Donald Trump may have won the Iowa caucuses by a historic margin. The question, though, is whether he can sustain his momentum through a primary season — and then general election — interrupted by his many upcoming court dates.
The former president is fighting a multi-front legal war that has consumed millions of his campaign funds. There’s the Justice Department case concerning his attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election on January 6, 2021, and the ongoing New York state court case in which he’s already been found liable for fraud for inflating the value of his businesses. And Colorado and Maine officials have ordered Trump removed from the ballot in 2024, subject to the approval of the US Supreme Court.
That’s not all of them: There’s also the federal case over his alleged mishandling of classified documents, the Georgia case about his interference in the 2020 election, and in New York, cases over hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 campaign and E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case against him.
With some court dates still up in the air, it’s unlikely that most of these cases will be decided before the November election. Even if some are decided in the next few months, Trump’s campaign has been working with state and national Republican Party officials to ensure that any legal troubles closer to the GOP convention can’t derail his nomination. But any adverse decisions might hurt Trump in the general election; a series of four separate polls conducted in August found that most Americans supported the charges against Trump.
“Is it ratcheting a noose around his campaign or not?” said Dave Wilson, a GOP strategist based in South Carolina. “That’s the question that folks like Haley and DeSantis are trying to ask. Do you really want somebody who’s going to be potentially on trial or convicted going up against an already weakened Joe Biden?”
In the meantime, his court appearances…
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