Donald Trump on Tuesday won enough delegates in the four states holding primary elections to lock up the Republican presidential nomination, meaning the party will now head into the November general election with an adjudicated rapist and, by then, potentially a convicted felon at the top of its ticket.
The coup-attempting former president needed 140 more delegates to win 1,215 ― a majority of those available in the Republican primary contests ― after a big win over Nikki Haley on Super Tuesday last week. She was his last rival in the race, and she dropped out the next morning.
The Republican National Committee at its Friday meeting in Houston already declared Trump the presumptive nominee and installed fellow election denier Michael Whatley as its new chairman and Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as vice chair, both at Trump’s request.
The first trial on Trump’s four criminal indictments is scheduled to begin on March 25 in New York City on charges that he falsified business records to hide payments to silence a porn star and a Playboy model just ahead of the 2016 election to suppress claims that he had had extramarital affairs with them.
A second trial, based on Trump’s attempt to remain in power despite his 2020 election loss, culminating in the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by a mob of his followers, could begin in federal court in Washington, D.C., between August and October, depending on the timing of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on his claim that he is immune from prosecution for his actions while president.
No trial date has yet been set on the federal charges over his refusal to turn over and attempts to hide secret documents that he took with him to his South Florida country club upon leaving the White House. And the fourth case, in which Trump and several co-conspirators are accused of scheming to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results, is currently tied up in a defense attempt to disqualify the Fulton County district attorney who filed it.
Trump previously was found liable for sexual abuse ― inserting his fingers or some object into the vagina of writer E. Jean Carroll against her will ― and then for subsequently defaming her by lying about it. The judge wrote that what Trump did is commonly referred to as “rape.”
He has also been found to have committed fraud over a number of years to get better loan terms for his various businesses and faces a $464 million judgment for that.
Despite all this, Trump easily defeated nearly a dozen rivals for the Republican nomination, with most of them shying away from using any of his criminal or civil cases against him. In fact, at the first Republican primary debate in August, six of the eight candidates on stage, Haley among them, said they would still support him in the general election if he became the nominee, even if he were a convicted felon at that point.