Will Donald Trump Actually End Up Facing Legal Accountability?

Beyond his fiendishness and authoritarian aspirations, Donald Trump’s biggest political vulnerability has been the prospect of his conviction on felony charges before Election Day in November. But with the former president’s delay tactics, key questions tangled up in the courts, and a scandal hanging over one of his prosecutors, it’s become increasingly murky how much legal accountability he’ll face before voters go to the polls.

To be sure, it seems likely that he’ll face trial in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case—possibly as soon as next month. But those charges—brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg last March—are seen as less severe than those he faces over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and his handling of classified materials. And those other three cases have been cast in uncertainty.

In Georgia, where Trump and 18 co-conspirators face racketeering charges over attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s case has been sidetracked by misconduct allegations Trump’s legal team leveled against her. On Friday, Willis acknowledged in a court filing that she indeed had a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, whom she hired to serve as a special prosecutor on the election fraud case, but denied any conflict of interest and asked Judge Scott McAfee to deny a motion by Trump’s lawyers to have her and her team dismissed from the case. She also asked that McAfee cancel a hearing scheduled for February 15 on the alleged impropriety. But Steve Sadow, who leads Trump’s defense in the Georgia case, said “nothing has changed” after Willis’s filing: “Our requested remedy remains clear: dismiss the case and disqualify the DA, together with her team and office, from any related matters.”

What McAfee will do remains to be seen. But even if the controversy doesn’t undermine the case in a legal sense, it could help Trump further his narrative that he’s the victim of a “witch hunt”—even though the material facts of the case haven’t changed. “Even those of us who understand that Georgia law does not require disqualification are acutely sensitive to the fact that this matter is not being tried merely in the court of law,” as Norm Eisen, special counsel to the House during Trump’s first impeachment, put it to the Washington Post. “It’s also being tried in the court of public opinion.”

Public opinion has tended to view a conviction in any of the cases as disqualifying for Trump in his run as a presidential candidate. While polls suggest he’s locked in a tight race against Biden, more than half of swing state voters say they would refuse to vote for him if he was found guilty of a felony, according to a recent survey. Even more say they wouldn’t vote for him if he was sentenced. That’s a huge liability, as Trump and his allies seem to recognize. “When things shift to the general-election dynamic, with razor-thin margins, and you’re trying to convince people who are unhappy with President Biden but are deeply skeptical of Trump personally—a conviction doesn’t help persuade those people,” a source close to Trump told Axios.

The Trump team has tried to slow-walk the cases, hoping they won’t matter if he’s elected eight months from now. Those efforts have involved a ludicrous claim that presidential “immunity” shields him from prosecution in the federal election subversion case brought by special counsel Jack Smith and asinine allegations that the classified documents case arose from bias against the former president. But even absurd or flimsy claims can gum up the proceedings. The classified documents trial is set for May, but if that date will stick is unclear—especially considering Judge Aileen Cannon’s seemingly sympathetic approach to Trump. Meanwhile, Trump’s Nixonian “immunity” claim—which, according to his team, may even extend to the assassination of opponents—is resting before an appeals court, which could determine whether the January 6 case goes to trial before November. That court’s deliberation has already brought proceedings to a halt for nearly two months, delayed the original March 4 trial date, and could result in further postponements—particularly if the “immunity” question ends up before the Supreme Court, where three Trump appointees help make up a six-member conservative majority.

None of this means Trump won’t continue to spend much of his 2024 campaign in courtrooms or that the possibility of a conviction doesn’t still loom over his candidacy; he’s already suffered significant legal losses, most recently in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, and could very well endure more. But the complications in the criminal cases should remind voters not to count on the legal system or some external savior—be it Willis, Smith, or Robert Mueller before them—to spare them from another Trump presidency. Trump should—and still could—have to answer for his actions in a court of law. But whatever comes of these cases, the future of US democracy will be determined by the verdict the American public reaches in November.