Opponents waging lawfare against former President Donald Trump are failing to prevent him from completing the greatest political comeback in history, establishment media reports recently acknowledged.
The numerous indictments against Trump were meant to politically sabotage his reelection campaign, many Republicans believe, buoyed by reports of multiple meetings between the Biden administration and Trump prosecutors. That strategy appears not to be working from Georgia to Florida to Washington, DC. Trump remains the political favorite to win reelection in November, swing state polling shows.
What first appeared to be a “wall of legal obstacles” preventing Trump from mounting the greatest comeback in political history now appears to be “little more than a series of speed bumps,” Politico’s Senior Legal Affairs Reporter Josh Gerstein acknowledged Wednesday:
The four criminal cases that Trump is facing have diverted him from the campaign trail and — as is evident from his speeches and social media feeds — have prompted him to devote an even greater share of his mental energy to his courtroom adversaries.
But, as of now, the wave of prosecutions don’t seem destined to deliver the kind of legal accountability that Trump’s investigators promised — or the devastating political blow to Trump’s presidential prospects that has animated his detractors since the cases were announced with great fanfare over a five-month span last year.
That’s because Trump has benefited enormously from a pileup of postponements. After a pair of delays this week in Georgia and Florida, the most likely scenario for 2024 is that the only trial that Trump will face before the election is the ongoing one in Manhattan: the hush money case, which many lawyers view as the least serious of the four, both in terms of the severity of the alleged wrongdoing and the prospect of prison time.
Several establishment media members echoed Gerstein’s analysis. Kyle Cheney, a congressional reporter for Politico, noted Wednesday that Trump has a serious chance of winning in November because he might not face a jury other than in his ongoing criminal trial:
But the legal snags have raised the odds that Trump might never face a jury in either of the two federal cases, both of which were brought by special counsel Jack Smith. If Trump wins the election later this year and the two federal cases remain pending, he is all but certain to order the Justice Department to unravel them. And his lawyers have foreshadowed efforts to postpone the Georgia trial during a potential presidency, even if it is allowed to proceed by the state courts.
Andrew Goudsward, who reports for Reuters, also admitted Wednesday that the lawfare against Trump has been ineffective:
Taken together, recent developments have made it far more likely that Trump’s ongoing trial in New York related to hush money payments to a porn star ahead of the 2016 election is the only case that will reach a jury before voters cast their ballots.
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If Trump wins the presidency, he can potentially order the Justice Department to drop the two federal cases against him once he takes office in January 2025. He does not have that option for the New York or Georgia cases, but legal experts say state prosecutors likely would not move forward while he is president.
President Joe Biden’s historically low polling numbers would not receive a boost if Trump is potentially found guilty in any legal case, a Leger survey recently found. The poll indicates a small percentage of Trump’s current support would move to the undecided column should a jury convict him. Hypothetically, Trump could re-earn those undecided voters after the shock of a potential conviction wears off.
The poll appears to contradict the narrative that a potential Trump conviction would somehow boost Biden’s fledgling poll numbers. Biden’s support is around 40 percent. Incumbents with an approval rating of 50 percent or greater historically win reelection.
