And so it begins…
Federal Judge Tanya Chutkan has scheduled Donald Trump’s federal criminal trial in Washington DC for March 4th of 2024. This doesn’t guarantee the trial will start on that precise date, but it does point to a strong likelihood that the trial will happen in that ballpark.
I’m seeing a lot of surprise and relief expressed about this on social media. But this was never really up in the air. Trump’s trials – most or all of them – were always going to happen before the 2024 election. Prosecutors made a point of timing their indictments that way. As I’ve become fond of pointing out, these prosecutors are not oblivious idiots. They know how to read a calendar. They knew when they needed to bring their indictments by, in order to get to trial well before the election. They’d have brought the indictments sooner if need be. But they understand how their field of expertise works, and they timed their indictments accordingly.
We’re still going to hear vague doomsaying about how Trump will still just decide to delay this trial beyond the election. But Trump doesn’t have a magic “delay” wand, no matter how many times the media claims he does. Remember when the judge set the date in stone for the start of the E. Jean Carroll trial, and then Trump made all those last minute filings to try to delay it? He wasn’t able to delay the trial by a single additional day.
We don’t yet know if Judge Chutkan sees March 4th as the “drop dead” date for Trump’s DC trial, or if she still sees some leeway in there. But the point is that this kind of thing is her call, not Trump’s call. There was always literally zero chance that this judge was going to allow this trial to be delayed until after the election. This trial date was never something to fret over. But now that we have a trial date, it is something to celebrate.
Of course this is just one of four Trump criminal trials. The other three trials will be slotted around this one, either before or after. We’ll once again hear fear mongering about how these trials are somehow going to bump into each other and, oops, Trump goes free. But again, nothing works that way in the real world. Judges know how to work around each other’s schedules. They do this stuff for a living – just as prosecutors know how to time their indictments to get them to trial within a certain timeframe.
