Donald Trump carries a ton of troubles and chaos follows him like a dark shadow

Trump’s Got Troubles: His campaign is careening, his poll numbers are slipping, and, after something of a summer lull, he is due for several confrontations in court. Echo essay by Amy Davidson Sorkin in The New Yorker. 

On August 7th, as thousands of people gathered at an airfield in Michigan to see Vice-President Kamala Harris and her just-announced running mate, Governor Tim Walz, Donald Trump signed paperwork notifying the federal government that he would be suing the Department of Justice for a hundred million dollars. 

Trump wants the money because, he claims, a Federal Bureau of Investigation search of Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home, in 2022, was “highly offensive”—and part of a malicious “political scheme” engineered by Attorney General Merrick Garland and the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray. The claim doesn’t make much sense. 

The F.B.I. had a warrant to look for White House documents marked as classified (and found plenty of them), and, while the resulting case has now been dismissed by Judge Aileen Cannon, her reasons had to do with the appointment of the special counsel, Jack Smith, which occurred months after the search. 

It took a few days for the hundred-million-dollar filing to become known. Trump may have been too busy spreading the falsehood that a photo of Harris’s airfield rally had been faked by A.I. He didn’t believe that her crowd could possibly be so big.

Donald Trump has a weird obession with crowd size

Amid the spectacle of Trump’s careening campaign—the declaration that President Joe Biden had been removed in “a coup”; a running mate, J. D. Vance, who disparaged childless women; Trump’s complaint that a Time magazine cover illustration of Harris was unfair because it made her look like his wife, Melania—it can be hard to focus on his personal legal problems. But Trump hasn’t forgotten about them, and neither have his lawyers or the prosecutors pursuing him. After something of a summer lull, Trump is due for several confrontations in court, just in time for the last, frenetic stretch of the campaign.

As the hundred-million-dollar suit indicates, none of the four criminal prosecutions against Trump is as yet a closed book, even though one has been dismissed (Florida) and another has resulted in a conviction (New York, on thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records). A Georgia case alleging a conspiracy to steal the state’s electoral votes in 2020, has been stalled, but may see action: Mark Meadows, Trump’s co-defendant and former chief of staff, has petitioned the Supreme Court to move the case to federal court. Another prosecution brought by Smith, in Washington, D.C., also related to Trump’s alleged attempt to overturn the 2020, election, has been shaken up by the radical Supreme Court ruling, in July, that former Presidents enjoy broad immunity for “official acts.”

Judge Tanya Chutkan has set a hearing for September 5th, to figure out whether any part of the indictment can survive—and thus test the limits of the Court’s decision. Smith’s office also has until next week to file a brief appealing the Cannon dismissal; that question, too, may end up before the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, Trump still needs to be sentenced in the New York case, and he could face up to twenty years in prison. The sentencing was delayed when Judge Juan Merchan, who presided, agreed to consider Trump’s argument that the verdict should be set aside because—again—of the immunity decision. (His lawyers say that, under it, certain evidence should never have been introduced.) Merchan is planning to rule on that motion on September 16th—six days after the first Trump-Harris debate—and then to sentence Trump on September 18th. By that point, Trump’s lawyers complained in a letter last week, which asked to push the sentencing back until after the election, early voting will have begun. Given the stakes, the level of scrutiny, the novelty of the charges, and the setbacks that the other cases have experienced in higher courts, Merchan and Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan D.A., would be well advised to tread carefully. Any prison sentence would most likely be stayed pending an appeal, but it would still have an explosive effect on an already unsettling campaign.

Last week, after Merchan declined to either recuse himself or entirely lift a gag order that hampers Trump from attacking court employees and their relatives, Trump posted, “This is the real Fascist ‘stuff.’ ” He has also, in the weeks since Biden dropped out of the race, described Harris as “a Communist,” “crazy,” “fake,” “not a smart person,” and, unforgettably, as someone who only recently “happened to turn Black.” For good measure, last week, at a press conference at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, he said of Walz, “He wants tampons in boys’ bathrooms.” The reference was to a Minnesota law Walz signed that simply requires schools to make period supplies available to “menstruating students” in fourth through twelfth grade. (Trump spoke in front of a display of bacon, Honey Bunches of Oats, and other groceries, meant to evince a concern for food prices.)

Trump has said that Harris is not fit to be President because he finds her laugh strange; that, if she’s elected, the stock market will crash; and that he had a near-death experience while flying in an out-of-control helicopter with Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco, who once dated Harris and “told me terrible things about her.” Brown says this never happened.

It’s tempting to put all the smears in the same category: Trump, reeling, lashes out. “She was so disrespected just a few weeks ago, and now it’s, like, Kah-mala, Kah-mala,” he said at a rally last Wednesday in North Carolina. (It was one of the rare times that Trump pronounced her name correctly.) What he meant, it seems, was that he was so far ahead in the polls just a month ago, and now he’s in a battle—and behind or tied in polls in several swing states. In that fight, one role of the criminal cases is to provide him and his followers an animating sense of grievance. 

Last week, after an awkward interlude in a live-streamed conversation between Trump and Elon Musk, in which Trump wondered why people talked so much about global warming “but they never talk about nuclear warming” (this had something to do with a Third World War), Musk tried to regroup by asking about the “lawfare” waged against him. Trump replied, “It’s a terrible thing”—and was off and running, with tales of rigged trials and banana republics.

Trump’s legal battles are not just another campaign issue, though, because they are existential, not only for him but for the country and the rule of law. He is no doubt keenly aware that, if reëlected, he can get the federal cases against him dropped. The image of Harris the prosecutor taking on Trump the felon is a compelling one, but the attendant hazard is his knack for presenting himself as a martyr. In Bedminster, he said, “They tell me I should be nice? They want to put me in prison!” The White House is the nicer place. ♦

Published in the print edition of the August 26, 2024, issue, with the headline “Troubles, Troubles.”