After months of legal wrangling, a schedule for former President Trump’s four pending criminal trials is finally taking shape.

Last week, federal district judge Tanya Chutkan set March 4 as the date when Trump’s trial in Washington would begin on charges that he conspired to overturn the 2020 election. That’s one day before Super Tuesday, when Republican voters in 15 states, including California, will cast their ballots in the primary.

Trump and his supporters erupted, claiming the start date proved the case is politically motivated.

A biased, Trump-hating judge gave me exactly what our corrupt government wanted: SUPER TUESDAY! Trump roared on his social media account. I want APPLE!

Chutkan should be thrown off the couch, Representative Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican, said in a social media post.

Their attempts to interfere in the 2024 election are so brutal it’s disgusting, Donalds said.

Their outrage was artificial.

At last week’s hearing, Chutkan asked Trump’s lawyer to suggest a date his client would prefer.

But the attorney, John Lauro, declined to accede to Trump’s ludicrous demand to delay the trial until April 2026, claiming the defense will need two years to prepare the former president’s case.

Lauro never mentioned Super Tuesday.

The omission was significant. Trump’s objection is not to start the process on March 4, but on a date before Inauguration Day in 2025, when he hopes to retake the presidency and have the case dropped.

In any case, Chutkan’s date of March 4 is unlikely to have any discernible effect on Super Tuesday results. Trump may not even need to be present at the initial court hearings, which will be taken over by jury selection. (Normally, however, he would have to attend most later procedures.)

And the start date may very well shift. Trump’s lawyers can still ask the judge for an extension if they really need more time to prepare.

Bottom line: There is no straight forward date to start a process between now and Election Day. The race for the presidency is already underway, with primaries starting in January and running virtually uninterrupted from February through June. And then the general election campaign begins.

So no, this isn’t really about Super Tuesday. But it does align with someone Trump’s political strategy.

One of his goals is to postpone the processes as long as possible.

The other not only convinces voters that the prosecutors and judges are corrupt, but that his supposed martyrdom at the hands of them makes him heroic.

I am being sued on your behalf, he told his supporters in June. They attack me because I fight for you.

Our legal system is set against me! he wrote in a social media post at 3am on Friday.

Trump is trying to turn the processes into an asset rather than a liability, a tool to rally his already devoted supporters and force his rivals to defend the Republican nomination. In both respects he has largely succeeded.

The good news, however, is that he doesn’t seem to convince anyone else.

In an Ipsos/Politico poll last month, 59% of respondents said they believe the Justice Department’s decision to indict Trump was based on a fair evaluation of the evidence, not politics.

Most Republicans sided with the former president. 75% said they believed the federal charges were politically motivated. Still, a significant minority, 23%, said they thought the charge was fair.

In another Ipsos poll, 45% of Reuters said they will not vote for Trump if he is convicted of a crime, according to Reuters. If so many Republican voters abandoned him, Trump’s chances of winning the general election would be doomed.

There is, of course, no guarantee that any of Trump’s trials will lead to convictions. A single juror can avoid a guilty verdict.

We are looking at two possible futures, said former federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig. In one instance, Trump is convicted and Biden wins the election. Otherwise, the trial ends with a hung jury and Trump wins the election, then kills the two federal cases and leans on the Georgia Legislature to end the prosecution there.

If Chutkan’s March 4 start date holds, lawyers estimate the case could reach a verdict in May.

Other trials could follow by the middle of next year: a state trial in Georgia, where Trump and 18 others have been indicted on charges of attempting to undermine the election; and a federal lawsuit in Florida accusing Trump of illegally holding national security documents at his estate in Mar-a-Lago. A fourth trial, in

New York is likely to come last, on charges that Trump paid illegal hush money to porn actor Stormy Daniels.

It is reasonable to wish that the prosecutors had filed their charges sooner. But it takes time to build a case, and Trump allegedly claimed he was prosecuted no matter when the trials started.

Regardless of the timing, the Trump trials are no longer an afterthought; they will be at the center of his 2024 campaign. The presidential election may depend on what happens in those courtrooms.