Donald Trump’s most unorthodox primary campaign persisted Tuesday, as the GOP front-runner chose to appear in a federal court, despite not being required to, rather than campaign in Iowa just days before the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. The former president, who possesses a more than 30-point polling advantage over his closest Republican rivals in Iowa, has sought to make his legal troubles inextricably linked to his presidential campaign. The strategy, at least in the primary, has worked. Republican voters have rallied around him, apparently viewing the scores of felony counts he faces as a form of political persecution.
A three-judge federal appeals court panel in Washington heard arguments about whether, according to the US Constitution, Trump was immune from criminal prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election, and their responses appeared highly skeptical.
Trump’s defense attorneys had contended that he was acting in his official executive capacity and was thus immune from prosecution. “During the 234 years from 1789 to 2023, no current or former president had ever been criminally prosecuted for official acts,” Trump’s attorneys argued in court filings, adding, “The indictment of President Trump threatens to launch cycles of recrimination and politically motivated prosecution that will plague our Nation for many decades to come.” In turn, the special counsel’s office has said that Trump’s executive privilege defense runs afoul of the “principle of accountability” and “threatens to license presidents to commit crimes to remain in office.”
Meanwhile, federal appeals DC circuit court judge Karen Henderson, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, seemed doubtful that the former president acted within his official duties. “I think it is paradoxical to say that his constitutional duty to take care of the laws be faithfully executed allows him to violate criminal law.” The panel’s judgment will likely see an appeal to the Supreme Court if the ruling goes against Trump, which will make the final decision on whether Trump’s criminal trial in Washington will happen.
For Trump, the Tuesday appearance was voluntary. However, the former president used wildly different framing in a recent fundraising blast, falsely accusing Joe Biden of “forcing me into a courtroom in our nation’s capital” and plucking him off the campaign trail, according to The Washington Post.
Oscillating between the campaign trail and courtrooms in Washington—or in Georgia and New York, where he faces separate state charges—is a maneuver Trump will have to repeat in the coming months and even later this week. On Thursday, after a short visit to Iowa for a Fox News town hall the previous evening, he is expected to travel to New York for the closing arguments of his civil fraud trial.
