Entering 2024, the terrain that lay in front of former president Donald Trump offered two very different, overlapping paths. He had been charged with more than 90 criminal counts in four jurisdictions, his attorneys scrambling to figure out how to defuse as many of them as possible. But he was also the dominant front-runner in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination, step one toward being elected president again — and the ability to stall or upend those indictments entirely.
Nine and a half months later, those paths look quite different. Trump is formally the Republican nominee and, despite his opponents replacing their nominee, has an even-odds chance of winning election in November. But most of the criminal threat he faced has already evaporated regardless.
On Thursday, the judge overseeing the case brought against Trump (and a number of his allies) in Fulton County, Ga., dismissed two more of the 13 charges Trump had originally faced. He’d already set aside three of those charges, meaning that the threat to the former president now centers on only eight criminal counts.
Those sit alongside the four charges filed against Trump by special counsel Jack Smith in D.C. Those charges faced their own challenges after the Supreme Court determined in July that Trump had broad immunity from prosecution for actions undertaken under the auspices of his presidential office. Smith filed a superseding (that is, replacement) indictment in late August, but Trump’s legal maneuvers have been effective in stalling a criminal trial in that case.
Those charges are also federal, meaning that, if reelected, Trump could have his Justice Department simply bring the prosecution to an end.
He could have had his administration do that for the federal charges brought against him in Florida, too, if Judge Aileen M. Cannon hadn’t already thrown them all out. Those charges, centered on his retention of classified documents after leaving the White House, were generally seen as the biggest threat to Trump — until Cannon was tapped as the judge overseeing the case. Soon after the original indictment, Smith’s team obtained a superseding indictment that added charges related to an alleged effort to obstruct the investigation; those, too, have been dismissed.
That leaves the 34 charges brought against Trump in New York — charges that went to trial in April and resulted in criminal convictions across the board.
Far from being problematic for Trump, the New York charges have probably been beneficial to Trump, at least so far. After the indictment was obtained — the first to be brought against the former president — his position in the Republican primaries surged. He effectively cast the indictment as politically motivated in the eyes of Republican voters, both establishing that his eventual conviction would be seen as meritless but also coloring the subsequent indictments in the same way.
Those charges do mean that Trump will at some point face criminal sanction (assuming that his efforts to have the conviction thrown out aren’t successful), which poses an obvious risk. But he has been able to have sentencing delayed until after the election, meaning that, again, he may be able to address the question of punishment from the elevated platform of the presidency.
None of this is how Trump’s critics hoped the situation would play out. There was an ongoing assumption — or perhaps hope — that the criminal charges or any convictions would hobble Trump, reducing the odds that he would win the White House again. (Trump likes to present this assumption as the predicate for the charges, a claim for which there’s no evidence.) That clearly hasn’t happened. It is unlikely that will change; with less than two months until Election Day, the charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 results — those in D.C. and Georgia — will not be tried.
From the outset, Trump’s political fate was intertwined with his legal one. Winning the presidency wasn’t just an ego boost, it was a literal get-out-of-jail-free card. But thanks in part to the slow workings of the justice system and thanks in part to (obviously sympathetic) judges in Florida and at the Supreme Court, the legal landscape is already very different — even before the election arrives.
