalent of “Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection.” In that case, Smith brought a narrow set of charges against Trump in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 election, totaling four felony counts, and with no co-defendants.

In contrast, Willis’ election case is a sweeping 98-page indictment of not only Trump, who faces 13 criminal counts, but also 18 co-defendants, including Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, and Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City. Already, Meadows has petitioned for his case to be moved from state to federal court, and other defendants are likely to follow suit. That process could take months and could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, probably making Willis’ proposed trial date of March 4 something of a long shot.

The sheer size of Trump’s Georgia case, and the fact it was the last of the four cases to be brought, suggests any Georgia trial of Trump could be delayed even beyond next year.