Former President Donald Trump’s legal woes, almost as if by design, threaten to bog down his White House run.
Mr. Trump faces political and practical challenges that are raising the hopes of President Biden and other Democrats that the web of legal entanglements will eventually kneecap his candidacy.
“Even if Trump prevails, this will consume both resources and time with hearings and appearances in as many as three jurisdictions,” said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University. “Trump will also face the constant grind of coverage that could contribute to a certain exhaustion factor for voters.”
Mr. Trump was yanked out of campaign mode last month when he was forced to travel from his home at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, to Manhattan to be charged with 34 felony counts for trying to cover up extramarital affairs with hush money payments during his 2016 presidential campaign.
Sitting stone-faced in the courtroom, Mr. Trump became the first former president to face criminal charges, setting off a frenzy of political coverage.
The made-for-television series of events provided a sneak peek of what will likely come if Mr. Trump is hit with more criminal charges or comes out on the losing end of an ongoing rape and defamation civil trial in New York.
Mr. Trump, nonetheless, remains the undisputed front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Polls consistently find that most Republican voters are sticking with him and rallied around him after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg brought charges against him.
“The New York litigation is designed to weaken Trump,” said Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston. “It is not a bug. It is a feature of the litigation,” he said. He noted that Mr. Bragg’s predecessor refused to pursue charges against Mr. Trump.
The Trump legal team is fighting the district attorney’s proposal to bar the former president from publicly addressing the case and the evidence against him. They said the proposal is “extremely restrictive” and could hurt Mr. Trump’s presidential bid.
“The People have proposed what would be an unprecedented and extraordinarily broad muzzle on a leading contender for the presidency of the United States,” Trump attorneys wrote to New York state Judge Juan Merchan.
They said the order that the district attorney is seeking would infringe on Mr. Trump’s “First Amendment right to freely discuss his own character and qualifications for federal office and the First Amendment rights of the American people to hear President Trump’s side of the story.”
Regardless of the gag order decision, every time Mr. Trump walks into a courthouse, it will attract attention and shift the focus away from his plans for a political comeback.
“He has to stop whatever he is doing on the campaign trail,” Mr. Blackman said. “So there is definitely a burden on him.”
The jury is out on whether voters will hang tough with Mr. Trump over the long haul or become fatigued and conclude that his legal baggage makes him unelectable.
Mr. Turley said it is a double-edged sword.
“The piling-on of charges may reach an exhaustion point for some voters with Trump, but in others, it is likely to reach an exasperation point with the establishment,” he said. “Democrats are counting on Trump securing the nomination in a largely anemic state due to the unrelenting pressures of litigation and investigations.”
Voters have had more to digest this week as the Trump legal team fights a civil lawsuit filed against him by E. Jean Carroll, a magazine advice columnist and writer who accused him of raping her in the mid-1990s. Ms. Carroll came forward with the allegation in 2019.
Ms. Carroll says she bumped into Mr. Trump as she was leaving a luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan when he persuaded her to help him find a gift for a female friend.
She said Mr. Trump proceeded to rape her in a dressing room in the lingerie department.
Mr. Trump could face another round of serious charges in the ongoing criminal investigation in Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis plans to announce this summer whether to file criminal charges against Mr. Trump and his allies for interfering in the state’s 2020 presidential election.
The investigation is looking into the various efforts to overturn President-elect Joseph R. Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia, including the phone call in which Mr. Trump pressed Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to “find” the votes needed to change the outcome of the race.
Legal analysts have said Mr. Trump and his allies could be charged under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, Act.
The Department of Justice is investigating Mr. Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and his alleged mishandling of classified material after he left office.
Mr. Trump has denied any wrongdoing in each of the cases. He is plowing ahead with his third bid for president and reiterating his charge that the judicial system is “RIGGED against me.”
“It’s all a political Witch Hunt, in coordination with heavy-handed, dishonest, and highly partisan prosecutors, working in conjunction with D.C. ‘Justice,’ the likes of which our Country has never seen before!” Mr. Trump said this week on Truth Social.
Mr. Trump has a trip to Des Moines, Iowa, penciled in for this weekend and plans to travel to Manchester, New Hampshire, next week to headline a CNN town-hall-style meeting with voters on May 10.
Mr. Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
