By now, Donald Trump should be tired of all the winning.

Pretty much since late-February, he’s been on the political upswing — no matter what. Good, bad or ugly, it either helps him in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, or doesn’t hurt him. The verdict against Trump in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case can now be probably added to the list.

Trump is the first former president to be found guilty of sexually abusing and defaming a woman, and will likely be the first former president to suffer no immediate adverse political consequences from being found guilty of sexually abusing and defaming a woman.

Over the last month or so, Trump has gotten indicted while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has passed a truly historic raft of conservative reforms — and Trump has gained, while DeSantis has lost ground.

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Former President Donald Trump has the support of his wife Melania in his reelection campaign, she says, after the former first lady has rarely been seen at her husband’s campaign events.

"He has my support, and we look forward to restoring hope for the future and leading America with love and strength," Melania Trump told Fox News in an interview published Tuesday.

Donald Trump announced his reelection campaign in November 2022 — the only time Melania Trump has appeared at one of his rallies. Since then, she hasn’t been spotted at any campaign events.

Melania Trump also did not accompany her husband to court in Manhattan last month for his alleged role in a scheme to pay hush money to a porn star during the 2016 presidential campaign, and was absent from his post-arraignment speech in Mar-a-Lago.

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Now that the criminal justice system has begun bringing charges against former President Donald Trump, it’s only a matter of time before he gets convicted of something, somewhere. And as soon as that happens, the next question to face our political system is, will he be pardoned?

The answer is more complicated, and surprising, than you might think. There are three ways Trump could be pardoned: by a state executive, by the current president or by himself.
State-level pardons  
Let’s take the state level first. Each state has its own process for pardons and commutations, which differ from pardons in that they reduce the punishments for crimes rather than wiping them out altogether. Some states lodge those powers with their governor and some with a range of executive officials.

Trump currently faces actual or potential criminal charges in two states, New York and Georgia. He has been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records under New York law. The only pertinent pardon power related to those charges
belongs to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, who is unlikely to agree to pardon the former Republican president.

The second state-level investigation is ongoing in Fulton County, Ga., in connection with Trump’s infamous recorded call imploring Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that “I just want to find 11,780 votes” to swing that state in his column. If district attorney Fani Willis produces an indictment, which she recently announced could be forthcoming this summer, Trump would have to turn to a five-member Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles for a pardon. Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has the power to appoint members, but they serve staggered, seven-year terms that are subject to confirmation by the state Senate. And unlike presidential pardons, which can be doled out arbitrarily with few legal constraints, Georgia’s pardon program has stringent eligibility requirements. Trump could only apply for a pardon in Georgia after he is indicted and convicted, and only after five additional years have passed since completion of his sentence.  

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MANCHESTER, N.H. — In New York, the woman who accused Donald Trump of raping her decades ago sat on the stand for a second day. In Washington, former Vice President Mike Pence testified before a federal grand jury, part of the special counsel investigation into the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

But here in Manchester, hundreds of miles away, those legal troubles were far from the focus as Trump spent more than an hour on Thursday riling up his faithful over the economy, international trade tariffs and his newly nicknamed adversary —“Crooked Joe” Biden — in a key early state ahead of next year’s presidential election.

For almost any other candidate in any other campaign, a criminal indictment and a civil trial over a rape accusation would sound a death knell.

For Trump, it’s barely a blip. The former president’s polling lead over his 2024 Republican rivals has grown as his legal morass deepens. A recurring joke he made again Thursday about being served a subpoena if he so much as flies over a Democratic-leaning state drew laughs and applause from those attending.

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They say sharing a common challenge is the best way to build a friendship. President Joe Biden, then, is on track to becoming fast friends with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol; the two are reuniting during Yoon’s state visit to Washington, D.C., this week, as the two heads of state face a number of similar challenges.

Both suffer from miserably low approval ratings. Biden’s popularity trails behind that of virtually every modern U.S. president. In Morning Consult’s survey of 22 major global leaders, Yoon comes in dead last with a 19 percent approval rating and a staggering 75 percent disapproval rating. Neither president can pass any significant law, as their opposition controls at least part of the legislature.

But most pertinently, both presidents deal with a political environment destabilized by their predecessor’s indictment. The only difference is that Yoon has been able to use this situation to his advantage — and could even offer Biden some pointers on how to benefit from the prosecution of former President Donald Trump.  

Unlike the U.S., which is queasy about prosecuting any former president no matter how awful they are, South Korea is a global leader among wealthy democracies in putting its former presidents in jail. Excluding Yoon, South Korea has had eight presidents since 1980; four of them were imprisoned. Yoon, a former prosecutor, was personally involved in the cases against two of them from his own party.

