Not long ago, the idea that a former president—or major-party presidential nominee—would face serious legal jeopardy was nearly unthinkable. Today, merely keeping track of the many cases against Donald Trump requires a law degree, a great deal of attention, or both.

In all, Trump faces 91 felony counts across two state courts and two different federal districts, any of which could potentially produce a prison sentence. He’s also dealing with a civil suit in New York that could force drastic changes to his business empire, including closing down its operations in his home state. Meanwhile, he is the leading Republican candidate in the race to become the next president—though lawsuits in several states seek to have him disqualified from the presidency. If the criminal and civil cases unfold with any reasonable timeliness, he could be in the heat of the campaign trail at the same time that his legal fate is being decided.

[David A. Graham: The end of Trump Inc.]

Here’s a summary of the major legal cases against Trump, including key dates, an assessment of the gravity of the charges, and expectations about how they could turn out. This guide will be updated regularly as the cases proceed.

New York State: Fraud

In the fall of 2022, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil suit against Trump, his adult sons, and his former aide Allen Weisselberg, alleging a years-long scheme in which Trump fraudulently reported the value of properties in order to either lower his tax bill or improve the terms of his loans, all with an eye toward inflating his net worth.

When?
A judge ruled against Trump and his co-defendants in late September, concluding that many of the defendants’ claims were “clearly” fraudulent—so clearly that he didn’t need a trial to hear them. (He also sanctioned Trump’s lawyers for making repeated frivolous arguments.) A trial to determine the amount of damages Trump must pay is ongoing in Manhattan, and could stretch for weeks or even months. Justice Arthur Engoron, the presiding judge, has already fined Trump a combined $15,000 for violating a gag order in the case.

How grave is the allegation?
Fraud is fraud, and in this case, the sum of the fraud stretched into the millions—but compared with some of the other legal matters in which Trump is embroiled, this is pretty pedestrian. The case is civil rather than criminal, and though it could end with Trump’s famed company barred from business in New York, the loss of several key properties, and millions of dollars in fines, the stakes are lower, both for Trump and for the nation, than in the other cases against him.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
Engoron has already ruled that Trump committed fraud. The outstanding questions are what damages he might have to pay and what exactly Engoron’s ruling means for Trump’s business and properties in New York.

Manhattan: Defamation and Sexual Assault

Although these other cases are all brought by government entities, Trump is also involved in an ongoing defamation case with the writer E. Jean Carroll, who said that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department-store dressing room in the 1990s. When he denied it, she sued him for defamation and later added a battery claim.

When?
In May 2023, a jury concluded that Trump had sexually assaulted and defamed Carroll, and awarded her $5 million. A second defamation claim remains under consideration.

How grave is the allegation?
Although this case doesn’t directly connect to the same fundamental issues of rule of law and democratic governance that some of the criminal cases do, it is a serious matter, and a judge’s blunt statement that Trump raped Carroll has been underappreciated.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
Trump has already been found liable for defamation and sexual assault, and a further finding of defamation is possible and perhaps likely.

Manhattan: Hush Money

In March 2023, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg became the first prosecutor to bring felony charges against Trump, alleging that the former president falsified business records as part of a scheme to pay hush money to women who said they had had sexual relationships with Trump.

When?
The case is set to go to trial on March 25, 2024. In September, the judge overseeing the case signaled that he is open to changing that date, given the various other court cases that Trump is juggling, but he also said he didn’t think it was worth discussing until February.

How grave is the allegation?
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. That this case alleges behavior that didn’t undermine democracy or put national secrets at risk makes it feel more minor—though those other cases have set a grossly high standard for what constitutes gravity.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
Bragg’s case faces hurdles including the statute of limitations, a questionable key witness in the former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, and some untested legal theories. In short, the Manhattan case seems like perhaps both the least significant and the legally weakest criminal case. Some Trump critics were dismayed that Bragg was the first to bring criminal charges against the former president.

Department of Justice: Mar-a-Lago Documents

Jack Smith, a special counsel in the U.S. Justice Department, has charged Trump with 37 felonies in connection with his removal of documents from the White House when he left office. The charges include willful retention of national-security information, obstruction of justice, withholding of documents, and false statements. Trump took boxes of documents to properties where they were stored haphazardly, but the indictment centers on his refusal to give them back to the government despite repeated requests.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

When?
Smith filed charges in June 2023. Judge Aileen Cannon has set a trial date of May 20, 2024. Smith faces a de facto deadline of January 20, 2025, at which point Trump or any Republican president would likely shut down a case.

