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Picture this: It’s 9 p.m. on January 13, 2026 — a Tuesday — and you tune in to your favorite cable-news network to watch the president’s annual State of the Union address.
But this year, the president doesn’t take a bulletproof limo from the White House to the US Capitol. Gone are the hundreds of members of Congress traditionally in attendance. Instead, the commander in chief is wearing an orange jumpsuit, his message streamed to lawmakers and into your living room via Zoom from his prison cell.
Yes, this scenario is equally far-fetched and outlandish — in the extreme.
But it’s also possible, law experts told Insider, particularly given former President Donald Trump’s mounting legal woes and his announcement November 15 that he is again running for president.
Those legal problems intensified in dramatic fashion this summer as the FBI reportedly searched his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
The Justice Department is currently scrutinizing Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 US election. Officials in Fulton County, Georgia, are pursuing potential criminal charges against Trump and his associates. The National Archives also asked the department in February to investigate if Trump broke the law when he took official government records with him to Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House.
And for months, the US House January 6 select committee has built a decidedly public case that Trump was intimately involved in the deadly attack on January 6 attack on the US Capitol, and did nothing for hours to stop it. The committee has ordered Trump to testify, and Trump is fighting back.
If Trump landed in prison, nothing in the Constitution would block him from continuing the White House run, according to nine legal experts interviewed by Insider.
The Constitution requires only that presidential candidates are natural born US citizens who are at least 35 years old and have been US residents for at least 14 years. And practically anyone — even fictional characters — can take the first step toward the White House by filing organizational paperwork with the Federal Election Commission.
“If he happens to be in prison at the time of the next presidential election, the fact that he’s in prison will not prevent him from running,” said Michael Gerhardt, a constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law in Chapel Hill.
Running for president from prison has, in fact, been done before — twice.
The Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs was incarcerated in a federal prison in Atlanta in 1920 when he won about 3.5% of the national vote. President Warren G. Harding later pardoned Debs, who had been convicted of treason under the Espionage Act for his vocal opposition to US involvement in World War I.
Lyndon LaRouche also ran for president in 1992 from a prison cell after he was convicted of mail fraud in 1988.
Whether Trump could run for president from prison — he has not been charged with a crime despite being the subject of local- and state-level inquiries — is therefore the easy question to answer, according to legal scholars.
From there, matters get more complicated.
Campaigning from even a minimum-security prison would at best be stilted, and at worst, darn near impossible — especially for a candidate such as Trump who thrives on in-person rallies that draw five-figure crowds.
Somehow convincing tens of millions of Americans that an incarcerated septuagenarian was fit to lead the free world would prove an equally monumental challenge.
But say voters decided to elect an imprisoned Trump anyway.
From prison, Trump “would be subject to the same rules as other prisoners, which could restrict their communications and ability to appear at events,” said Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan and a former US attorney. “He would need to rely on proxies to campaign for him.”
Then there are the chaos-inducing unknowns: Would Trump use his powers to make his life cushier? Would he attempt to pardon himself? How would he defend himself if he faced, say, a third impeachment trial?
Trump has maintained that investigations into his actions, as well as his two impeachment trials, are all part of a “witch hunt” against him and that he’s committed no crime.
“Our Country is broken, our elections are rigged, corrupt, and stolen, our prosecutors are politicized, and I will just have to keep on fighting like I have been for the last five years!” Trump said in a statement in May.
Asked about whether Trump would consider running in 2024 if he were incarcerated, Trump spokesman Jason Miller told Insider last year, “This is legitimately the stupidest press inquiry I’ve received in 2021.” Miller has since left his post as Trump’s spokesman to launch a tech startup.
If an imprisoned Trump kept running for president and won the Republican Party nomination in 2024, this alone wouldn’t guarantee that his name would appear on each state’s ballot that November.
