The former president and 2024 Republican frontrunner has an unprecedented balancing act between political events and court appearances
The week of Sunday, March 3, 2024, promises to be a busy one for former President Donald Trump and is symbolic of his unprecedented split-screen balance of campaigning for a White House return and repeatedly appearing in court as part of his fight against a cumulative 91 criminal charges.
Monday, March 4, is the day state prosecutors in Georgia have suggested his trial should begin. The 2024 GOP front-runner stands accused in Fulton County, encompassing Atlanta, of orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse President Joe Biden’s 2020 Georgia win, the first Peach State victory by a Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992, and subverting the will of voters.
Trump’s Georgia trial will likely be postponed to accommodate his federal district court trial in Washington, for which Judge Tanya S. Chutkan set a trial date for March 5. Trump faces four charges related to his efforts to remain in office after his election loss in 2020 and his role in the events that led to the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Assuming Trump’s federal trial starts that day — his lawyers are offering a wave of motions to delay proceedings for months — it will be just part of a busy news day. March 5 is Super Tuesday in the Republican presidential primary. Polls show Trump with leads of 30 percentage points or more over rivals such as Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, and others.
So, if Trump hasn’t sewn up the GOP primary fight by then, Super Tuesday could be decisive. Republican primaries are set for Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, and Virginia, plus caucuses in Alaska and Utah.
Meanwhile, the federal district judge overseeing the classified documents case against Trump has decided the criminal trial will begin May 20, 2024, in Fort Pierce, Florida. That’s toward the end of the Republican nominating season.
Trump’s court obligations extend further, to his New York state criminal case in Manhattan related to the legality of a hush money payment to a porn star. The trial is set to start on March 25, 2024, a bit over halfway through the GOP presidential nominating calendar, though the Trump criminal case’s presiding judge has signaled he could be open to changing its date in light of the other possible trials the former president now faces.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to all 91 charges across the four indictments.
For a conventional political candidate, this would likely seem a scheduling nightmare. Not so with Trump, who, in 2016, beat a field of establishment Republicans
Trump has pleaded not guilty to all 91 charges across the four indictments.
for the GOP nomination. Then, in one of the biggest surprises in political history, he won the White House over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Trump is now trying to be the second returning president after Democrat Grover Cleveland, who held the office from 1885-89 and 1893-97. Trump, while in grave legal jeopardy from the two federal cases and state trials in Georgia and New York, might be helped politically.
“Trump is so adept at making what looks like a disaster turn out to be a benefit for him,” said Tobe Berkovitz, an associate professor of advertising emeritus at Boston University and former political media consultant whose clients included retired Sens. Patrick Leahy and Tom Harkin and the late Sen. Carl Levin.
TRUMP ORGANIZATION TRIAL A TASTE OF THINGS TO COME Trump, in a pair of civil lawsuits against him, has already offered a pugilistic preview of how he will deal with competing claims on his time as the legal charges against him and the 2024 campaign move forward.
Trump is appealing a May 2023 jury verdict from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, which found the former president liable for sexually abusing and defaming author E.
Jean Carroll. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million in damages from Trump.
Trump, throughout the proceedings, criticized and lambasted Carroll. In a CNN appearance the day after the verdict, Trump continued to disparage Carroll. He called her a “whack job”; said the trial was “rigged”; denied raping Carroll and said, “I didn’t do anything else, either”; and claimed, “I don’t know who the hell she is.”
Then, there’s Trump’s New York state civil fraud trial. While the first Republican voting contest, the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15, 2024, approaches, Trump has voluntarily spent many days in a Manhattan courtroom, watching and testifying in proceedings that threaten the future of his New York real estate empire.
While Trump took breaks from the campaign trail to attend his Manhattan civil trial throughout October, he entered the first full week of November with testimony from the witness stand. There, he decried Judge Arthur Engoron’s pretrial ruling against him and others finding them liable for “persistent and repeated” business fraud.
“This is a very unfair trial ... and I hope the public is watching,” Trump said from the witness stand on Nov. 6 during the civil trial spurred by New York Attorney General Letitia James, which accuses him and his adult children of inflating the value of assets by as much as $3.6 billion.
Facing up to $250 million in fines to the state of New York, Trump has dubbed his accusers “radical Democrats” and “thugs” seeking to shut down his reelection campaign.
“It’s a terrible thing you’ve done. You knew nothing about me,” Trump told Engoron at one point in the trial.
“You believed this political hack back there,” Trump added, pointing to James.
Trump’s campaign again raised funds off of his latest testimony, claiming that “this is how dictatorships are born” and posting on his Truth Social platform. While his legal woes bring costly financial demands to his campaign lifeline, the Trump campaign announced it pulled $45.5 million in the third quarter of the year on Oct. 5, significantly out-fundraising for the third quarter of the year one of his top opponents, DeSantis, whose campaign posted a $15 million haul.
