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If you’re finding it hard to keep track of all of former President Donald Trump’s legal woes, don’t feel bad: He can’t get it straight, either. Last weekend, he announced that he’d be arrested in Manhattan on Tuesday. It’s now Thursday, and Trump remains a free man, with no indictment from a grand jury yet. Public indications still seem to point toward charges against Trump in Manhattan, but what and when are still a mystery. And several more cases loom beyond that.

Assuming Trump is eventually charged, whether in Manhattan or elsewhere, the result will be a spectacle no one alive has seen before: a former U.S. president under arrest. We likely won’t see a classic perp walk, with officers holding him by each arm and escorting him. The process would instead be arranged and negotiated beforehand, and he’s reportedly been debating whether to smile for the cameras on his way to being booked. Trump would have to be fingerprinted like any other defendant, and then he’d be released. But that would be just the start of a long process toward a trial or plea, and then a verdict.

With so many investigations and cases floating around, maintaining a sense of the issues at stake in each investigation, the timeline for them, and how serious a threat to the former president they pose is tricky—even when you’ve been following the cases for years now, as I have. Here’s my attempt to put all of the open criminal cases against Donald Trump in context for easy reference. I’ve arranged the cases by my assessment of the seriousness of the allegations to democracy and the rule of law, from the least significant to the most.

Manhattan: Hush Money

Because District Attorney Alvin Bragg has not announced charges, we have to speculate a bit, but public evidence suggests that Bragg is looking at a claim that Trump falsified business records in reimbursing his former fixer Michael Cohen for a hush payment made to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actor who allegedly had an affair with Trump. Cohen’s payoff and Trump’s reimbursement are not in dispute, but Trump denies the affair and any lawbreaking.

When? The timing of any charges is a topic of intense speculation, especially after Trump’s prediction last weekend of a Tuesday arrest. The grand jury unexpectedly didn’t meet yesterday and is reportedly meeting on a different matter today. That means we’re probably looking at next week at the earliest.

How grave is the allegation? Look, falsifying records is a crime, and crime is bad. But many people have analogized this case to Al Capone’s conviction on tax evasion: It’s not that he didn’t deserve it, but it wasn’t really why he was an infamous villain. Unless Bragg has a more elaborate case than he has tipped, this feels like a minor offense compared with the others I’ll get to below.

How plausible is conviction? The case Bragg is most likely to make faces hurdles, including the statute of limitations, a questionable key witness in Cohen, and some untested legal theories. In short, based on what we know, the Manhattan case seems like perhaps both the least significant and the legally weakest case. Even some Trump critics are dismayed that Bragg seems to be likely to bring charges before any other criminal case.

Department of Justice: Mar-a-Lago Documents

Special Counsel Jack Smith is overseeing a Justice Department probe into presidential records, some of them highly classified, found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. Trump removed many documents from the White House when he left office, then refused to return some despite repeated requests. His attorneys attested that he’d returned all relevant documents, but an August 2022 search turned up many, including extremely sensitive documents allegedly stored haphazardly.

When? Smith faces a de facto deadline of January 20, 2025, at which point Trump or any Republican president would likely shut down a case if they take office. Last week a court matter raised eyebrows, as prosecutors persuaded a judge to order Trump’s attorney to hand over documents, ruling that attorney-client privilege didn’t apply because evidence suggested that Trump’s attorneys may have advanced a crime. Then this week, Trump appealed, but the D.C. Circuit Court rejected the attempt in a lightning-fast decision.

How grave is the allegation? The alleged handling of the documents is not as serious as Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, but it’s probably a solid bronze medal on this list. The documents are highly sensitive for national security, and if allegations are true, Trump refused to comply with a subpoena, tried to hide documents, and lied to the government through his attorneys.

How plausible is conviction? This may be the most open-and-shut case. Not every case involving classified documents gets charged, but if Smith decides to prosecute, the facts and legal theory here are more straightforward than in almost any other of these matters.

Fulton County: Election Subversion

In Fulton County, Georgia, which includes most of Atlanta, District Attorney Fani Willis has been conducting an investigation into attempts to steal the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, including Trump’s call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he pressured Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to allow him to win.

