Trump’s electoral and judicial calendars collide – but it does him little harm

Four candidates were on the campaign trail, meeting and greeting voters in frigid Iowa. A fifth was sitting in a courtroom in rainy Washington, trying to fend off a criminal case that might land him in jail.

But in the upside-down, topsy-turvy world of American politics, it is Donald Trump – not Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Asa Hutchinson or Vivek Ramaswamy – who is expected to win the first Republican presidential nominating contest in a landslide next week.

This is not despite but because of a host of legal woes that would have long buried a normal candidate in a normal time have become a feature, not a bug, of his 2024 presidential run. “Unprecedented” is the most overused word of the Trump era but this week really is, well, unprecedented as the collision of his electoral and judicial calendars gets real.

On Tuesday he was in court as his lawyers tried to convince the three judges that a federal criminal case charging him with election subversion should be dismissed before it goes to trial. On Wednesday, Trump will sit for a Fox News town hall in Des Moines, Iowa, counterprogramming a CNN debate in the same city between DeSantis and Haley. On Thursday, expect to see Trump in New York for the closing arguments in a civil fraud trial. And on Saturday, he returns to Iowa for campaign rallies.

The former president is picking and choosing when and where he shows up. In every case, the decision is calculated to maximise his chances of winning back the White House – and staying out of prison.

He was not obliged to attend Tuesday’s proceedings at the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit. In driving rain, few protesters bothered to show up outside the courtroom and there were no TV cameras allowed inside. Trump