Donald Trump has been winning legal battles but could still lose the war

If found guilty in a trial whose date is yet to be set, Donald Trump faces decades in prison in what would in effect be a life sentence.

If ‘indictment outrage’ diminishes over time, Donald Trump should worry the latest, albeit revised, indictment against him won’t be enough to help him regain political momentum as he struggles in the polls against Kamala Harris.

Rather than the political boosts he enjoyed last year from successive indictments, the slightly revised set of charges against the former president unveiled on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST) should instead serve to remind him he’s legally far from out of the woods yet.

Special Counsel Jack Smith and his band of federal prosecutors aren’t giving up on their quest to see the Republican presidential candidate punished for allegedly seeking to overturn the 2020 election, after they revised their August 2023 indictment in light of the Supreme Court’s declaration last month that presidents enjoyed partial immunity for their official acts.

And the reminder came only a few weeks before Trump’s sentencing for falsifying business records to pay off a porn star, which will come down in Manhattan on September 18, and could see the former president jailed.

It is a major blow for Trump, whose legal woes had dropped out of the picture in recent months, following a series of setbacks for federal and state prosecutors. A Florida judge dumped the classified documents case last month, while a similar election interference case in Georgia is on ice after the district attorney Fani Willis was accused of corruption.

If he’s been winning the legal battles, Trump has by no means won the war.

The sentencing over the Stormy Daniels payments had been pushed back from July and is unlikely to see Trump face jail time but will almost certainly precede a torturous series of appeals that would last well into any second Trump term.

What’s more, even if he won the presidency he could not pardon himself as the verdict was reached in a state, rather than in a federal court.

If the federal indictment finds its way to trial before the election Trump would almost certainly be found guilty, given the presiding judge over the January 6 case, Tanya Chutkan, appears to strongly believe Trump to be guilty.

“It’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day,” she said of Trump from the bench in October 2022, as she was sentencing Christine Priola to 15 months for “obstructing an official proceeding”.

A guilty verdict would mean potentially decades in prison in what would in effect be a life sentence.

The former president’s only hope to avoid further guilty verdicts, including for his behaviour on January 6, would appear to be winning the election, after which he might be able to pardon himself, at least for the federal charges.

Joe Biden and Democrats reacted hysterically last month when the US Supreme Court ruled that presidents enjoyed at least “presumptive immunity” for acts they carried out in their official capacity and total immunity for acts related to their “core constitutional powers”.

“Today’s decision almost certainly means that there are virtually no limits on what a president can do,” Mr Biden said at the time, foreshadowing the spectre of a King Donald I, a Caligula on the Potomac.

Democrats were apparently furious that the most critical of the four state and federal criminal indictments levelled against the former president, for his alleged role in seeking to overturn the 2020 election, including pressuring Mike Pence to use his power in the senate discard votes, were finished.

Kamala Harris fumed last week in her speech to the Democratic National Convention: “Consider the power (Trump) will have, especially after the US Supreme Court just ruled that he would be immune from criminal prosecution. Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails”.

It seems those guardrails remain strong. The refashioned version of the indictment is basically the same, demonstrating just what nonsense such arguments were.

The latest round of charges against Trump are bound to rile up his supporters who see the former president as a martyr, but whether that’s enough to get Trump over the line as he falls behind in the polls is another matter.