How grave is the allegation?
These are, I have written, the stupidest crimes imaginable, but they are nevertheless quite serious. Protecting the nation’s secrets is one of the greatest responsibilities of any public official with classified clearance, and not only did Trump put these documents at risk, but he also (allegedly) refused to comply with a subpoena, tried to hide them, and lied to the government through his attorneys.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
This may be the most open-and-shut case, and the facts and legal theory here are pretty straightforward. But Smith is believed to have drawn a short straw when he was randomly assigned Cannon, a Trump appointee who has sometimes ruled favorably for Trump on procedural matters.

Fulton County: Election Subversion

In Fulton County, Georgia, which includes most of Atlanta, District Attorney Fani Willis brought a huge racketeering case against Trump and 18 others, alleging a conspiracy that spread across weeks and states with the aim of stealing the 2020 election.

When?
Willis obtained the indictment in August. The number of defendants makes the case unwieldy and difficult to track. In late September, one defendant who breached election equipment struck a plea deal. Three more, Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis, pleaded guilty in late October. No date has been set for the other defendants’ trial, but it likely won’t come until 2024.

How grave is the allegation?
More than any other case, this one attempts to reckon with the full breadth of the assault on democracy following the 2020 election.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
Expert views differ. This is a huge case for a local prosecutor, even in a county as large as Fulton, to bring. The racketeering law allows Willis to sweep in a great deal of material, and she has some strong evidence—such as a call in which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” some 11,000 votes. Three major plea deals from co-defendants may also ease Willis’s path. But getting a jury to convict Trump will still be a challenge.

Department of Justice: Election Subversion

Special Counsel Smith has also charged Trump with four federal felonies in connection with his attempt to remain in power after losing the 2020 election. This case is in court in Washington, D.C.

When?
A grand jury indicted Trump on August 1. A trial is scheduled for March 4, 2024. As with the other DOJ case, Smith will need to move quickly, before Trump or any other Republican president could shut down a case upon taking office in January 2025. But even before the trial begins, heated legal skirmishes are under way: In October, following verbal attacks by Trump on witnesses and Smith’s wife, Judge Tanya Chutkan issued an order limiting what Trump can say about the case.

[David A. Graham: Trump attempted a brazen, dead serious attack on American democracy]

How grave is the allegation?
This case rivals the Fulton County one in importance. It is narrower, focusing just on Trump and a few key elements of the paperwork coup, but the symbolic weight of the U.S. Justice Department prosecuting the attempt to subvert the American election system is heavy.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
It’s very hard to say. Smith avoided some of the more unconventional potential charges, including aiding insurrection, and everyone watched much of the alleged crime unfold in public in real time, but no precedent exists for a case like this, with a defendant like this.

Additionally …

In about 20 states, cases are pending over whether Trump should be thrown off the 2024 ballot under a novel legal theory about the Fourteenth Amendment. Proponents, including J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe in The Atlantic, argue that the former president is ineligible to serve again under a clause that disqualifies anyone who took an oath defending the Constitution and then subsequently participated in a rebellion or an insurrection. They say that Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election and his incitement of the January 6 riot meet the criteria.

The three most active cases right now are the following:

Colorado: A state-court trial in Denver began on October 30 in a suit filed by Colorado residents and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, to kick Trump off the Centennial State ballot.

Minnesota: A similar case, filed by residents and the liberal group Free Speech for People, seeks to keep Trump off the ballot in Minnesota. Oral arguments before the state supreme court begin November 2.

Michigan: When yet another similar case tried to force Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to disqualify Trump, she stated that she did not have the authority to decide whether Trump was eligible, and that only a court could decide. But on October 30, Trump’s campaign asked for a court ruling affirming that Benson has no such power.

When?
Cases are in various stages of progress, and the Colorado and Minnesota trials should wrap soon. But time is tight in all of these matters: Ballots for primary elections in early states must be printed soon in order to reach overseas and military voters. Any decisions are expected to be appealed, perhaps as high as the U.S. Supreme Court.

How grave is the allegation?
In a sense, the claim made here is even graver than the criminal election-subversion cases filed against Trump by the U.S. Department of Justice and in Fulton County, Georgia, because neither of those cases alleges insurrection or rebellion. But the stakes are also much different—rather than criminal conviction, they concern the ability to serve as president.

How plausible is a disqualification?
No one knows. The clause has seldom been used, and not for some time, and never for a plausible presidential candidate. Courts might hesitate to disqualify Trump under a somewhat novel theory and without either a criminal conviction or an impeachment conviction, though proponents insist that neither is required. Given different judges and state procedures, one plausible outcome is that Trump might be tossed off the ballot in some states but not in others—which could matter a lot or not at all to the outcome of the 2024 election, depending on the state’s partisan lean. More likely, however, a Supreme Court ruling would resolve the issue to avoid a patchwork.

When Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania announced in September that the nation’s largest swing state would implement automatic voter registration, Donald Trump threw a conniption. “Pennsylvania is at it again!” the former president posted on Truth Social, his social-media platform. The switch, Trump said, would be “a disaster for the Election of Republicans, including your favorite President, ME!”

