Countdown to Super Monday

INDIGNITY VOL. 3, NO. 145

THE WORST THING WE READ™

Whose Fault Is It That Trump's Trial Starts in Primary Season?

"THE TRUMP TRIAL Date Is a Big Mistake," the headline on Ross Douthat's New York Times column announced today. The trial date—which federal district judge Tanya Chutkan announced this week would be March 6, 2024—falls right before Super Tuesday on the Republican presidential primary calendar. 

"From any theory of the law’s relationship to democratic deliberation, this seems like an extremely suboptimal convergence," Douthat wrote. How, he asked, could voters be asked to cast their votes for or against someone, in potentially decisive primary elections, if the question of whether that candidate might be convicted of a felony was still up in the air?

But complaining about a convergence means that two things are coming together that could otherwise have been kept apart. The March 6 date is for Donald Trump's trial in Washington D.C., on the federal charges that he conspired to obstruct the electoral count through the Jan. 6 attacks. As the Times noted in its news story about Judge Chutkan's announcement, Trump's trial on federal charges for absconding with classified documents is scheduled to begin in Florida in May of 2024; his state trials for hush-money payments in New York and for attempted election theft in Georgia are also supposed to fit in there somewhere. The only way to keep one or another of Trump's trials from happening during a sensitive part of the primary season is by pushing things back into a sensitive part of the general election season.