Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The dangers of political prosecution

issue 20 April 2024

At the start of January, Donald Trump offered up a cheery new year message for Americans. ‘If I don’t get immunity, then Crooked Joe Biden doesn’t get immunity,’ the former president declared on his social media platform Truth Social. With this, he touched on a looming question about 2024: will the presidential race be decided by lawyers and jurors, rather than voters?

Trump showed up in court for the first criminal lawsuit against him this week, a case which could in theory result in a decades-long jail sentence. He’s accused of paying hush money to the former porn star Stormy Daniels, then falsifying business records to conceal the information from voters during the 2016 presidential campaign. (He denies the charges.) It is one of 91 criminal charges that have been levied against Trump across four indictments, ranging from accusations of fraud to attempts to tamper with the 2020 election result.

Trump in upper Manhattan, 16 April 2024 (Getty Images)

Biden has not yet found himself the defendant in a courtroom, but some of his opponents hope to change that.

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