Just a heads-up to readers: There is still time to organise one’s life to avoid paying attention to the labyrinthine process of selecting US presidential candidates, now that it is effectively welded to a whole series of criminal proceedings that will take place in at least four jurisdictions across the country.

However, doing this will require serious planning and the meticulous management of one’s electronic media streams. Otherwise, campaign images and an ever-flowing torrent of video, print and online commentary will come at one for many months to come.

Usually, American quadrennial elections for president, the entire House of Representatives, a third of the Senate, many governors and state legislators and hundreds of local officials, as well as voting for a whole raft of referendums and local initiatives, are sufficient to fill the news space with “horse race” reporting as well as more analytical pieces on actual issues and policy differences among candidates.

This coming year will be different. There will be an entirely new and novel dimension – a whole plethora of court cases involving the former president.

Running parallel to the usual electoral business will be wall-to-wall coverage of those unprecedented criminal proceedings against former president Donald Trump with more than a dozen of his aides and supporters. These proceedings will be taking place variously in New York City; Washington, DC; Fort Pierce, Florida; and Atlanta, Georgia.

Maybe even a few more venues will have been added by the time everything is set. (One of the accused in the Atlanta case, Mark Meadows, the former president’s chief of staff, is now hoping to have his case transferred from the state of Georgia’s jurisdiction to a federal court in Atlanta on the grounds that Meadows was simply following orders in doing his job and a federal court should hear the charges against him. That defence, of course, has been tried before to rather limited success, ever since 1945.)

Inevitably, there will also be a multitude of pre-trial motions, squabbles over jury selections and almost certainly some or all of the actual trials. If any of the trials conclude before election day on 5 November 2024, there will, following any judgment, also be the nearly inevitable appeals and related motions and hearings.

Some of the other defendants in the Georgia case are trying to get their trial separated from the larger, all-encompassing indictment and to get their right to a speedy trial respected – rather than be tied directly to the former president’s fortunes. Meanwhile, that former president’s attorneys are pushing for the least speedy trial possible to position any potential conviction until after he wins the presidential election in November 2024 – or so their thinking seems to be headed.

Live from Georgia

One absolutely compelling part of this whole tapestry of criminal proceedings, however, is going to flow from a decision by the trial judge in Georgia that the proceedings of the trial (or trials) can be transmitted electronically online or broadcast. While a definitive date for that trial has not been fixed, the prosecutor, Fani Willis, is pushing for a trial start date of 23 October 2023.

If that decision holds and if it is not somehow overturned through pre-trial appeals on behalf of some of the defendants, that courtroom drama (or dramas) will balloon into a media extravaganza that would dwarf any combination of the coverage of the OJ Simpson, Oscar Pistorius, and Bruno Hauptmann (the Lindbergh baby kidnapper) trials, the Scopes “monkey” trial, the Dreyfus treason trial in France, the Watergate Senate Committee hearings in 1973 and the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, all rolled into one. We will all be assimilated into this vortex — unless we unplug ourselves from pretty much everything electronic.

For comparison, just imagine if Stalin’s show trials had been televised, on top of the wall-to-wall coverage in the Soviet Union’s obedient newspapers, back in the late 1930s. Maybe that could have rivalled what we are poised to endure, but that earlier example was pure governmental stage-managing on a massive scale, designed to purvey just one conceivable outcome.

The combined weight of coverage of a Trump trial or trials will produce a whole wave of unplanned, unpredictable results. If we choose to follow these court proceedings, our biggest problem will be the time differences between the US and South Africa, but we’ll just adjust – people have managed to work night shifts for years and years, after all.

Election overlap

One complication is that, except for the possibility of the Georgia trial to begin in a couple of months, the other criminal trials are most likely to begin after a large portion of the Republican voters have already made their choices in the various primary elections and caucuses in many states, in a progression that begins in January 2024. What that might mean is that Republican voters will have selected a man as their choice for the Republican nomination for the presidency who could, soon enough, be a convicted felon.

