U.S. Court of Appeals says it expects Donald Trump’s criminal trial to be over long before the 2024 election
There’s been this pervasive notion that Donald Trump is somehow magically going to be able to postpone all his criminal trials until after the 2024 election and will thus simply “get away with it all.” The media keeps feeding this notion while chasing ratings. And the panickers on social media keep hyping this notion in the mistaken belief that panicked hysteria makes them vigilant. But every now and then we’re reminded that what we’re hearing from the media, and on social media, tends to have very little to do with what’s actually going on in the real world.
Case in point: on Thursday the U.S. Court of Appeals issued a ruling which mostly upheld Judge Tanya Chutkan’s gag order against Donald Trump. As I’ve said before, Trump’s disappearing and reappearing gag orders are something of a sideshow, and are not central to Trump’s ultimate fate. But in Trump’s filing he complained that a gag order would limit his ability to campaign in the 2024 election. In response, the U.S. Court of Appeals said this is irrelevant because Trump’s trial will take place “long” before the general election.
So now we have the U.S. Court of Appeals plainly stating its absolute expectation that Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Judge Chutkan’s court will conclude long before election day in 2024. So for all the endless doomsday hype you keep hearing about how Trump is going to wave some wand and delay his trial to his liking, the court system itself just said that no such thing is going to happen.
Trump does have a little bit of a leg up in the Judge Aileen Cannon trial, and we’ll see what happens with that timetable (though Cannon is limited in her powers as well). But when it comes to Trump’s three other criminal trials, there is no such thing as him being able to “delay delay delay” them and “run out the clock” – no matter how many times the media and pundits keep chanting those phrases. It is simply, as the U.S. Court of Appeals just reminded everyone in its ruling, not how anything works in the real world.
