Many voters say they don’t want a convicted felon in the White House. But do they mean it? And can prosecutors get to trial before the vote?

Many voters say they don’t want a convicted felon in the White House. But do they mean it? And can prosecutors get to trial before the vote?

Can anything stop former President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign juggernaut, now that Trump has all but crushed his GOP primary opponents and pulled ahead of President Joe Biden in national polls?

While November is a long time away, and plenty could happen before then, voters do say Trump has a massive weakness: A potential criminal conviction. In poll after poll, lots of voters who shrug off Trump’s four indictments say they wouldn’t support him if he’s convicted of a felony. If they mean it—or even if a big chunk of them do—they could easily be enough to keep him out of the White House.

What remains to be seen, of course, is whether they mean it—and, crucially, whether prosecutors can put Trump on trial in time for the rest of us to find out.

That makes prosecutors’ race against the clock one of the most important narratives of the 2024 election cycle, as teams of lawyers work feverishly around the country to overcome Trump’s efforts to gum up the gears of the judicial system and push the start-date of all his trials past November.

  • @[email protected]English
    26•5 months ago

    TeChNiCaLlY, unless I missed something big, he wasn’t convicted of the rape. That requires a criminal trial. A jury did find that he raped her as a material fact in a civil trial, so we can say with legal certainty that it happened, but until an actual conviction, it will be used as a excuse to avoid holding him to account for it. Of course a bunch of the right are the type to blame the victim or wave it off entirely for that particular crime anyway so I don’t know how much difference even a conviction would make to them.

    • DarkGamer
      10•5 months ago

      thank you for the clarification. Looking into definitions, evidently the word “convicted” only refers to criminal proceedings, as you say.

      • @[email protected]
        7•5 months ago

        Yeah you’re right and I think we’re looking for civily liable instead of conviction in this scenario - not that it should make a difference.

        • @[email protected]English
          2•5 months ago

          The technicalities can get weird, but it makes a huge difference. In the US (it works differently in different legal systems) even the defendant’s basic constitutional rights are different between civil and criminal proceedings. For example you can’t plead the 5th (invoke the right to not be compelled to provide incriminating evidence against yourself) in a civil trial because your testimony couldn’t incriminate when the trial’s not criminal. Any evidence gathered this way in a civil trial is therefore inadmissible in a criminal trial about the same matters. That’s why Bill Cosby got his rape conviction overturned on appeal. A lot of the criminal case against him was based on evidence he was compelled to give when he got sued over it earlier, so it shouldn’t have been allowed in the criminal trial. The appeal didn’t find him innocent, just that the conviction had to be thrown out because the process had violated his rights.

          • @[email protected]
            2•5 months ago

            I was referring to the perception from the results of the trial by the public, but you’ve given me quite a bit to mull over. Appreciate the context.

    • @ReallyActuallyFrankensteinEnglish
      3•5 months ago

      But just to avoid being overtechnical, if you want to say Trump raped Carroll, you can accurately say so:

      A judge has now clarified that this is basically a legal distinction without a real-world difference. He says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood.

      The filing from Judge Lewis A. Kaplan came as Trump’s attorneys have sought a new trial and have argued that the jury’s $5 million verdict against Trump in the civil suit was excessive. The reason, they argue, is that sexual abuse could be as limited as the “groping” of a victim’s breasts.

      Kaplan roundly rejected Trump’s motion Tuesday, calling that argument “entirely unpersuasive.”

      “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’ ” Kaplan wrote.

      He added: “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”

      Kaplan said New York’s legal definition of “rape” is “far narrower” than the word is understood in “common modern parlance.”

      https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-carroll-judge-rape/