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NEW YORK — Less that one month after being indicted on charges related to a hush money payment to a porn star, former President Donald Trump is about to stand trial in a civil lawsuit from a magazine columnist who says he raped her decades ago.

E. Jean Carroll, a longtime columnist for Elle magazine, says Trump attacked her in a dressing room of a luxury department store in the 1990s and sexually assaulted her — a claim Trump denies, saying the incident “never happened.” On Tuesday, jury selection is scheduled to begin in Manhattan federal court for the trial.

Though the case is civil and not criminal, meaning there is no threat of jail time for the former president, the stakes are nonetheless high. If Carroll wins, it would be the first time Trump has been held legally responsible for sexual assault, despite dozens of women who have accused him of that crime and other sexual misconduct. The jury could order Trump to pay Carroll a financial award that one legal expert said could be “many millions of dollars.” Carroll is seeking monetary damages but has not specified an amount.

And, of course, a civil verdict against Trump would add to his avalanche of legal troubles as he is seeking to regain the presidency while under indictment in an unrelated case and facing the possibility of additional criminal charges in several other investigations.

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The Manhattan district attorney’s indictment of former President Donald Trump for 34 felonies so far has not resulted in the “death and destruction” that the former president warned of and may have desired. The protests near the courthouse, though loud, were non-violent and essentially performative. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who had encouraged the far-right demonstrators, left the scene after five perfunctory minutes, unable to make herself heard over the din.

We and others have written of the prospect of a new civil war in the United States, which seemed a real, if still remote, possibility immediately after Jan. 6. Now it is starting to look less plausible, given the strength shown by the political center in the 2022 midterms and President Joe Biden’s largely effective tenure in the White House.

Yet full-scale civil war is not the only danger. Far-right Americans are highly unlikely to coalesce into a cohesive force that could wage war, but an army is not required to wreak sustained havoc and destabilize the country. In a deeply polarized environment, smaller pockets of armed unrest could easily ignite and spread disorder. The hyperbolic reactions of far-right Republican political figures and media commentators to the Trump indictment signal that they certainly do not believe the MAGA fever among their constituents and consumers has broken.

As the 2024 election approaches, the threat of political violence and civil breakdown is only going to increase. And despite all that U.S. national security and law enforcement officials have learned since Jan. 6, the country is still not prepared for a far-right revolt.

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NEW YORK — An appeals court temporarily halted a planned Thursday deposition of former Trump prosecutor Mark Pomerantz, delaying an effort by House Republicans to investigate the office of the Manhattan district attorney.

The brief pause gives the court time to consider arguments from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg that a subpoena for Pomerantz’s testimony is unconstitutional.

The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), issued the subpoena to Pomerantz, who previously worked for the district attorney’s office, in the wake of Bragg filing criminal charges against former President Donald Trump late last month.

Bragg then sued Jordan and the Judiciary panel, seeking a court order preventing the House from enforcing the subpoena.

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NEW YORK — A federal judge declined Wednesday to block a subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee to a former prosecutor who investigated Donald Trump in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, paving the way for a Thursday deposition of the former prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz.

“The subpoena was issued with a ‘valid legislative purpose’ in connection with the ‘broad’ and ‘indispensable’ congressional power to ‘conduct investigations,’” wrote U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil.

“It is not the role of the federal judiciary to dictate what legislation Congress may consider or how it should conduct its deliberations in that connection,” she continued. “Mr. Pomerantz must appear for the congressional deposition. No one is above the law.”

The district attorney’s office planned to ask an appeals court to intervene quickly and stop the deposition, a spokesperson for the office said.

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The House Judiciary Committee cited an unlikely inspiration — the Democratic-run Jan. 6 panel — in its Monday response to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as the two sides battle over the GOP’s attempt to investigate the New York prosecution of Donald Trump.

The GOP-led panel noted that the select committee, which investigated the attack on the Capitol, had repeatedly won in court battles over subpoena enforcement, even against witnesses who argued their testimony was protected by various legal privileges. And the same conclusion should apply to the GOP subpoena of former Bragg aide Mark Pomerantz, the Judiciary Committee noted in a brief filed by House lawyers.

“Even if a privilege could potentially apply to certain questions at Pomerantz’s deposition, that is no basis to quash the subpoena,” House General Counsel Matthew Berry wrote in a 35-page response to a lawsuit that Bragg filed last week against the the Judiciary panel. “Instead, Pomerantz must appear and invoke any claimed privilege on a question-by-question basis.”

Bragg's lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, seeks a court order preventing the House from enforcing the subpoena. An initial hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.

