VICE
Can anything stop former President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign juggernaut, now that Trump has all but crushed his GOP primary opponents and pulled aheadof President Joe Biden in national polls?
While November is a long time away, and plenty could happen before then, voters do say Trump has a massive weakness: A potential criminal conviction. In poll after poll, lots of voters who shrug off Trump’s four indictments say they wouldn’t support him if he’s convicted of a felony. If they mean it—or even if a big chunk of them do—they could easily be enough to keep him out of the White House.
What remains to be seen, of course, is whether they mean it—and, crucially, whether prosecutors can put Trump on trial in time for the rest of us to find out.
That makes prosecutors’ race against the clock one of the most important narratives of the 2024 election cycle, as teams of lawyers work feverishly around the country to overcome Trump’s efforts to gum up the gears of the judicial system and push the start-date of all his trials past November.
Nearly a quarter of Trump’s own supporters said he shouldn’t be the nominee if he’s convicted of a crime, according to a New York Times/Sienna College poll published in December. A clear majority of Americans, 57 percent, said they would not vote for Trump if he’s convicted of a felony in a September Reuters/Ipsos poll — including just under a third of Republicans.
In Iowa, almost a third of GOP caucusgoerssaid Trump would not be fit to be president if convicted. In New Hampshire, where Nikki Haley took second place in the GOP primary last Tuesday, nearly 9-out-of-10 her supporters backed that sentiment. The number of voters who oppose putting a convicted felon in the White House is high in key swing states, too.
D.C. or Bust?
Yet legal experts say it’s far from certain Trump will end up on trial in any of his four cases this year.
Prosecutors waited until 2023 to begin filing indictments against him, leaving precious little time to push the court system. And Trump has used every trick in the book to slow them down.
The most serious case with a decent chance of making it all the way to trial is in Washington D.C., where Trump is accused of efforts to subvert the 2020 election.
One big reason: District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, who was appointed by former Democratic President Barack Obama.
Judge Chutkan has expressed more concern from the bench about the timeline of the case than any of the other judges overseeing Trump’s criminal cases.
She has even threatened to push forward the start-date of the trial to punish Trump if he refuses to follow the gag order she imposed on him against attacking witnesses in the case over their potential testimony, as well as court staff and members of the prosecution team.
This trial had been scheduled to start on March 4—but it is currently on ice while Trump appeals one of Judge Chutkan’s decisions denying him presidential immunity. While many legal experts think Trump will ultimately lose that appeal, the question is how long the courts will take to get a final ruling…