When? A special grand jury completed its work in January and recommended that its report be made public. The special grand jury can make recommendations, but a normal grand jury would have to issue indictments. During a January hearing over whether to release the full report, prosecutors told a judge that decisions on charges were “imminent,” but so far nothing has emerged. (The judge withheld most of the report.)

How grave is the allegation? Short of the federal January 6 case (which I’ll get to next), this is probably the most egregious. Trump’s pressure offensive against officials at the state level to try and change the results of the election was a grave attack on democracy. But Willis can focus only on what happened in Georgia, one piece of the bigger whole.

How plausible is conviction? Experts differ. This is a huge case for a local prosecutor, even in a county as large as Fulton, to bring. The grand jury’s foreperson said in an interview that there will be no big surprises in who the jury suggested be charged. Willis has the advantage of the recording of the Raffensperger call, which is close to a smoking gun.

Department of Justice: January 6

Special Counsel Smith is overseeing the federal probes related to Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election and overturn the results, as well as the insurrection on January 6, 2021.

When? No one knows. As with the other DOJ case, Smith needs to move quickly, before Trump or any other Republican president could shut down a case upon taking office in January 2025.

How grave is the allegation? This is the most important Trump case out there. You can’t get much graver than attempting to subvert the American election system and inciting an attack on Congress, and the Justice Department has the potential to address the whole sordid episode.

How plausible is conviction? It’s very hard to say. Everyone saw the attack, but we don’t know what crimes Smith might charge, or what legal theories he might use—the House January 6 committee, for example, made a nonbinding recommendation to apply a seldom-used charge of aiding insurrection—or whether he would even charge Trump or instead opt to prosecute lower-level officials.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

By some accounts, Mike Pence has wanted to be president since his college-fraternity days. Now he finally seems ready to run—but he can’t find a constituency to support him. How did the former VP get here?

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Tattoos do odd things to the immune system. The Malthusians are back. Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading

Deal With the Devil

My colleague McKay Coppins, who profiled Mike Pence for The Atlantic in 2018 and has closely followed Pence’s political career ever since, recently sat in on some focus groups consisting of Republican voters who supported Trump in both 2016 and 2020. “My goal was to see if I could find at least one Pence supporter,” McKay wrote yesterday. Instead, he heard “some of the most withering commentary you’ve ever encountered about a politician.”

I called McKay to talk about Pence’s Trump trap, and how one big miscalculation damaged his political prospects.

Isabel Fattal: Mike Pence has a problem: Some voters think he’s too aligned with Donald Trump; others think he’s not aligned enough. How did he end up in this pickle?

McKay Coppins: Well, it’s a problem Pence created for himself. When he joined the ticket in 2016, he decided that his job would be to loyally defend Trump in every context. Pence’s role was to be an obsequious Trump flatterer, and he did it very well. And then he broke with Trump on January 6 by refusing to obstruct the certification of the electoral votes.

On one side, I kept hearing, in these focus groups of Republicans who are still strong Trump supporters, that Pence was disloyal. And on the other side, the less Trump-inclined Republicans felt like Pence was too stained by his time in the Trump administration. What was interesting, though, is that everybody across the MAGA spectrum saw Pence as weak. And I think that that’s what you get when you refuse to take a stand. In trying to walk this line, I think he’s alienated everybody and has come off looking kind of spineless in a way that is not appealing to any voters.

Isabel: You argue that Pence also miscalculated the role of decency in conservative politics.

McKay: Pence made the calculation at the very beginning that he would vouch for Trump with conservative Christian voters. He would assure them that Trump was a good man, and that they didn’t need to worry about the various mistresses and affairs and exploits in his personal life. Pence was a key figure in creating a permission structure for evangelical voters to support Donald Trump, all of his personal foibles notwithstanding.

In doing so, Pence unwittingly wrote himself out of conservative politics. He convinced what should have been his base—conservative religious voters—that personal character and morality don’t really matter in a presidential candidate. I heard that over and over in these focus groups. Voters would praise Mike Pence as an apparently decent, honest, wholesome guy who seems like a good Christian. And then, in the next breath, they would say, But I don’t really want to see him as president. And in many cases, they cited those qualities as evidence that he doesn’t have what it takes to be president.

