Transcript: Swamp Notes — Trump’s legal troubles

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Swamp Notes: Trump’s legal troubles’

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Marc Filippino
In 1920, Eugene V Debs became the first presidential candidate to run a campaign from prison. Now, some are wondering could Donald Trump follow in his footsteps?

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This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the FT News Briefing, where we talk about all of the things happening in the 2024 US presidential election. I’m Marc Filippino, and this week we’re asking: how are Trump’s legal troubles shaping the campaign? Here with me to discuss this is Stefania Palma, she’s the FT’s US legal enforcement correspondent. Hey, Stefania. 

Stefania Palma
Hi, Marc.

Marc Filippino
And we’ve also got Peter Spiegel back with us, the FT’s US managing editor. Hi, Peter.

Peter Spiegel
Thanks for having me back, Marc.

Marc Filippino
OK. Honestly, guys, did you guys know who Eugene V Debs was before we started taping?

Peter Spiegel
I mean, I majored in American history in college, so I know Eugene V Debs, the socialist candidate for president multiple times in the ‘20s and ‘30s. So I have to say, I did know that.

Marc Filippino
Ten points to Peter. Stefania? 

Stefania Palma
No, by virtue of my beats, I have heard of Debs multiple times, given everything that’s happening around Trump.

Marc Filippino
Well, good. You guys have both passed and we can continue on with the conversation.

Stefania Palma
Thank God.

Marc Filippino
And the reason we’re talking about this now is in part because there was some news last week about Trump’s civil cases. He was asked to pay over $350mn in a fraud trial. He was also banned from operating a business in New York state. And it got us thinking, you know, what are the implications of the criminal and the civil cases on Trump as we go into this campaign? Stefania, what are the big criminal cases that we’re focusing on right now?

Stefania Palma
So Trump is currently facing 91 criminal charges across four separate cases. We have two federal cases, one accusing him of meddling with the 2020 elections and one charging him with mishandling sensitive documents. We also have a third case out of the state of Georgia that is also accusing him of interfering with the 2020 polls as it pertains to the state specifically. And then lastly, we have a criminal case out of New York state courts that is essentially accusing Trump of making hush money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels in the lead up to the 2016 election. And when it comes to timeline, the first one that’s coming up will be the New York hush money case. That’s starting March 25th. When it comes to the other three, it’s still very, very fluid. There was an expectation that they would be able to begin before the votes in November, but now it’s very unclear whether that is going to be the case.

Marc Filippino
Peter, we’ve got four criminal cases, the ones that Stefania just mentioned. As I mentioned, there are several other civil trials. Trump is going to be spending a lot of time in court between now and November. How is that going to affect his ability to campaign?

Peter Spiegel
Yeah, it’s going to be an issue. I mean, it’s been one that thus far has cut both ways, right? I mean, he has used these appearances in courts as opportunity to go in from the camera, to rally the base, to accuse the Biden administration of launching political persecution of him. So it has in some ways served him in his communication strategy. But as the trials begin to start, he’s going to have to spend a huge amount of time in court, which is going to keep him off the campaign trail. The other thing I just have to mention on this is he’s also going to have to spend a lot of resources financially ...

Marc Filippino
A lot of money.

Peter Spiegel
A lot amount of money, because we’ve already seen in his last his campaign funding announcement, $50mn of his campaign funds were spent on legal defence. Now, that’s not a small percentage for a campaign that’s already struggling a bit to raise money from people who was donating to him in 2016 and 2020. So it is not inconsequential, and I think if you start looking at the calendar, you know, you have increasingly narrow window of time for Trump to actually campaign, particularly if he’s be stuck into these court cases that are all around the country.

Marc Filippino
Stefania, I know this kind of gets into some weedy constitutional territory, but if he were found guilty in any of these criminal cases, would it impact his eligibility to serve a second term and even be elected?

Stefania Palma
The truth of the matter is, is that when you look at the US Constitution and the prerequisites in it for someone to hold presidential office, it doesn’t really say anything about being convicted, even serving time in jail. So it’s not clear that even if Trump is found guilty, even if he’s sitting literally in a prison cell, that that would stop him from being president. One provision that many of his critics are pointing to is the 14th Amendment that basically bars anyone who has engaged in an insurrection from holding office. Now, he has not been charged with insurrection. However, there are two states — Colorado and Maine — that have thrown him off their states’ Republican presidential primary ballots on the basis that he allegedly did engage in insurrection when it comes to the attack on the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Now, that matter is before the Supreme Court, and we still don’t know where the justices are going to land on that.

Peter Spiegel
To summarise: the problem is when the Founding Fathers or those who wrote the 14th Amendment, which was written right after the Civil War to prevent basically Confederate leaders getting re-elected in Washington, no one in 18th century or the 19th century contemplated a case like Donald Trump and that’s the problem. You want to sort of want to reach through history and tap James Madison on the shoulder and say, hey, by the way, if someone gets convicted of a felony, maybe we should write a line in there that says it. But they didn’t do that because they had the impeachment process, right? The impeachment process says if you’re convicted of a high crime or misdemeanour, you get thrown out of office. And it was at the time, because I did a lot of research on this, at the time it was seen to be so self-evident that someone had done something so horrible that despite partisan differences, which they don’t really have in 18th century ...

Marc Filippino
It would be clear that they would be off the ballot. Nobody would vote for them, right?

Peter Spiegel
It would be clear. But no one contemplated what we have today, and that’s the problem.

Marc Filippino
Well, now that I’ve gotten my honorary law degree, I’d like to talk a little bit about the politics of this, because ultimately voters still get a chance to weigh in on whether or not these criminal cases, the civil cases, should impact Donald Trump’s ability to serve as president. Peter, are we seeing this impact voters’ decisions.

