Donald Trump’s legal calendar is coming into sharper relief after a New York judge affirmed last week that the ex-president’s first criminal trial – on charges that he manipulated the 2016 election by concealing hush-money payments to an adult film star – will proceed to trial in Manhattan next month.
A federal case in Washington over the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election had once been expected to go first. But when Trump filed appeals on grounds of presidential immunity last year, the presiding US district judge, Tanya Chutkan, was forced to put the case on hold.
With Trump’s legal calendar otherwise clear, justice Judge Juan Merchan on Thursday scheduled Trump’s hush money trial to start on 25 March in Manhattan and last roughly six weeks. Allowing a week for jury selection and deliberation could mean a verdict might arrive around mid-May.
That is the straightforward part.
For the federal case in Washington, the timing of the trial depends on what the US supreme court decides to do with Trump’s immunity arguments, which contend Trump should be absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for what he claims were official acts he took as president.
There are several options available to the court that could affect a trial date: refuse to hear the case and send it back to Chutkan with immediate effect, hear the case and issue a ruling expeditiously, or hear the case and issue a ruling late in the summer.
Complicating matters, Chutkan isn’t expected to schedule a trial immediately even if the court denies the immunity claim and sends the case back to her, because Trump is technically entitled to the “defense preparation” time that elapsed since he first started appealing the immunity issue.
(Trump filed his immunity claims to the US court of appeals for the DC circuit on 8 December. The moment he appealed, it paused the case before Chutkan, including her since-scrapped 4 March trial date. The clock ticking down to trial only starts again when all the appeals are done.)
As a result, the way to calculate a potential trial date is to first take the elapsed time between 8 December and 4 March, and add that to when the case is returned to Chutkan’s control, assuming the supreme court won’t decide Trump has absolute immunity from all the charges.
If the supreme court refused to take the case, for instance as early as this week, the total time elapsed that Trump would get might stand at roughly 80 days, meaning Chutkan could schedule a trial around the final week of May.
If the supreme court agrees to take the case with oral arguments set sometime in March, and then issues a quick decision in April, the total time Trump would get might stand at roughly 100-120 days, meaning Chutkan could set a trial to commence in June.
But in the worst-case scenario for the special counsel, Jack Smith, if the court agrees to take the case but puts off ruling on immunity until the end of its term, for instance at the end of June, there might not be a trial in Washington until after election day.
The date that the federal election case goes to trial is important mainly because estimates for how long the trial itself might take has been estimated at roughly a week for jury selection, eight weeks for the prosecution, four weeks for Trump, and a final week for deliberation.
Added together, the trial might take around 100 days. If voters wanted to go to the ballot box knowing whether Trump was guilty of conspiring to stop the peaceful transfer of power after losing the 2020 election, a trial would need to have started before the last week of July.
All of this matters because Trump has made it no secret that his strategy is to seek delay – ideally even beyond the election – in the hopes that winning a second presidency could enable him to pardon himself or allow him to install a loyal attorney general who would drop the charges.
