Former president Donald Trump and some of his legal advisers see an upside to the latest criminal case against him: He can use his upcoming trial to further argue his false claims of a stolen 2020 election.
The looming courtroom showdown is poised to push his insistence that election fraud occurred in 2020 toward the center of the 2024 presidential campaign, a dismaying prospect for Republicans and some of Trump’s advisers who have urged him to stop belaboring that subject. Trump’s defense team has signaled that they’ll focus on rebutting prosecutors’ allegations that Trump knew his fraud claims were false.
The strategy offers a small consolation to the former president, who spent Thursday suffering once again from the small indignities faced by indicted federal defendants. He was arraigned after roughly an hour-long wait inside a Washington courthouse just blocks from the site of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. Trump spent the time occasionally rapping his knuckles on a table.
Trump has said that he wanted to subpoena people about the 2020 election and argue that he won, as prosecutors allege that he knew he lost and that his claims were false, according to people close to the former president, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
But the prospect of revisiting the validity of the last election has delighted Democrats, on top of causing consternation among Republican strategists, who see other, much more politically fruitful focal points for 2024. There are mountains of evidence — provided by top leaders in his campaign and government — that the election was not stolen from Trump, and the indictment paints a damning portrait of a man who was frequently informed of that reality.