Pence accidentally conditioned the conservative Christian base to see as their ideal champion a brash, loud, charismatic, and morally dubious figure. Now that’s what they expect in a president. And the fact that Mike Pence doesn’t embody that persona now works against him.

Isabel: Right. He did too good of a job selling Trump.

McKay: Exactly. I’ve been writing about Pence for a long time now. When I profiled him back in 2018, it was clear to me that he had made this deal with the devil, this bargain that he thought would position him to eventually become president. And instead, all of the compromises he made to his principles ended up being his undoing. I think there’s a tragic irony in that.

Isabel: Tom Nichols recently wrote about Pence’s speech at the Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, where Pence publicly stated that Trump endangered his life on January 6. Why do you think he is speaking out about this now?

McKay: I imagine that his campaign-in-waiting is holding similar focus groups as the ones that I sat in on. And I imagine that his consultants have recognized the same problem that I’ve identified, which is that right now he has no constituency at all. So it’s possible that he will decide that the most hard-core Trump supporters are out of reach, and that therefore his best bet is to sharpen his criticism of Trump, sharpen his criticism of what happened on January 6, and reach for the portion of the party that’s not still under Trump’s spell. I don’t know if it’ll work, and there are probably other candidates better positioned at this point to win that segment of the party. But it is possible that he’ll decide that’s his best shot.

Related:

Nobody likes Mike Pence. God’s plan for Mike Pence

Today’s News

The Manhattan grand jury that has been hearing evidence on Donald Trump’s alleged involvement in a hush-money payment to an adult-film actress reportedly did not meet today, delaying a possible indictment of Trump until tomorrow at the earliest. Meanwhile, a federal appeals court ordered a lawyer representing Trump to hand over records in an inquiry into Trump’s handling of classified materials. Two faculty members of East High School in Denver were wounded in a shooting at the school this morning; the male student suspected in the incident remains at large. Despite recent banking-sector instability, the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates by a quarter-point as part of an ongoing effort to curb inflation.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: The environmental toll of bitcoin could be even higher this year than last, Emma Marris writes. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf asks: Are suburbs the future?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Houston Cofield / NYT / Redux

How Ivermectin Became a Belief System

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

Since fall 2021, Daniel Lemoi has been a central figure in the online community dedicated to experimental use of the antiparasitic drug ivermectin. “You guys all know I’m not a doctor,” he often reminded them. “I’m a guy that grew up on a farm. I ran equipment all my life. I live on a dirt road and I drive an old truck—a 30-year-old truck. I’m just one of you.” Lemoi’s folksy Rhode Island accent, his avowed regular-guy-ness, and his refusal to take any money in exchange for his advice made him into an alt-wellness influencer and a personal hero for those who followed him. He joked about his tell-it-like-it-is style and liberal use of curse words: “If you don’t like my mouth, go pray to God, because he’s the one that chose me for this mission.”

Last March, during an episode of his biweekly podcast, Dirt Road Discussions, he thanked his audience for their commitment to his ivermectin lifestyle: “I love that you guys are all here trusting my voice.” His group currently has more than 130,000 members and lives on Telegram, a messaging app that has become popular as an alternative social-media network. When Lemoi died earlier this month, at age 50, his followers found out via the chat. As first reported by Vice, Lemoi had given no indication that his health may have been failing. In fact, one of his last posts in the group was from the morning of the day he died: “HAPPY FRIDAY ALL YOU POISONOUS HORSE PASTE EATING SURVIVORS !!!”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

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Read. Saving Time, a new book by Jenny Odell that challenges Americans’ relationship with time.

Watch. Arrival (available to stream on multiple platforms), the 2016 alien-contact film to which the Atlantic staff writer Jerusalem Demsas attributes her enduring devotion to the actor Amy Adams.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you haven’t read McKay’s 2018 profile of Pence yet, I recommend sitting with it; he does a beautiful job untangling the political, moral, and religious motivations at play in Pence’s path to power.

“There is, of course, nothing inherently scary or disqualifying about an elected leader who seeks wisdom in scripture and solace in prayer,” McKay writes. “What critics should worry about is not that Pence believes in God, but that he seems so certain God believes in him. What happens when manifest destiny replaces humility, and the line between faith and hubris blurs?”

— Isabel

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.