The day has come. Today Tuesday, Donald Trump will become the first president in the history of the United States to be formally charged with crimes that, in theory, could lead to prison sentences. This afternoon, the Republican will appear in court in New York, where he will be read the approximately 30 charges brought against him by a grand jury in the city. But what implications will this fact have for the former president in the face of the 2024 presidential elections? Here are some answers to the uncertainties of the ‘Trump case’.
This question leads to another: whether the law of the United States allows one to run for the Presidency -which in that country is the head of State and Government- while being accused, being tried or even after having been convicted and in jail. And the answer is yes. However, in case of being in prison, there would be practical consequences that are difficult to imagine and that fundamentally revolve around another question: How can you run a country from a cell?
This afternoon, Trump will appear before the New York Justice accompanied by the Secret Service agents who are in charge of his security for being a former president. The Secret Service must coordinate with the New York Police in everything related to the taking of fingerprints, measurement of height and photography of Trump. There remained the great question of the perp walk, that is, the little walk to which all those arrested in New York are subjected, handcuffed with their hands behind their backs and both agents grabbing their arms. Will they dare to do it, even without wives, with a former president? In principle, he has been ruled out.
At the moment, we do not know what they are, although, according to the US media, there could be more than 30 charges. In many cases, judges significantly cut prosecutors’ indictments, so if that were to happen with Trump, it wouldn’t be exceptional.
Once processed by the New York Police, Trump will appear before Judge Juan Merchan, where the charges will be read. His lawyers have confirmed that the former president will plead not guilty to these charges.
There the Prosecutor’s Office is on theoretically slippery ground. One of the main assets of the Prosecutor’s Office is the pornographic actress Stormy Daniels, whom Trump’s defense will predictably accuse of having orchestrated the entire setup to relaunch his moribund career.
The other is Michael Cohen, the former head of the legal team at the Trump Organization, which is the umbrella under which the former president organizes his business, and which has been convicted of fraud and has its former financial director, David Weisselberg (who played a central role in the payments to Daniels). But Cohen has spent three years in jail for tax fraud and campaign finance violations, and has become Trump’s public enemy number one. That could call into question his credibility as a witness, since the former president’s defense would have no trouble presenting him as an admitted criminal and a resentful former employee of Donald Trump.
The point, however, is that the Attorney General’s Office for the Southern District of Manhattan is, without a doubt, the most professional and effective in the United States, since it has jurisdiction over none other than Wall Street. So it seems unlikely that he would have jumped on a case of historic scale. Be that as it may, we will only have the answer in the coming weeks or, more likely, months. Meanwhile, one thing is clear: candidate Trump continues to lead the 2024 Republican Party polls by a huge advantage. And the only thing that can prevent him from running are two things: a health problem (which, considering the longevity of their parents, seems unlikely), or lose the primaries. From jail, from the courthouse or from Mar-a-Lago, candidate Trump continues.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project