Students discuss whether the former president’s legal troubles over payments, classified documents and election interference will affect the 2024 race.
April 23, 2024 at 5:56 pm ET
Donald Trump at Manhattan criminal court in New York, April 23. PHOTO: BRENDAN MCDERMID/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Editor’s note: In this Future View, students discuss Donald Trump’s hush-money payment trial. Next week we’ll ask, “This month, Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter was banned for life from the NBA for violating betting rules. Last month a sports betting scandal broke out when Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter was charged with bank fraud and accused of stealing more than $16 million from the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher. With 38 states having made sports betting legal, what does the future of sports betting look like? Will it improve sports? Will there be more scandals?” Students should click here to submit opinions of fewer than 250 words by April 29. The best responses will be published Tuesday night.
It’s the Time, not the Case
While the spectacle of a president on trial captivates the nation, its electoral significance will be less dramatic than anticipated. Polling data averages continue to show opinions about the former president’s legal trouble split neatly along partisan lines, and this trend will likely continue with each new trial. Left-leaning news institutions wax poetic about the dangers to democracy that a criminal candidate poses, while their counterparts on the right rage about how the trials are an insult to due process. These arguments are good for ratings, but they are unlikely to change minds.
The time Donald Trump will spend inside a court matters far more than the content of the case. The months before an election—characterized by a packed campaign schedule and traversing the country—are essential to a candidate’s success. This is where Mr. Trump excels. The grand rallies he holds help him carefully curate his image as the next American president. This year, though, he’ll spend four days out of each week inside a Manhattan courthouse for months leading up to the election. He can’t run an invisible campaign as Joe Biden did in 2020. He is a candidate who needs to be visible. The content of the trial won’t lose him this election, but those days of invisibility inside the courtroom could.
