I wonder about that because Trump seems to be moving simultaneously in two opposing and irreconcilable directions. First, it seems increasingly plausible that he will become the first former president to be convicted of a felony. Second, he also seems increasingly likely to win the Republican nomination for president, with the betting markets also giving him about a 22 per cent chance of going on and actually being elected president.
Any defendant must be presumed innocent until proven guilty. But some smart lawyers believe that for Trump, the “peril is extreme,” as one former federal prosecutor put it. Trump’s own attorney general William Barr said, “If even half of it is true, then he’s toast.”
Trump could, of course, catch a break. The evidence from his own lawyer could be declared inadmissible in trial, or maybe the trial judge will allow stalling tactics by the defence, or maybe a die-hard sympathiser on the Florida jury will refuse to convict. But Trump could eventually be indicted in four separate criminal cases, and with so many cases swirling about, the odds increase that he may find himself convicted of at least some felonies.
He would be a first offender, and it’s not certain that he would do prison time. Officials so far have been very deferential toward Trump: He hasn’t been handcuffed or subjected to a mug shot.
Still, deference may end upon conviction, and defendants in less serious cases have ended up with substantial prison sentences. Just this month, a former Air Force officer was sentenced to three years in prison for keeping classified documents — and he had pleaded guilty and thus presumably received leniency. And during Trump’s presidency, Reality Winner leaked a single document and was sentenced to more than five years in prison.
Even if Trump is convicted and imprisoned, he could continue to run for office and even presumably hold the office of president, if he isn’t too busy in the prison factory making license plates. Eugene Debs, the socialist candidate, famously ran for president from federal prison in 1920, receiving almost 1 million votes.
I guess accommodations could be made so that prison officials didn’t listen in on phone conversations between federal inmate No. 62953-804 and Chinese and Russian leaders. Perhaps summit meetings could be held in a larger cell? State banquets in the prison dining hall?
One low-level precedent: Joel Caston, while serving a sentence for murder, was elected in 2021 to be an advisory neighbourhood commissioner in Washington, DC But that’s an unpaid two-year advisory position, a bit different from the presidency.
If Trump is both incarcerated and elected president, perhaps his Cabinet could invoke the 25th Amendment and declare him unable to serve. But Trump presumably would carefully choose Cabinet members who would never do that. Alternatively, maybe if elected, would he try to pardon himself?
Is it conceivable that voters would actually choose as president a man who had been convicted of felonies, or was about to be? It seems hard to believe, but I also thought Trump was unelectable in 2016. It’s notable that as the legal cases against Trump have gained ground this year he has also risen in Republican polling.
A plausible guess, based in part on the latest polling since the federal indictment, is that prosecutions could help him in the Republican primaries while hurting him in the general election. Looking ahead, news organisations must not drop the ball as they did in 2016, giving Trump a platform without adequately fact-checking him. We should enable democracy, not empower an anti-democratic demagogue.
All in all, I think Trump is going down. But my nightmare is that the United States slips into a recession that voters blame on President Joe Biden, that there is a Middle East crisis that raises oil and gas prices, and that there is a third-party candidate who draws more votes from Biden than from Trump. Or perhaps Biden has a health crisis and the Democratic nominee is Kamala Harris, who I fear would be a substantially weaker candidate. In short, Trump’s election as president seems unlikely, but not impossible — and the consequences could be catastrophic.
A sitting president governing from behind bars? It’s utterly unimaginable — right? The uncertainty speaks to a tragedy for our nation.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Nicholas Kristof
Photographs by: Mark Peterson
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
