The judge in Trump’s Jan. 6 case didn’t just pick a March 4 trial date at random. The aim is to get Trump off the ballot.
News broke Monday that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, the judge overseeing the Jan. 6-related case against Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., set a March 4, 2024, trial date for the former president.
It just so happens that March 4 is the day before Super Tuesday, when more than a dozen states, from California to Texas to Virginia, will hold Republican primary elections. What a coincidence!
What this means is that Trump, the Republican front-runner by a wide margin, will not be able to campaign ahead of the most important date on the GOP primary calendar. It also means he’ll likely be tied up in court a week later on March 12, when four more states hold primary elections.
But this isn’t merely election “interference,” it’s a naked attempt to rig the 2024 election. The timing here is important, because not only will Trump be pulled off the campaign trail at a crucial time, he will almost certainly be convicted over the summer. After all, the jury in this case will be drawn from a pool that voted 92 percent for Joe Biden. No matter how outlandish and unconstitutional the charges are, no matter how utterly politicized the process is, a D.C. jury is going to convict Trump.
A summer 2024 conviction sets up the real play here, which is for blue states and counties to remove Trump from the ballot, citing a faulty and blatantly lawless reading of the 14th Amendment. Assuming Trump wins the GOP primary, this will leave Republicans with no candidate on the ballot across vast swaths of the country heading into the fall.