Writing about the way Republican voters in Iowa seem to be leaning, the Economist noted: “The first nominating contest, a caucus, will take place in Iowa on January 15th, and Mr Trump has a commanding lead there as he does in national primary polls, though he remains unpopular with Americans as a whole. According to a poll published on August 21st by the Des Moines Register, fully 42% of those who intend to caucus said they would support Mr Trump, compared with 19% for Mr DeSantis.

“Mr Trump’s legal problems appear to be strengthening him in Iowa, as they have nationally. The survey was conducted from August 13th until August 17th; after Mr Trump was indicted in Georgia on August 14th, his support jumped five points. ‘Trump has never been viewed favourably by more of Iowa’s likely Republican caucus goers than he is now,’ the newspaper reported.”

This is also bizarre, along with all the other bizarre things that are about to happen. In the most bizarre possibility of all, Donald Trump could then go on to be elected president and then attempt to pardon himself of any federal criminal convictions. That would truly be uncharted waters.

Of all the other unprecedented circumstances now lining up to take place in this period, that one could be the most astonishing of all. While one power of the presidency is the virtually unlimited power to pardon individuals for crimes for which they have been convicted at the federal level, the constitution is silent on the legality of a president pardoning himself.

Richard Nixon apparently considered the idea if he had been convicted of any crime, but he resigned the presidency instead and his successor, Gerald Ford, provided a full pardon to Nixon for any criminal behaviour – even as he was still a now-disgraced, now-resigned president. However, this presidential power does not extend to criminal convictions in the various state-level courts.

The election of Donald Trump after a conviction in Georgia would then, arguably, mean he would remain a convicted felon in Georgia, for which no federal pardon would be possible, although a Republican governor in that state could choose to do so. Just imagine the protests arising out of such a mess.

So, as far as we now know, here is the overlapping schedule of trials and primaries and caucuses now set in place, except for the Georgia case, which might actually begin in October 2023.

• 15 January – E Jean Carroll civil defamation trial begins; and the Iowa caucuses
• 23 January  – Possible New Hampshire primary
• 8 February – Nevada caucuses
• 24 February – South Carolina primary
• 27 February – Possible Michigan primary
• 2 March – Possible Michigan caucuses; Idaho caucuses
• 3 March – DC party-run primary
• 4 March – Federal trial on 2020 election criminal charges begins; and North Dakota caucuses
• 5 March (Super Tuesday) – Primaries in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and Virginia; and Utah caucuses
• 12 March – Primaries in Georgia, Mississippi and Washington; Hawaii caucuses
• 19 March – Primaries in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Kansas and Ohio
• 23 March – Primary in Louisiana
• 25 March – Trump’s criminal trial in New York related to hush-money payments in 2016 begins
• 2 April – Primaries in Delaware, Rhode Island, Wisconsin and, potentially, New York
• 23 April – Primary in Pennsylvania
• 30 April – Primary in Connecticut
• 7 May – Primary in Indiana14 May – Primaries in Maryland, Nebraska and West Virginia
• 14 May – Primaries in Maryland, Nebraska and West Virginia
• 20 May – Criminal trial in classified documents case begins in Fort Pierce, Florida
• 21 May – Primaries in Kentucky and Oregon
• 4 June – Primaries in Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota
• 15-18 July – GOP convention in Milwaukee

There is also a scheduled trial date of 2 October 2023 for the $250-million civil fraud case being brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James against Trump, his eldest children and his companies.

While it seems that – so far at least – one part of the Trump strategy is to make use of the criminal trials as elements in his campaign plan, portraying himself as the persecuted as well as prosecuted representative of his supporters. Nevertheless, at least in the criminal trials, the image will also be one of Donald Trump scowling and fuming at the defendants’ table in this or that court, rather than giving his usual fulminating set speech in front of rapturous Maga crowds.

As one witness after another testifies about Trumpian perfidies, observers will likely see Trump barely bottling up and controlling his outrage and itching to rain fire and brimstone down upon the witnesses, the prosecutors, the court system, the “weaponised” justice department, FBI, the media, the deep state and the incumbent president through social media.

Through all of this, there will be all those pro- and anti-Trump crowds milling around outside the respective courtrooms as television cameras and individuals with their smartphones record the ensuing chaos. It may not be all that much of an over-reach to say these trials (and the primaries) will be putting the future vitality of American democracy on trial as well. DM