The calendar for the 2024 presidential campaign just got a whole lot more complicated.

Not the primary agenda. The trial calendar.

Last week, former President Trump was indicted in Manhattan on felony charges over a hush money payment

to a porn star.

Given the Dickensian pace of New York’s court proceedings, Trump’s trial will not begin until next year, in the middle of the election campaign.

His lawyers are expected to file motions to challenge the case in August, just in time for the first GOP presidential debate. Those preliminary battles could go all the way to the Supreme Court.

That’s not the only potential train wreck on the horizon.

Trump faces three more possible charges: a prosecution in Georgia based on his attempts to do so

reverse tilt

that states

2020

selection result; federal indictment over his trove of secret documents at Mar

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More; and allegations stemming from his role in the January 6, 2021 plot to prevent Congress from ratifying Joe Biden’s victory.

The odds of any of these cases going to trial by the end of 2023 are very slim, even if all the charges come in tomorrow, Donald B. Ayer, a former top Justice Department official, told me last week.

That means the entire 2024 campaign, from the Iowa caucus

It

January through Election Day in November will be inseparable from Trump’s legal trials.

Now add his interest to keep the drama going. He’s managed to take advantage of being a criminal defendant, at least in the short term.

The indictment sparked a wave of support among Republican voters. A Reuters/IPSOS poll released Friday found that Trump had beaten his closest GOP rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, 58% to 21%. Two weeks earlier, the same poll showed a narrower margin: 44% to 30%.

This is what you would call a rally around the Trump effect, Sarah Longwell, a GOP strategist who founded the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, said in a televised interview.

The lawsuit also helps him raise money. Trump’s campaign claims it has collected more than $13 million in new contributions since news of his indictment.

He has armed the investigations as a campaign theme with rampaging attacks on New York Dist. attentive Alvin Bragg (who calls the black prosecutor an animal), Justice Department prosecutor Jack Smith (a crazy dog ​​psycho), and the FBI (Marxist villains).

The only crime I have committed is to fearlessly defend our country against those who would destroy it, Trump said in March

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More last week. Now these radicals

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lunatics on the left want to disrupt our elections by using law enforcement. We must not let that happen.

He urged his supporters in Congress

to define

the FBI and the Department of Justice, and presented donors with a T-shirt with a fake photo picture and the words N

or guilty

for $47.

Part of Trump’s diabolical genius is how thoroughly he has embraced the self-imagined role of martyr and led most of his party to defend him. Even his leading rivals for the GOP nomination DeSantis, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence line up to denounce Bragg.

She

‘D

get used to it: in the coming months, they’ll be pressed to pass judgment on every turn of the current front-runner’s current legal odyssey.

Trump may also have a long-term legal strategy in mind. According to an advisory from the Justice Department, a president should not be indicted while in office. The same reasoning suggests that a sitting president cannot be convicted or imprisoned. If he returns to the White House in 2025, Trump will inevitably claim he is free.

So what should Atty. General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department?

The Justice Department has a policy against charges or other actions that may appear political, especially late in an election year. It is often referred to as the 60-day rule, although it is not a formal rule and the 60-day benchmark is not official.

This is what Garland

wrote last year: Prosecutors should never choose the timing

by

investigative steps, criminal charges or any other action in any matter or case for the purpose of influencing an election.

In practice, the rule is often interpreted more broadly to prohibit any action that appears to influence an election, whether intentionally or not.

But that hasn’t stopped the Justice Department from suing politicians in the summer of an election year. Rep. Chris Collins (RN.Y.) was charged with securities fraud two months before his reelection in 2018. (He won, but later resigned.) Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) was charged with failing to report donations from a donor three months before the 2008 election. (He lost, but was later acquitted.)

Either way, Trump’s assumption of martyrdom to bolster support among GOP voters puts Garland in a paradoxical position: He has no way of knowing whether impeaching Trump will hurt him or help him.

And legal scholars argue that a decision to drop charges just to avoid the appearance of political interference is also a political act.

Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns wreaked havoc in our political system. Now his 2024 campaign has drawn the justice system into the toxic mix.

So Garland may have no choice but to ignore the noise and follow his own oft-repeated mantra: We’ll follow the facts and the law wherever they lead.