Donald Trump will be served this Tuesday, April 4, with his indictment in the case of the bribes he allegedly paid to ex-pornographic actress Stormy Daniels to buy her silence, when he was a candidate for the presidential. Interview with Corentin Sellin, historian specializing in the United States.
This is a first in the history of the United States: an ex-president indicted. The ex-president has arrived in New York, where he is preparing to appear in court in Manhattan. Donald Trump still seems combative, despite this indictment and the many investigations aimed at him. He claimed on Friday to have raised $ 4 million in 24 hours, in the wake of his indictment, to finance his presidential campaign in 2024.
RFI : Can this indictment, instead of being a problem for Donald Trump, can serve him politically?
Corentin Sellin: For now, and in the short term, this is an obvious political gain for Donald Trump. We have seen it since the announcement of the indictment on March 31: all the Republicans, including those who have positioned themselves in the alternative to Trump, all his rivals, including the most serious of them the governor from Florida, Ron DeSantis, all of them flew to the support of Donald Trump against an indictment presented as an act of politics and not judicial – under penalty of appearing as bad Republicans. They have no choice, because clearly the Republican voters are unanimously convinced that it is a political persecution suffered by Donald Trump.
Could Donald Trump, in the same vein, drag out the trial in this case so that it arrives in the middle of the 2024 presidential campaign?
Obviously, that could be a hypothesis, that’s not what we’re headed for, because Donald Trump’s lawyers have made their defense strategy clear: request a motion to annul the procedure as soon as possible, to try to demonstrate that the whole procedure of the Manhattan Democratic prosecutor is unfounded in law, does not hold. What they would like to achieve is in fact that the Manhattan district attorney, Democrat Alvin Bragg, or disavowed by a judge. If that happened, obviously, it would make it much more difficult for other federal or local prosecutors to prosecute Donald Trump.
The fact is that in addition to this first case in which he will be indicted, there are still many other investigations underway that target the ex-president…
Yes, indeed, and it is really this whole sequence that will have to be scrutinized. We know that Donald Trump is currently under investigation, both on his role in the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, but also on his management of the classified archives, which he kept for more than a year, at his private home, contrary to the laws of the country. And there obviously, we are sure of the possible crimes which are much heavier, including in terms of the penalty incurred.
And one wonders if the Manhattan prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, did not drop an unthought of history, that is to say, to charge an ex-president for the first time. Which could ease the burden on other prosecutors investigating Donald Trump, because now they don’t have to worry about being the first to indict an ex-president – done. And they could go more directly to new indictments.
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Could these new charges take place before the Republican primary and the 2024 presidential election?
The first ballots for the Republican primary will not take place until February 2024, that leaves almost a year. So a lot of things can happen. And that’s why you have to be careful about political analysis: yes, in the short term, today, it benefits Donald Trump with his camp. But if there were to be a lot of indictments, wouldn’t some Republican voters ultimately prefer another candidate, perhaps just as radical, DeSantis-style, but without all those judicial “pans” attached to a candidate? ?