By the time you read these words, Donald Trump — former president and current front-runner to be renominated as the Republican Party’s candidate for the presidency in 2024 — will have been arraigned for the third time on criminal charges, presumably around 4pm in Washington, DC (11pm in South Africa). This time, after undergoing arraignments in New York City and Florida, the charges will be made in Washington, DC.  

The newest charges stem from his role in pursuing a palpably false narrative about his having won the 2020 presidential election, then trying to overturn the actual result, and, finally, encouraging a violent mob to seize the Capitol Building in an (ultimately unsuccessful) effort to prevent Joe Biden from being declared the winner in the electoral vote count. 

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In the two previous indictments, first, the prosecutor in New York City is seeking his conviction for having violated campaign finance laws by illegally diverting funds in an elaborate scheme in order to use those funds to pay off an adult film actress with whom he had an affair so as to buy her silence as he pursued his first presidential bid. There are some who argue this charge stretches the appropriateness of the laws being cited, although the basic shenanigans have gone largely unchallenged. 

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In the second case, charges have been filed in Florida by special prosecutor Jack Smith over the mishandling of highly classified documents unlawfully retained by Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club and stored in totally inappropriate locations inside the club. And then, that he refused to return them to the government after repeated requests by the relevant agencies. A number of documents were so highly classified they should never have been outside a secure controlled access facility, rather than thrown willy-nilly into boxes heaped up in a bathroom and shower stall. 

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A pair of the club’s supernumeraries have now been charged as well with attempting to destroy electronic recordings of the goings-on with those documents as they were shifted around in the storerooms of that club. 

Meanwhile, the Fulton County (Atlanta, Georgia) prosecutor, Fani Willis, is moving closer to indicting Trump over illegal efforts to get Georgia’s vote totals changed by fiat so that Trump could get closer to an electoral win in 2020. Control over voting regulation and management largely falls to the 50 states in the US, rather than at the national level, except for some financial regulation and violations of the civil right to vote. 

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But the charges central to Thursday’s arraignment will almost certainly result in unprecedented legal fireworks as the accused’s lawyers will bring into the proceedings the idea that anything — true, false, or even positively delusional — the ex-president says or said was protected speech under the American Constitution’s sacrosanct First Amendment. 

In response to such an assertion and its criticality in his defence in the  upcoming trials, historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote in her Wednesday night news blog, “since the [newest] indictment became public, Trump loyalists have insisted that the Department of Justice is attacking Trump’s First Amendment rights to free speech. Indeed, if [Rudy] Giuliani’s unhinged appearance on Newsmax last night is any indication, it appears that has been their strategy all along. Aside from the obvious limit that the First Amendment does not cover criminal behavior, the grand jury sidestepped this issue by acknowledging that Trump had a right to lie about his election loss. It indicted him for unlawfully trying to obstruct an official proceeding and to disenfranchise voters. [Italics added] 

“Today, Trump’s former attorney general William Barr dismissed the idea that the indictment is an attack on Trump’s First Amendment rights. Barr told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: ‘As the indictment says, they’re not attacking his First Amendment right. He can say whatever he wants. He can even lie. 

“He can even tell people that the election was stolen when he knew better. But that does not protect you from entering into a conspiracy. All conspiracies involve speech. And all fraud involves speech. Free speech doesn’t give you the right to engage in a fraudulent conspiracy.’”

Cox Richardson then went on to describe Trump defender Rudy Giuliani’s own legal troubles, “unrelated to the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. His former assistant Noelle Dunphy is suing him for sexual harassment and abuse, and new transcripts filed in the New York Supreme Court of Giuliani’s own words reveal disturbing fantasies of sexual domination that are unlikely to help his reputation…” That, of course, is beyond his embarrassing incidents of using a landscape company’s parking lot for a media conference (instead of a larney hotel with almost the same name or black hair dye dripping down his temples at another appearance). 

All of the indictments, pre-trial motions, Jacob Zuma-esque delaying tactics, and then even the eventual trials will become features of a fiendishly complex schedule for the former chief executive as he tries to campaign for his party’s nomination for the presidency. There are no real, fixed dates yet for the trials for his miscellaneous legal troubles, although the Florida case is now set for sometime in May 2024. The teams of lawyers and the various judges will have to sort all this out in what will be a charged, near-toxic atmosphere, going forward. 

However, the first two primaries and caucuses for the presidential nomination occur in January. Campaigning in New Hampshire and Iowa are especially retail exercises of convincing one voter and one caucus delegate at a time to support one. Merging that campaign schedule with what may evolve from all the eventual trials will become difficult, and a challenge for someone known to be given to extemporaneous, ad hoc decisions about his public appearances more generally. 

Still the Republicans’ leading light

Even so, at least for now, Donald Trump appears to have a commanding lead over any — or all — of the other contenders for the Republican nomination, despite the fact not a single vote has yet been cast. And this lead comes as those indictments pile up. Analysts argue Trump has been effective among many Republican Party supporters in portraying those indictments as proof the so-called deep state/the media/Democratic Party forces have orchestrated a persecution of him. Accordingly, his resilience is a demonstration of the power of his message about those evil designs and the need for voters to stand by him.  

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is his nearest competitor, but his popularity continues to sink nationally, despite a highly publicised re-set of his campaign. Unfortunately for DeSantis, as one wag put it, the more you know him, the less you like him. His culture war efforts in Florida secured his reelection against a lacklustre opponent, but beyond more Republican Party-leaning parts of his state, the “war on woke” and his assault on the Disney Corporation (the state’s biggest single employer) over its presumed tolerant stance towards the LGBTI community have not translated into a wave of national support.  

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The rest of the gaggle of a dozen other declared candidates are — at least at present — barely registering in polling terms. Those candidates who have criticised Trump (albeit tepidly, save for former New Jersey Chris Christie) are close to being rounding errors in the polling statistics at this point. The next dipstick test of feeling among Republicans — after the most recent indictment has been worked itself into the national zeitgeist — will come in a public debate platform open to all declared candidates who meet minimum standards of support and fundraising as set by the Republican National Committee. One straw in that particular breeze will be to see who does not qualify (former Vice President Mike Pence may not), while another one of those straws will be if Donald Trump even bothers to participate in the cattle call of a debate. 

Meanwhile, of course, incumbent President Biden’s team are busy trying to figure out how the domestic economic good news — low unemployment, falling inflation, millions of new jobs created, growing infrastructure and manufacturing plant investment — can help encourage better, stronger, more energetic support for the president in his circumstances as his party’s near-certain candidate.  

The quixotic candidacy of former congressman Robert F Kennedy Jr — a conspiracy theorist and noted anti-vaxxer — for the nomination is unlikely to upset the Biden candidacy. However, the unexpected downgrade of the US government’s financial circumstances by the Fitch ratings agency and those embarrassing congressional investigations and largely fact-free charges about the president’s son’s personal finances will be irritants, to say the least. 

If things continue as they are, the American voter will be offered a choice between a possibly convicted (by then) felon and serial political fantasiser in the person of Donald Trump versus the incumbent president. The latter is someone who on some days delivers on his promise of no-nonsense governing style but on others seems to be every bit his eighty years of age, with his garrulous verbal wanderings. The Clintonian adage that in the presidential sweepstakes “It is the economy, stupid” may be put to the test by so many other worries in 2024. DM