Trump gets the ‘inside straight’ he’s been hoping for in court

Donald Trump has pulled it off.

Voters will go to the polls in November without resolution in any of the four criminal cases against the former president and Republican presidential nominee. A judge’s decision Friday in New York to postpone Trump’s sentencing for his criminal conviction in the hush money case until Nov. 26 was the last domino to fall. But for months, Trump has been rattling off unlikely legal victories — sometimes aided by his own appointees to the bench — and outmaneuvering federal and state prosecutors who pushed for quick trials.

It’s an outcome his supporters have often described as drawing to an “inside straight”: a calculated gamble to delay his criminal cases at all costs to ensure that he avoids accountability from the courts during his bid to reclaim the White House. But he’ll have to wait until November to see if the gamble pays off. If Trump wins, the two gravest cases he faces — the federal election subversion case and the classified documents case brought by special counsel Jack Smith — are likely to go away altogether. And the state cases in New York and Georgia would likely be shelved for years.

But if Trump loses the November election, the legal delays he’s amassed may turn out to be hollow victories. All of the cases could then return with a vengeance, and Trump would no longer have his greatest shield of all: his potential return as the nation’s chief executive.

In fact, Trump’s ability to postpone his criminal cases has ensured that the election itself will determine whether he spends the rest of his life at the apex of American power or under the crush of the criminal justice system.

Of course, some of Trump’s worst fears about his criminal cases have already come true, most notably in Manhattan, where he faced charges of falsifying records to conceal hush money payments to a porn star. There, Trump endured the humiliating spectacle of a five-week trial that largely sidelined him from the campaign trail, featured graphic testimony about his alleged sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels and ended with a jury foreman standing up and pronouncing him guilty on 34 felony counts. But even that verdict is now facing legal uncertainty as the trial judge in that case, Justice Juan Merchan, weighs whether to toss the conviction as a result of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity. Legal doubts raised by the high court’s decision were the primary reason Merchan cited in his decision to postpone Trump’s sentencing in the New York case until Thanksgiving week.

Until last year, any criminal case against a former president was unprecedented and indisputably momentous, as many noted when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in April indicted Trump on 34 felony charges linked to a $130,000 hush money payment to Daniels before the 2016 presidential election.

At the time the first charges were brought, Trump was near the nadir of his influence. Still smarting from his defeat in 2020, he was seen as partly responsible for Republicans’ underwhelming performance in the 2022 midterms and watching as other GOP leaders sought to supplant him as the dominant force within the party. But as Trump regrouped and reasserted control, he used his mounting criminal jeopardy as a rallying cry, redoubling his effort to both stave off the charges he faced and to turn them into a political advantage.

Three other criminal cases against Trump unfurled in the ensuing months. In June, Smith obtained an indictment of Trump in Florida accusing him of hoarding classified records at his Mar-a-Lago estate and obstructing a federal probe into the subject. In August, Smith got another indictment of Trump, bringing charges against him in Washington for attempting to subvert the 2020 presidential election. And later that month, a grand jury in Georgia indicted Trump and 18 of his allies on similar charges of illegal interference in the 2020 election.

That Georgia case produced a memorable mug shot that seemed to symbolize the grave legal situation Trump found himself in, even as the defiant former president sought to leverage his plight to boost his fundraising and stir up anger among his base.

One year ago, Trump was facing 91 felony charges — a stunning tally that seemed like a millstone on his presidential bid. While Trump stood a chance of evading or defeating any particular case, it appeared wildly implausible that he would manage to elude all four.

A year later, the deluge Trump faced looks far less imposing. Trump’s default strategy of playing for time has largely succeeded in pushing off deadlines. And three of the four prosecutions ran into serious setbacks that have dampened the legal threat they pose to Trump, or at least pushed potential consequences far down the road.

The prosecution of Trump in the classified records imbroglio, considered by many commentators and national security professionals to be the most serious and solid case against the former president, was tossed out last month by a Trump-appointed federal judge who accepted Trump’s argument that Smith’s appointment was legally infirm. Smith is appealing that ruling in a bid to revive the prosecution, but the appeal is unlikely to be heard before the election.

Smith’s other case against Trump was waylaid for months by Trump’s appeal of a ruling on a presidential immunity claim he raised. The Supreme Court agreed to hear that dispute and did not render a decision until July, effectively precluding a trial in that matter before next year. The high court’s ruling also forced Smith to curtail the indictment and left the trial judge with a morass of complicated legal questions certain to produce another appeal.

And the election case in Georgia was sidelined by the disclosure that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was romantically involved with one of the top prosecutors she assigned to the case against Trump. Wrangling over that issue slowed proceedings, which already seemed unlikely to result in a trial this year. A Georgia appeals court also agreed to dig into the matter, effectively stalling any action in that case until December.