TRUMP'S TRIALS ARE STARTING TO LOOK LIKE THE NEW FITZMAS OR MUELLER TIME

Remember Fitzmas? That was a term referring to the belief among critics of then-president George W. Bush that Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame would effectively end the Bush presidency. Yes, we really believed that once.

We also believed that Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in the 2020 election would effectively end Donald Trump's presidency. Mueller Time didn't pan out either.

Now we assume that Trump's four pending criminal cases will be the deus ex machina that re-elects Joe Biden and saves us from another Trump term. It's obvious why people believe that:

More than half of swing-state voters wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump if he were convicted of a crime, according to a new Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll, a warning sign for the Republican frontrunner who continues to lead President Joe Biden in key states.

The poll found that 53% of voters in the seven closely watched battleground states would be unwilling to vote for Trump in the general election if he were found guilty of a crime, a figure that grows to 55% if he’s sentenced to prison.

... Nearly one in four — 23% — of swing-state Republicans say they are unwilling to support him if convicted.

... He loses one out of every five of his 2020 voters if he’s found guilty....

That's a good thing, because otherwise, the numbers in that poll look really awful for Biden:

But it seems less and less likely that there'll be any Trump trial ending in a jail sentence before November. Politico reports:

Whether Donald Trump faces a potential prison sentence in 2024 is at the mercy of a federal appeals court that’s operating on its own schedule — at a time when every day matters.

More than 50 days have elapsed since Trump’s criminal proceedings in a Washington, D.C., trial court — on charges for attempting to subvert the 2020 election — were paused indefinitely. They won’t resume until the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and, most likely, the Supreme Court resolve the question hanging over the entire case: whether Trump, as a former president, is immune from criminal prosecution....

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s federal election case, has tried to keep it on an expeditious track, and the trial is officially slated to begin on March 4. Chutkan, though, has strongly suggested she’ll push back that start date to account for each day of delay caused by Trump’s immunity appeal.

Even if the appeal were resolved this week against Trump, that calculation would put his earliest trial date in late April. But if the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court take additional weeks or months to deliver a final ruling, the opening days of Trump’s trial could be pushed to the summer or fall.

If, at that point, Trump retains his grip on the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, he and his allies are certain to exert intense pressure to postpone the trial until after the election.

A George H.W. Bush appointee, Judge Karen Henderson, is playing stall ball here. As for Trump's other trials, only the least damaging one seems likely to get under way soon:

Trump is facing three other criminal cases: one brought by [special counsel Jack] Smith in Florida in which Trump stands accused of hoarding national security secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving office; one in Georgia brought by local prosecutors who say Trump conspired to subvert the presidential election there in 2020; and one in New York brought by the Manhattan district attorney, who says Trump falsified his company’s records to mask hush money payments he made to conceal an alleged affair with a porn star.

A trial in the New York case is officially slated to begin in late March, though Trump is still pushing to toss it altogether, and even if it moves forward, the anticipated punishment is expected to be minimal. The Georgia case has not yet been scheduled but is likely to be shunted to 2025, given its complexity and laundry list of unresolved issues. And the classified documents case in Florida, set for May 20, also appears likely to be pushed back as U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, has extended key pretrial deadlines.

Maybe you think there'll still be a massive dropoff in support for Trump if his only conviction is for paying hush money to a porn star and his sentence is a fine and probation. If so, I hope you're right. But be ready for that to be the best we get in 2024 from all the investigations of Trump. Be ready for the real possibility that the three other trials, all on much more serious charges, simply won't happen before the election.

Biden should be trying to reverse these polling deficits on the assumption that the legal system won't help him. If it does, that's gravy. But it seems more and more likely that it won't.