Former President Donald Trump is riding high after a victory in the New Hampshire primary over his last major remaining opponent for the 2024 presidential nomination. But he shouldn't get too excited, wrote Greg Walters for Vice, because he is about to be in a world of legal hurt.
Trump is notoriously facing down four criminal indictments at the federal and state level, but those trials are still a long way off. However, two major civil cases with huge potential ramifications for him are on track to be decided very soon.
"Trump is days away from learning how much he’ll owe writer E. Jean Carroll in a defamation lawsuit over his derisive denials of her claim that he sexually assaulted her decades ago in a Manhattan department store," wrote Walters. "Then, likely next week, he’ll find out how much he has to pay for losing a sweeping civil fraud case brought by the New York Attorney General’s office, which accused him and his family business of fraudulently manipulating the valuations of Trump properties for financial gain" — with the AG seeking $370 million in fines and the dissolution of the Trump Organization in New York.
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Taken together, Walters continued, Trump is "about to get rocked by a double-bang of explosive legal judgments."
Aside from the judgments themselves, which could be enormous, Trump could also end up in a highly embarrassing position as he clashes visibly with the presiding judge in the Carroll trial, Lewis Kaplan, "if he gets on the stand and then fails to follow the judge’s restrictions on what he can say," wrote Walters. "Flaunting the rules could prompt a showdown with a federal judge who is known for coming down hard on shenanigans in his courtroom, and has a track record on the issue of contempt that could prove dangerous to Trump."
Arthur Engoron, the judge in the fraud trial, similarly has had to restrain Trump and his attorneys, and even fine the former president.
Trump, wrote Walters, "has used his tangles with the law to rally Republican support behind him by painting himself as the victim of a witch hunt." However, this tactic has so far "worked better for him on the campaign trail than in the courtroom — as his victory in New Hampshire, followed by the pair of potentially painful legal events to follow, appear set to illustrate."