Peter Spiegel
When we saw the indictments come down, I think the assumption was, oh, he’s been indicted, this will turn people off to him. And actually, the exact opposite happened. He was able to fundraise off these things. It solidify the base and solidify the narrative among his base that he’s being politically persecuted, that this is a political trial. And so you saw the base solidify around him. The one thing I will say is there is a portion of Republican party that just is tired of the chaos. I mean, Trump, who in many ways ran as an incumbent, he only got 51 per cent of the vote in Iowa. It’s a very conservative state. Fifty-four per cent in New Hampshire. And a lot of the people that our reporters talked to on the ground in New Hampshire and Iowa said part of the reason they don’t support him is this issue. It is not so much the legal cases as the chaos. On the Democratic side, it’s much more complicated, right? Joe Biden has clearly made the decision that he cannot be seen to be politicising in anyway. It’s his Justice Department and it’s his attorney-general. Now, the special counsel who’s bringing the prosecutions, who is independent of the Justice Department, but it’s still the US federal government, which Joe Biden heads, bringing charges against his rival in November.

Stefania Palma
And also politically, I think it would be a bit of a strategic faux fas. Even it would completely play into the narrative that Trump has created in light of these indictments, which is that it is political witch hunt, in any case, and that they are politically motivated. 

Peter Spiegel
Yeah. I mean, there’s a whole political side, and you don’t get away of your opponent when he’s screwing up. 

Marc Filippino
Stefania, will he be convicted? I mean, we’ve seen Trump evade consequences for scandals and legal challenges in the past. But as far as the criminal cases go, the big ones that we’re talking about here, could this be different?

Stefania Palma
I mean, I think the stakes are that much higher, especially when you think of, first of all, the variety of misconduct that he’s been accused of. That sort of puts him in quite a vulnerable position. Secondly, we have both the DOJ as well as states coming at him from different directions, using actually completely different statutes. It’s very difficult to predict if he will be convicted. We often talk about Trump cases specifically in relation to the 2024 elections, for obvious reasons. But I think it’s important to remember that these cases are testing the US Constitution, courts, Congress, in a way that we have never quite seen before. If we really zoom out, and if we do accept the premise that the US remains the most powerful democracy in the world, for better or for worse, then that means that a country with this level of weights globally is now suddenly potentially facing pretty fundamental shifts in how the government is run, how it’s elected, the checks and balances around its president. So I think it’s fair to say that we cannot overstate the historical significance of these legal proceedings that, frankly, go way beyond the 2024 polls, if not US borders.

Peter Spiegel
The other thing I’ll just say about that, to emphasise what Stefania was saying, is, yes, the US is the largest economy in the world. Yes, the US has the most powerful military in the world. But the . . . what would Joe Nye used to call the soft power of the United States? That’s the way the United States would influence global affairs, right? With the indispensable nation, if the Americans showed up, they had this example of a country that worked, democracy that worked, and that’s frankly how international affairs would operate. Other countries that were aspiring to become modern countries, would look the United States as a model, and they would model their political systems, their economic system at the United States. This it’s really undermining that moral authority on a global stage in a way that nothing else has. And I think that the US has ability to influence global affairs. Because of that, soft power is going to be severely undermined because of what’s going on the next six months.

Marc Filippino
All right, guys, we’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, we’re going to do Exit Poll. This one’s going to be out of this world.

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Marc Filippino
We are back with Exit Poll, where we talk about something that didn’t happen on the campaign trail and apply some very rigorous political analysis to it. Today we’re talking about the Odysseus lunar rover. At the time of this recording, it’s mere moments from becoming the first American spacecraft to land on the moon in 50 years. Sounds great. Right? America’s back on the moon. We all missed it. But Odysseus was built by a private Houston-based company called Intuitive Machines. So, assuming everything goes according to plan, guys, is this lunar landing good for Biden or a win for private sector boosters in the Republican party?

Stefania Palma
I think it’ll be a very interesting prompt for debates around sort of innovation when it comes to private sector versus public sector. Obviously, the company behind this is a private one, but there is much to say around public investment in the earlier phases of the innovation race that have been fundamental in order for, say, companies like this one. I don’t think it’s a clear black and white conversation, much more nuanced.

Marc Filippino
Peter, what do you got? Moon or no moon?

Peter Spiegel
I would just say, look, I think I will undermine the premise of your question, Marc. Because, just because it’s private sector doesn’t mean it’s good for the Republicans. I will remind everyone — and it was Barack Obama, a Democratic president of the United States, who actually scaled back the Nasa mission to the moon so that private sector companies like SpaceX and whatnot can move into that, the space. And actually, at the time, Republicans were very critical of him in this one. So I say it’s a victory for Barack Obama and therefore a victory for Joe Biden. It is good for Biden that we’re back in the moon.

Marc Filippino
Thanks, Obama. I want to thank our guests, Peter Spiegel. He’s the US managing editor for the FT. Thanks, Peter.

Peter Spiegel
Thanks for having me back.

Marc Filippino
And Stefania Palma, she’s our US legal and enforcement correspondent. Thanks, Stefania. 

Stefania Palma
Thanks for having me.

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Marc Filippino
This was Swamp Notes, the US politics show from the FT News Briefing. It’s produced and mixed by Ethan Plotkin. It’s also produced by Lauren Fedor and Sonja Hutson. Special thanks to Pierre Nicholson. I’m your host, Marc Filippino. Our executive producer is Topher Forhecz, and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Check back next week for more US political analysis from the Financial Times.

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