He has been a frequent visitor to courtrooms lately: Donald Trump, the likely candidate of the Republican Party for the presidential election in USA in November 2024. In January this year a New York jury ordered him to pay millions of dollars in damages to writer E. Jean Carroll for sexually assaulting her and eventually defaming her. The case was civil, with Trump appealing the decision.
And now he is about to become the first former US president to be tried on criminal charges. The case, which has been pending in a New York court since April 15, is set to determine whether Trump bought his silence after an extramarital sex affair with a porn star to protect his 2016 White House campaign.
This is the first of four criminal trials Trump faces -- two at the state level and the other two at the federal level. In Georgia, Trump's alleged attempts to erase his loss in that state in the 2020 presidential election have come under scrutiny. Another lawsuit accuses him of knowingly spreading lies about election fraud in 2020, and a fourth of illegally detaining confidential government documents when he left the White House, in violation of the Presidential Records Act.
What will a possible sentence mean for his candidacy?
No matter how each of these cases ends, Trump will still be able to run for president. The U.S. Constitution imposes only three eligibility requirements for persons seeking to hold this office: they must be born as citizens of the United States, be at least 35 years of age, and have resided in the United States for at least 14 years. Nowhere does it say that a convicted felon can't run for office or become president.
Can Trump be disqualified under the 14th Amendment?
According to it, people who have "participated in insurrection or rebellion", after taking the oath of allegiance to the Constitution, cannot hold "any office, civil or military, in the United States of America". Trump's opponents, who want to disqualify him under that amendment, argue that the then-president's actions in the run-up to the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, actually amount to participating in an insurrection. They say Trump's lies that Democrats stole his election victory emboldened the extremist mob that stormed the Capitol that day.
In several states, they have already tried to remove Trump from the primaries - precisely by virtue of this amendment. But in March 2024, the Supreme Court rejected one such attempt in Colorado, saying that states do not have the right to bar individuals from running for federal office. "Responsibility for enforcing Section 3 against persons holding federal office and candidates for such office rests with Congress," the Supreme Court wrote in the reasoning of the decision. But Washington's parliament is divided: Republicans hold a majority in the House of Representatives, and Democrats control the Senate, albeit with just one more term. So it seems unlikely that Trump would be disqualified under the 14th Amendment.
Can Trump vote in US elections if convicted?
Probably not. Trump is a registered voter in Florida, where felons are disenfranchised. "Most felons in Florida regain their voting rights after serving their entire sentence, including probation after parole – and after they pay all the fines and fees," explains journalist Maggie Astor in the "New York Times". But Trump's probation likely won't expire in time for him to regain his right to vote. So, if convicted, Donald Trump can still run for president, but not vote for himself.
What if Trump actually has to go to jail?
Nobody knows that anymore.
"We don't have even a remote and approximate precedent of what is happening now,", told the "New York Times" Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law expert at the University of California, Berkeley. "We only have guesses." Legally, Trump would be eligible to run even while behind bars. But, of course, being president and at the same time lying in prison seriously complicates state management.
Maggie Astor suggests that in such a situation, Trump could ask to be released from prison because the imprisonment prevents him from fulfilling his constitutional duties as president. But let's say it again: nothing like this has ever happened in US history, so there's no telling how things might play out.
If elected, could Trump drop the cases against him or pardon himself?
Purely theoretically, Trump could leave his sentence in force, but postpone its execution. He could even try to pardon himself entirely, but all that would be a re-rolling of presidential powers, the constitutionality of which would likely go to the Supreme Court — where, however, conservative justices have a 6:3 majority. Finally, if Trump wins the election in November, incumbent President Joe Biden could pardon him to allow the president elected by the people to carry out his duties. However, this only applies to the federal cases against Trump. It doesn't apply to either the New York state bribery-for-hush trial or the Georgia election-meddling case — just that presidents don't have the power to pardon state-by-state convictions.
Author: Carla Bleiker