Donald Trump faces an uphill battle to avoid conviction in his criminal trial beginning Monday. Most defendants who go to trial are convicted. Trump is unpopular in Manhattan, and his courtroom antics have not endeared him to many prospective jurors. Judge Juan Merchan significantly narrowed Trump’s potential lines of defense in rulings on legal and evidentiary issues. Trump and his lawyers still have two robust defense strategies to rebut prosecutors’ charges that Trump falsified his company’s business records in connection with a hush-money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016 election, Politico reports. The defense will take a wrecking ball to Michael Cohen, the former Trump lawyer/fixer and a key witness, in the hopes of taking the whole case down with him. The Trump team also may ask the judge to give the jury the option of convicting him on lesser, misdemeanor offenses instead of the felony counts he faces.
Some Trump’s lawyers have considered that option. “Now, obviously he doesn’t want” to be convicted at all, said someone familiar with Trump’s legal strategy, “but a misdemeanor conviction in state court in Manhattan is going to have absolutely no effect on this guy’s ability to run for office or on his liberty.” Trump’s quest to regain the White House relies in large part on avoiding prison time in the pending criminal cases against him. The conventional wisdom is that his other trials — particularly for trying to overturn the 2020 election — pose the gravest political threats to this effort. Polling conducted by Ipsos and Politico Magazine suggests that a conviction in Manhattan could hurt him electorally, particularly with independents. If Trump’s lawyers can pull off an upset victory, they could not only save Trump from the prospect of spending time on Riker’s Island like his former CFO, but also reshape the dynamics around Trump’s legal issues heading into November.
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