Trump skips much of the final week before Iowa’s caucuses to go to court voluntarily instead

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — While his rivals contend with snow drifts and frigid temperatures as they make their last-ditch pitch to Iowa voters, former President Donald Trump has spent much of the week before the caucuses in court instead, by choice.

Trump was in Washington, D.C. for a federal hearing Tuesday and is attending the closing arguments of his civil fraud trial in New York Thursday, with a brief trip to Iowa in between for a Fox News town hall. He’ll only return to Iowa Saturday for a final blitz before the Monday caucuses.

Both court appearances are voluntary and Trump was not required to attend either. But his campaign has come to embrace his legal woes as a centerpiece of its strategy — one that has so far, supercharged his candidacy instead of hobbling it.

That may not work in a general election, when Trump will need to win over moderate and independent voters who turned from him in 2020 while he fights four separate criminal cases in four jurisdictions. But campaigning just to Republicans, Trump is using court appearances to cast himself as the victim of a coordinated effort by Democrats to hobble the chances of their chief political rival and to push back against President Joe Biden’s assertion that his reelection poses a threat to democracy. He instead calls Biden the real threat.

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