Trump may be down, but he isn’t out – yet

A televised trial of the former president could make a great spectacle – but it won’t stop Trump securing the Republican nomination, writes Mary Dejevsky

What, if anything, could stop his name appearing on the 5 November ballot paper? (AFP via Getty Images)

The charges brought against Donald Trump by the US state of Georgia this week represent far and away a bigger threat to his ambitions than all the other legal threats piled up against him. This is because they are at once the most political – in the sense that they involve conspiracy to overturn the results of a democratic election – and the least political, in the sense of being least liable to be influenced by the political sympathies of a jury or public opinion.

The point is that to secure a conviction, a prosecutor has to match the evidence with the letter of the law. And the evidence that is already in the public domain in this case – an audio recording of Trump asking for the reallocation of votes – seems pretty damning. Short of finding a lawyer who would cast doubt on the authenticity of that recording – and it has not been challenged hitherto – it is hard to see much room for anyone to argue that the call meant anything other than it appears to mean: that the man who was still US president was trying to alter the genuine result of a democratic vote.