Many voters say they donāt want a convicted felon in the White House. But do they mean it? And can prosecutors get to trial before the vote?
Can anything stop former President Donald Trumpās reelection campaign juggernaut, now that Trump has all but crushed his GOP primary opponents and pulled ahead of 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 Trumpās four indictments say they wouldnāt support him if heās convicted of a felony. If they mean itāor even if a big chunk of them doāthey could easily be enough to keep him out of the White House.
What remains to be seen, of course, is whether they mean itāand, crucially, whether prosecutors can put Trump on trial in time for the rest of us to find out.
That makes prosecutorsā 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 Trumpās efforts to gum up the gears of the judicial system and push the start-date of all his trials past November.
The technicalities can get weird, but it makes a huge difference. In the US (it works differently in different legal systems) even the defendantās basic constitutional rights are different between civil and criminal proceedings. For example you canāt plead the 5th (invoke the right to not be compelled to provide incriminating evidence against yourself) in a civil trial because your testimony couldnāt incriminate when the trialās not criminal. Any evidence gathered this way in a civil trial is therefore inadmissible in a criminal trial about the same matters. Thatās why Bill Cosby got his rape conviction overturned on appeal. A lot of the criminal case against him was based on evidence he was compelled to give when he got sued over it earlier, so it shouldnāt have been allowed in the criminal trial. The appeal didnāt find him innocent, just that the conviction had to be thrown out because the process had violated his rights.
I was referring to the perception from the results of the trial by the public, but youāve given me quite a bit to mull over. Appreciate the context.