This is the first edition of Tracking Trump’s Trials and Tribulations. You can find the latest edition here: UPDATE 1: August 26
Donald’s calendar is filling up faster than rats deserting the Trumptanic. He’s accruing so many legal engagements in cases both civil and criminal, it’s hard to keep up. That’s why Politizoom is providing you with this user-friendly way of tracking his burgeoning schedule. It’s a ready reference for what’s happening when and where.
The inspiration for this tracker was Denis Elliott’s Trump Trials Coming – Let’s Look at the Timeline. While trackers do include proposed dates, there’s very little elbow room for actual predictions. But predictions are fun so please share your prognostications in the comments.
This is the third in Politizoom’s Tracker series and, like the previous two, this one will also be updated on a regular basis.
As you’ll see from the key, the cases are colour-coded to enable faster scanning for those who want to follow the progress of a particular case or to see at a glance how many different cases are packed into each month. The key not only allocates a colour to each case, it also provides a quick overview of all seven cases that are currently active and the prosecutors in charge of them.
We begin with the current month and, thus far, it’s the busiest in this year’s calendar with engagements spanning three different cases in three different places: DC, Florida and Fulton County, Georgia.
It would’ve been more crowded had Judge Cannon not cancelled a tentative date for a protective order hearing. But Trump cannot count on any other judges or justices contributing in the same way to his primary method of handling legal jeopardy: delay, delay, delay.
Thanks to New York attorney, Robbie Kaplan, who forwarded letters to New York judges warning them of Trump’s delay tactics, the judiciary is now very much aware of his flimflam stratagem and they’re not taking it anymore.
In September 2022, Reuters reported that Justice Juan Merchan warned against delaying tactics in a pre-trial hearing in New York. In November 2022, The Daily Beast reported that Judge Arthur Engoron was completely out of patience with the Trump Organization’s stall tactics. In March this year, ABC News reported Judge Arthur Engoron saying there was no need to postpone what he called a “seemingly simple case” in spite of Trump’s lawyers’ attempts to delay it.
All these judges are involved in current Trump cases. They know the board is getting crowded but rather than allowing it to slow them down, they are using it as a reason to speed up the process. Trump is not used to such forceful judicial pushback and now it’s coming at him from all sides.
October has the first firm trial date AND a proposed date by Fani Willis for her RICO case! Thank you, Kenneth Chesesbro for playing the speedy trial card!
Talk about a nightmare scenario. Cheseboro is playing a hole card. He’s betting that Willis won’t be ready to go to trial that quickly. But in the process, he’s dragging all 18 of his co-defendants down into the same legal quagmire with him.
Man oh man did that ever backfire because Fani is ready to bring it!
November is currently blank and December has only a proposed date for jury selection for the January 6 trial. No firm dates have yet been set by Judge Tanya Chutkan though it’s pertinent to note that Defendant Trump’s venomous rants will have considerable bearing on the dates chosen. From The Guardian, Saturday 12 August:
The federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s 2020 election subversion case on Friday warned inflammatory remarks from the former president would push her to schedule the trial sooner, saying she would take every step to safeguard the integrity of proceedings and to avoid tainting the potential jury pool.
At the rate he’s going, Judge Chutkan will be scheduling jury selection for the end of October if not sooner. The calendar is currently clear for most of October and all of November and December so she has a wide-open window if she wants to use it.
January has two firm trial dates plus a start date proposed by Special Counsel for the January 6 trial – check out which week of January 2024 Jack Smith is proposing for the beginning of the January 6 trial. I’m sure Judge Chutkan has noticed!
February is open. So far, March has the 25th inked in for DA Alvin Bragg’s case regarding the falsification of business records. However, he has stated that he’s ready to move this date forward should Special Counsel Jack Smith require it for one of his federal cases.
Judge Cannon has pencilled in May 20th for the stolen documents case but no one takes her seriously.
Keep a watchful eye out for updates!
Pictured in the feature image, from left to right:
Top: DA Alvin Bragg, DA Fani Willis, NY AG Letitia James, Special Counsel Jack Smith
Mid: Judge Aileen Cannon (stolen documents), Justice Arthur Engoron (Trump Org falsifying business records – Manhattan), Judge Juan Merchan (Trump Org fraudulent business practices – NY AG), Judge Lorna Scofield (Trump Org pyramid scheme – class action suit), Judge Scott McAfee (RICO case, Georgia), Judge Lewis Kaplan (E Jean Carroll’s second defamation suit), Judge Tanya Chutkan (Jan 6 case, DC)
If you see or hear of any firm or proposed dates, please let me know in the comments or on social media. You can find me on Twitter as @Mopshell, on Post and Mastodon as @michelle_elle, on Spoutible as @MichelleElle and Michelle Elle on Creative Sprints (4pm-7pm EST)
Thanks for taking on this task. I think things are going to heat up and you’re gonna get increasingly busy filling in calendars. Here’s hoping that before we know it you’ll be faced with the problem of having to create monthly calendars with bigger boxes because stuff will be happening in more than one place at the same time. (Maybe something you should start looking into now, instead of finding yourself in a “oh sh*t – how do I fit all this in one date box?” kind of rush)
Already on it. I have more than a year’s worth of individual months set up ready to go and they can easily be increased in size. What takes the most time is getting the numbers in the correct days of the week! It took me all day to set them up yesterday but it was time well spent because it means I can turn out an update really fast because all the grunt work is done.
Colour-coding makes a big difference too because the colour instantly tells you three pieces of information: which case it is, where it is and the prosecutor or individual/s who brought the case. That cuts down on the information that needs to go in the box. If I add the name of the judge to the colour key, that will cut back even more on the text in the box.
Thank you so much for the idea! I also discovered in my research, that all the big media outlets already have some form of tracker up and running but all of them are so information-heavy they’re unwieldy; none are as user-friendly as ours. If Twitter wasn’t such a shambles with everyone scattering to the 4 x 4 winds of the multi-social-media-verse, it would’ve been easier to promote our tracker version. I’m hoping that, despite the dispersion of our potential audience, we can still get the word out there. My fingers and toes are crossed!