Donald Trump is set to make a significant effort to turn his criminal trial into a political asset in the next two days, alternating between the courtroom and the campaign trail. The former president's hush money trial resumes in New York on Tuesday, with prosecutors seeking to prove that Trump falsified business records to cover up an alleged affair and thereby interfered in the 2016 election. Trump has pleaded not guilty.
After court on Wednesday, Trump will head to Wisconsin and Michigan, two swing states that could decide the fate of the White House. This trip will mark his most intense campaign travel in weeks, and he is expected to double down on his false claims that his four indictments were directly instigated by the White House.
However, Trump's return to full-time campaigning will be brief, as he must be back in court on Thursday for another hearing over prosecution claims that he is regularly violating a partial gag order meant to protect witnesses, court staff, and even the judge's own family.
The juxtaposition between campaigning, where Trump will revert to his dominant political persona, and his muted disempowerment in the courtroom, where the judge is in charge, will be a remarkable moment in a presidential election campaign like no other. It will emphasize how the 2024 White House race is being shaped as much by what happens in court as in traditional campaigning.
Trump has made his defense in multiple criminal cases the same as his central campaign theme – that he is effectively a political dissident who is the victim of unwarranted persecution. He tells his supporters that he is being targeted because he is preventing the same thing from happening to them.
The opening week of the prosecution case contained detailed testimony that appeared to be damaging to Trump, with former tabloid publisher David Pecker detailing "catch and kill" schemes that the ex-president allegedly used to suppress negative stories. Prosecutors also teased out evidence about alleged financial irregularities.
Trump's counsel Todd Blanche countered that there is nothing wrong with trying to influence an election, calling it democracy. However, the ex-president is playing to a jury made up of tens of millions of voters, and it is too early to tell how the electorate might respond to a conviction in the case or whether Trump could get a political boost if he is acquitted.
CNN polling released last week suggests that there is no dominant public view on the trial, but that does not preclude the possibility that a guilty verdict could damage the former president. Only 44% of Americans expressed confidence that the jury will reach a fair verdict. Not surprisingly, a majority of Democrats feel that Trump is being treated more leniently than others, while a majority of Republicans think the opposite.
Trump's appearances in Wisconsin and Michigan will give him a more traditional platform than the dingy courtroom corridor where he has been delivering daily screeds against the case and spinning a dystopian vision of a nation on the verge of collapse. However, there is also a risk that Trump's loose tongue on the trail could get him into trouble following his alleged violations of the gag order.
The former president has been complaining that he is being penned up in court and unable to effectively campaign. However, he spent the trial's off day last Wednesday playing golf at his course in Bedminster, New Jersey. Still, the four-day-a-week court schedule does present its constraints. Trump, for example, has yet to reschedule a rally that had been due to take place on April 20 in North Carolina but was cancelled due to a dangerous storm.
Trump's allies are pushing the persecution theme, ignoring the fact that all of the indictments emerged from grand juries and according to established legal procedure. However, this view is convincing to Trump supporters and is repeated in a daily drumbeat on conservative media to disguise the nature of the charges.
Trump's itinerary on Wednesday reflects the critical importance of two states that he won in 2016 but lost to Biden on his way out of the White House in 2020. Battleground polls published by CBS News on Sunday showed the rivals neck-and-neck in Wisconsin and Michigan. They were also tied in Pennsylvania, a third swing state Biden flipped from Trump four years ago.
The Trump campaign is billing the presumptive GOP nominee's trip to Waukesha, Wisconsin, as a chance to highlight "the peace, prosperity, and security of his first term with Joe Biden's failed presidency." Yet, a new CNN poll released Sunday suggests that Trump's message might be resonating with some voters at a time of high grocery prices, elevated interest rates, and turmoil abroad. Some 55% of Americans now see the ex-president's term as successful, while 61% think that Biden's presidency is a failure.
The former president and his allies are already seizing on the countrywide pro-Palestinian protests at college campuses to embroider their claims of a nation under siege from left-wing extremists on Biden's watch. While the protests typically only include a minority of students at each campus and have not reached anywhere near the momentum of Vietnam War or civil rights-era demonstrations, television footage of police confronting students holding protest signs are becoming commonplace.
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