TRUMP CAN PICK HIS CAMPAIGN STOPS
Trump’s legal travails and using the courtroom to protest his various criminal indictments and attacks on his business holds many “advantages,” Berkovitz said. Chiefly saving time and money by staying in the media limelight through his constant legal coverage.
“He doesn’t overexpose himself on the campaign trail,” Berkovitz added. “So it’s not like, ‘Today, he’s in Topeka. Tomorrow, he’s in Manchester. Friday, he’s in Omaha.’ He can be much more selective about when and where he travels and actually delivers a campaign speech.”
Trump’s preoccupations in the courtroom may have cost him time that could have been spent gaining support from state governors, such as when Gov. Kevin Stitt (R-OK) became the first head of state to endorse DeSantis in June or DeSantis’s endorsement by Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-IA) in early November after months of campaigning in Iowa.
The campaign-court strategy appears to be working for Trump, who boasts a RealClearPolitics polling average lead of 44 points above his GOP competition as of Nov. 7.
Joe Walsh, a Republican congressman from Illinois from 2011-13 who has since become a staunch Trump critic and challenged the then-president for the 2020 Republican nomination, admitted that Trump’s campaign in the courts provided an advantage over his GOP rivals — and he may even reach some independents.
Walsh said he has heard from voters across the diverse GOP landscape, including conservative critics of Trump like himself, that the overwhelming sentiment under the GOP’s big tent is his prosecutions are “overkill.”
“They tell me that it seems like this is overkill. And it is kind of the Justice Department trying to place their thumb on an election result in 2024,” Walsh said. “So, I think Trump can play this, and he will, and I think it can be advantageous for him well beyond just the base.”
COMBINING COURT
AND CAMPAIGNING
Trump is a most unusual defendant, in his four criminal cases and two civil ones, in that he’s a former president of the United States sitting at a defendant’s table like anyone else would. Amid the 2024 presidential campaign, it has made for some awkward proceedings.
Trump has recently used his time at the witness stand in Manhattan to lob attacks at James, calling her a “political hack,” and spar with Engoron, saying, “He called me a fraud, and he didn’t know anything about me.” That also prompted James to take to X, formerly known as Twitter, posting, “I will not be harassed” and that “this case will go on.”
Trump attorney Chris Kise referred to Trump as the “former and again soonto-be commander in chief,” furtherance that Trump’s legal woes fall second to his priority of winning back the presidency, which could amount to his greatest defense should he be convicted in one of four criminal cases.
Likewise, Trump’s Washington trial judge in the federal election subversion case, Chutkan, has dinged Trump’s lawyers for bringing Trump’s campaign talking points into their arguments before her.
“I do not need to hear any campaign rhetoric in my court,” Chutkan chided Trump attorney John Lauro during a mid-October hearing about the scope of the government’s gag order request.
Trump’s civil fraud trial was the first venue in which he faced a narrow gag order, barring him from referring to courtroom staff, which his team has violated twice, according to Engoron, who ordered $15,000 in fines.
His criminal trial judge in Washington applied a limited gag order against Trump at the request of special counsel Jack Smith.
Chutkan ruled Trump could criticize his indictments all he wanted but couldn’t lob inflammatory remarks about specific prosecutors and the judge, their families, or possible witnesses or jury members involved in the case. For example, Trump could no longer refer to the special counsel over his two federal indictments as a “thug.”
Smith has called for stricter enforcement of the gag order, saying that repeated violations by Trump should incur punishments such as fines or even jailing him.
“I don’t think his voters care if he goes to jail for breaching a gag order,” attorney Andrew Lieb of Lieb at Law told the Washington Examiner, adding that a gag order breach resulting in some form of detention could energize Trump’s base.
Lieb also suggested that Trump’s meteoric success in the polls was all thanks to the sheer number of candidates who ran against him. Most of his GOP rivals publicly sympathized with Trump’s indictments over the summer and helped boost that sentiment among the Republican base.
“Chris Christie alone does nothing,” Lieb said, referring to the former governor and 2024 GOP candidate’s regular attacks against Trump. “If all of the candidates at once condemned him at the beginning when the first charge came in, they could have taken him out” much sooner.
In a sign that Trump’s campaign in the courtroom is likely to ascend to more unprecedented heights, Trump’s gag order will take center stage next month when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit weighs his appeal of the gag order. A three-judge panel has frozen Chutkan’s order until at least Nov. 20, when the court will hear oral arguments from both sides.
Any subsequent appeal would be to the Supreme Court, a move Trump’s attorneys have acknowledged and vowed to make if the D.C. Circuit rules against them in a recent court filing and since his indictment in the Washington case in early August.
“It is Election Interference, & the Supreme Court must intercede,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post following his indictment in Washington on Aug. 4. ★
I do not need to hear any campaign rhetoric in my court.
–Judge Tanya S. Chutkan