Trump plans to be in court for 2 days the week before Iowa. His campaign is fine with that.

CLINTON, Iowa — The Iowa campaign trail has long been littered with mainstays, like Pizza Ranch and the Machine Shed BBQ restaurant, but Donald Trump aims to add a new stop on Tuesday nearly 900 miles from Des Moines: A courtroom in Washington, D.C.

His campaign and allies see this detour from the Hawkeye State days before the caucuses as a boost, not a detriment, to his bid to return to the White House.

“I think the Democrats intended to hurt him by tying him down in a courtroom, but it’s backfiring on them spectacularly,” said Mike Davis, an outside legal and political adviser who is in frequent contact with Trump and his campaign. “They’re turning Donald Trump into Nelson Mandela.”

As his rivals barnstorm Iowa, Trump will not hold another public event in the state until Saturday, just two days before the caucuses. Instead of stumping in Sioux City or Storm Lake, he will voluntarily appear twice this week in courtrooms, first at appellate arguments in Washington and then Thursday at closing arguments for his civil fraud trial in Manhattan. He’ll return to Iowa for a Fox News town hall on Wednesday.

“If Donald Trump were in Ankeny, Iowa, this week, he’d suck all the oxygen out of the state and the race, but if he has to go appear in court, he still sucks all of the oxygen out of the race and out of Iowa,” said Hogan Gidley, a former Trump administration official and senior adviser at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute.

Trump himself has mused that his legal woes create political benefits.

Days before a Georgia grand jury handed up the fourth historic indictment of Trump, he predicted the state’s sprawling racketeering case against him could be, counterintuitively, just the spark he needed to sew up