Rallies and debates used to define campaigns. Now they’re about juries and trials

NEW YORK (AP) — Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has been sitting for hours a day in a Manhattan courtroom, where his hush-money trial is nearing its end. On Monday, a trial is set to begin in Wilmington, Delaware, for President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who is accused of lying on a federal gun purchase form.

While presidents have been deposed in criminal matters, impeached and pardoned, and their family members entangled in legal scrapes before, never has the criminal courtroom taken center stage in a presidential election like this.

“It’s so unusual that we lack the terminology to express how unusual it is,” said presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky, author of the upcoming book, “Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic.”

The two criminal cases are in no way the same. One involves the conduct of a former president who is running to reclaim the White House, yet stands accused of falsifying business records to conceal an illegal scheme to influence the 2016 election. The other focuses on a private citizen — albeit the current president’s son — who is facing charges of lying on a federal gun-purchase form when he claimed he wasn’t using drugs.

Politically, though, there is some obvious overlap. Both men say they’re being persecuted by overzealous prosecutors and unfairly targeted for political gain. And both sides are seeking to capitalize on highly personal and potentially embarrassing witness testimony about their adversaries, with Republicans trying to use Hunter Biden as a sort of target by proxy for the president himself.

The politics of the moment

Trump has leaned hard into the politics of the moment, campaigning from court, claiming he’s the subject of a “witch