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Former President Donald Trump’s latest campaign finance filing showed how his indictment spurred a last-minute fundraising surge. It also showed he used that money to pay close advisors and top aides while some went to his own properties and businesses.

The former president’s campaign raised $14.5 million during the first quarter of 2023, according to a first-quarter filing with the Federal Election Commission late Saturday. The filing backs up the notion that Trump experienced a fundraising surge linked to talk of the indictment: more than 30 percent of his quarterly fundraising from itemized donors came in during the final 12 days of the quarter, after Trump said on Truth Social that he expected to be arrested, with the greatest surge in the final days, after he was indicted.

Fundraising has long been a point of strength for Trump, as he leveraged Facebook and other digital tools to mobilize a base of GOP small-dollar donors. His joint fundraising committee, Save America, raised more than $100 million in the 2021 calendar year when he was not even a federal candidate.

But Trump’s early presidential campaign initially struggled to keep up the momentum. The fourth quarter of 2022 was Save America’s worst in terms of overall fundraising and it spent more on digital fundraising expenses than it raised in December of last year, according to FEC filings.

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NEW YORK – Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s new lawsuit against Rep. Jim Jordan is an aggressive counterpunch for a first-term elected prosecutor who is typically averse to politics. But it’s not the first time that Bragg, a Democrat, has fought House Republicans.

He’s dusting off a legal strategy devised seven years ago by one of his top lieutenants when they both worked in the New York attorney general’s office. That strategy — defying federal subpoenas by invoking state sovereignty — shows a prosecutor intent on defending the independence of local investigations from congressional oversight. And by suing Jordan and his House Judiciary Committee directly, Bragg has escalated his public confrontation with the House GOP over the investigation and indictment of former President Donald Trump.

Bragg’s lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court in New York, asks a judge to block a subpoena seeking testimony from Mark Pomerantz, a former assistant DA who briefly worked under Bragg and has criticized aspects of his Trump investigation.

The lawsuit echoes legal arguments advanced in 2016 and 2017 in another subpoena fight on a hot-button issue. At the time, New York’s attorney general, Democrat Eric Schneiderman, was investigating whether Exxon Mobil misled investors about the risks of climate change. A GOP-controlled House panel accused Schneiderman of having a political agenda and served subpoenas seeking documents from the probe. Bragg was a senior official in Schneiderman’s office, as was Leslie Dubeck, who was then counsel to the attorney general and is now Bragg’s general counsel.

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Former President Donald Trump has gained more support for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination from South Carolina Republican voters than former Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott in their home state, a Winthrop University poll released Wednesday shows.

Trump was the top pick among 41 percent of respondents. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — who has yet to declare his candidacy, though he is widely expected to — came in second with 20 percent and Haley came in third with 18 percent.

Seven percent of respondents support a presidential nomination for Scott. The South Carolina senator has not announced that he’s running for the GOP ticket in 2024, but he officially launched his presidential exploratory committee Wednesday.

The poll comes as Trump is the first former president to ever be criminally charged for his alleged role in a hush money payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels. Still, Republicans overall believe Trump is being unfairly targeted, according to pre-indictment poll numbers.

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Donald Trump argued late Tuesday that his historic indictment by a Manhattan grand jury requires a delay in another legal matter he faces: the defamation lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll, who says Trump defamed her when he denied and derided her claim that he raped her decades ago.

The former president is slated to defend against those allegations in a civil trial on April 25, but his lawyer Joe Tacopina is urging U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan to postpone it for four weeks, contending that the surge in media coverage of Trump’s indictment has tainted potential jurors in the civil case.

“Holding the trial in this case a mere three weeks after these historic events will guarantee that many, if not most, prospective jurors will have the criminal allegations top of mind when judging President Trump against Ms. Carroll’s allegations,” Tacopina argued in a late-night filing, contending that the intensity of media coverage was “remarkable for its volume and incitement of animus towards President Trump” among potential jurors.

Tacopina acknowledged that Trump draws blanket media coverage at nearly all times — but he said Google searches indicated a particularly intense surge of coverage of the charges brought by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg earlier this month. Those charges include claims that Trump falsified business records to conceal hush money payments to a porn star to cover up an affair. Because those charges relate to Carroll’s claims of “sexual misconduct,” Tacopina said, there’s a particularly acute risk that jurors in the civil trial will conflate the issues.

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Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg sued House Republicans on Tuesday to prevent them from subpoenaing a former assistant DA who has criticized aspects of Bragg's investigation into former President Donald Trump.

In a 50-page lawsuit, Bragg slammed House GOP efforts to compel the testimony of his former lieutenant, Mark Pomerantz, as a “brazen and unconstitutional attack” and a “campaign of harassment in retaliation for the District Attorney’s investigation and prosecution of Mr. Trump.” Bragg is seeking a court order to bar Pomerantz from complying with the subpoena — and he also urged the court to issue a preliminary injunction and temporary restraining order to prevent Congress from enforcing the subpoena.

The subpoena is an extraordinary escalation of the clash between the House Judiciary Committee and Bragg’s office, which is prosecuting the former president for allegedly falsifying business records to cover up a hush money scheme.

The new litigation was filed in federal district court in Manhattan and assigned to Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, a Trump appointee. It stems from the first subpoena issued in a sweeping House GOP investigation into Bragg’s office. Republicans launched their probe, led by Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and Administration Chair Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), while rallying to Trump’s side ahead of his indictment.

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Sunday that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ statement regarding his relationship with Republican megadonor Harlan Crow “contradicts many of the facts on the ground and also raises in other ways, even more serious questions.”

On CNN’s “State of the Union,” she pointed to the fact that Thomas acknowledged his friendship with Crow has been 25 years-long but Thomas has been a justice for more than 30 years.

“What he is admitting in his statement in an attempt to defend himself is that he began this relationship with a billionaire and receiving these sorts of gifts as after he was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States,” the New York Democrat said on Sunday.

Thomas issued his statement Friday after ProPublica reported that Crow had paid for multiple trips for the justice and his wife, which included the use of Crow’s yacht, private jet and Adirondacks resort, among other gifts. ProPublica estimated the cost of one vacation as more than $500,000.

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Former Attorney General William Barr said Sunday he thought the case for which President Donald Trump has been indicted is deeply flawed, but also said Trump has acted imprudently in attacking the judge and others in the case.

"I don't think it is appropriate or wise. The president notoriously lacks self-control and he frequently gets himself into trouble,” Barr said on ABC’s “This Week” about Trump's attacks on Judge Juan Merchan and members of his family, as well as the judicial process.

Barr did agree with Trump and his allies who say the criminal case brought in New York by District Attorney Alvin Bragg is very weak. Trump was arraigned Tuesday on 34 felony counts relating to a hush-money payment to a porn star during the 2016 election season.

“I don’t think it has any merit,” Barr said of the case. “I think it is transparently an abuse of prosecutorial power to accomplish a political end. I think it is an unjust case. That’s not say that every legal challenge that the president faces is unjustified. But this one especially is.”

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Rep. Bennie Thompson, the man who for nearly 18 months anchored the House investigation into the events that led to the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, says he sees parallels between the attacks on his committee’s work and the skepticism levied at the Manhattan district attorney.

Alvin Bragg, a first term district attorney, made history earlier in the week when he announced 34 felony counts against former President Donald Trump. It is the first time in the nation’s history a former president has been criminally charged. At his arraignment in New York on Tuesday, Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Soon after those charging documents were made public, critics, including those who normally would be expected to support Bragg’s case, bemoaned the legal theories he is employing in pursuit of a conviction. As POLITICO highlighted earlier this week, Bragg’s case, which stems from hush money payments to silence a porn star from speaking publicly about an alleged affair, appeared to embolden Trump’s most ardent defenders.

House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Thursday subpoenaed a former prosecutor who worked in the Manhattan DA’s office — a move Bragg characterized as an “attempt to undermine an active investigation” and “an unprecedented campaign of harassment and intimidation.”

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On Tuesday afternoon, against the blue-sky backdrop of one of the first spring-like days in New York, Donald Trump’s eight-car motorcade arrived at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He was there to turn himself in ahead of his arraignment on criminal charges related to hush money he paid to an adult film star, Stormy Daniels, during the 2016 campaign. His indictment marks the first time a former — and certainly the first time a former and possibly future — president has been charged with criminal conduct.

After almost a decade of Trump’s rewriting most of the rules in politics, his indictment could blow up another norm: The perception of the legal system’s independence from politics. Conservatives and Republicans have argued that Trump’s prosecution was politically motivated, coming from a liberal DA who campaigned on holding Trump accountable. (Even some liberal analysts have pointed to the flimsiness of the 34 felony counts Trump has been charged with.) Meanwhile, most liberals and Democrats argue that it’s a triumph of law and order over a president who has long evaded consequences for his actions.

Will this prosecution change politics as we know it?

POLITICO Magazine reached out to a group of the sharpest legal and political minds to get their take on how the charges leveled at Trump could usher in a new era of politics, with consequences that will reverberate long after Trump’s trial, long after the 2024 campaign and long after Trump is out of office — or, as the case may be, out of prison.

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