Trump’s panic is consistent with his (baseless) view that any reforms designed to increase voter turnout, such as expanding mail balloting and early voting, are part of a Democratic conspiracy to rig elections in their favor. But he may be wrong to fear automatic voter registration: Although Shapiro is a Democrat, if either party stands to gain from his move, it’s likely to be the GOP. In Pennsylvania, the reform “really has a potential to lean more Republican,” Seo-young Silvia Kim, an elections expert who has studied the system, told me. It’s “not great news for Democrats.”

First implemented in Oregon in 2016, automatic voter registration is now used in 23 states, including three—Alaska, Georgia, and West Virginia—that are governed by Republicans. Rather than requiring citizens to proactively register to vote, some states that use the system automatically enroll people who meet eligibility requirements and then give them the option to decline or opt out. The shift is subtler in Pennsylvania; the state has simply started prompting people to register to vote when they obtain a new or renewed driver’s license or state ID.

[David A. Graham: Actually good news about voting, for a change]

The seemingly minor change, which voting-rights advocates still place under the umbrella of “automatic” registration, is based on behavioral research showing that people are less likely to opt out of a choice than to opt in. By including voter registration as part of a commonly used process such as obtaining a driver’s license—and by presenting it as the default option rather than a form that citizens have to request—states have found that they can increase both registration and turnout in elections. “Even though the process isn’t that big of a shift, the effects are great,” Greta Bedekovics, the associate director of democracy policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, told me.

Democrats have led the move toward automatic voter registration, and their 2021 comprehensive voting-rights legislation known as the For the People Act included a requirement that state-elections chiefs implement the policy. (The bill died in the Senate.) But automatic registration does not inherently favor one party or the other, and it has appealed to Republicans in some states because it helps officials clean up voter rolls and safeguard elections. “I don’t know who it will help, and that’s kind of the point,” Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the voting-rights program at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, told me.

A 2017 study by the Center for American Progress found that the voters who enrolled through Oregon’s automatic-registration system were more likely to be younger, more rural, lower income, and more ethnically diverse than the electorate as a whole—a demographic mix that suggests that Republicans might have benefited as much as Democrats.

Other research shows a more partisan advantage. While an assistant professor at American University in 2018, Kim, the elections expert, studied the effects of automatic registration in Orange County, California, the site of several hard-fought congressional races that year. She found that among residents who needed to update their registration because they had moved within the county, automatic registration resulted in no meaningful shift for Democrats. But it substantially boosted turnout among Republicans and independents—by 8.1 points and 7.4 points, respectively. “I was actually very surprised,” Kim said, adding that she’d expected that if any party gained, it would be Democrats. She suspects that Democrats may have been unaffected by the change because in 2018, they were already motivated to vote by Trump’s recent election.

The impact of automatic registration on any one election is likely to be marginal, but even small shifts could be significant in a state such as Pennsylvania, where less than one percentage point separated Trump from Hillary Clinton in 2016 and just more than one point separated Joe Biden from Trump four years later. Several factors suggest that the new system could benefit the GOP in Pennsylvania. Although Democrats have more registered voters in the state, Republicans have been closing the gap during the Trump era as more white working-class and rural voters who stopped voting for Democrats years ago have chosen to join the GOP. Democrats have countered that drift by capturing wealthier suburban voters, a group that helped Shapiro and first-term Democratic Senator John Fetterman win their races during last year’s midterm elections. Because this demographic already goes to the polls pretty reliably, though, automatic registration is more likely to boost turnout among the right-leaning rural working class.

An early-2020 study also suggested that the GOP stood to gain from higher voter turnout in Pennsylvania. The Knight Foundation surveyed 12,000 “chronic non-voters” nationwide before Democrats had settled on Biden as their nominee. Across the country, nonvoters said that if they cast a ballot, they would support the Democratic candidate over Trump by a slim margin, 33 percent to 30 percent. But in Pennsylvania, nonvoters went strongly in the other direction: By a 36–28 percent margin, they said they’d prefer Trump over the Democrat. The eight-point gap was the second largest (after Arizona) in favor of Trump in any of the 10 swing states that the organization polled.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Americans vote too much]

“Democrats sometimes have the mistaken opinion that anybody that doesn’t show up is going to vote Democrat,” Mike Mikus, a longtime Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania, told me. “It’s been one of the myths in Democratic circles for years. Quite frankly, given the changing of the respective party bases, it makes sense that [automatic registration] may somewhat benefit Republicans.” Other recent polls have suggested that the political realignment of the Trump era has made the GOP more reliant on infrequent voters.

The place where Democrats could most use stronger turnout—particularly among the party’s base of Black voters—is Philadelphia, which provided about one-sixth of Biden’s statewide vote in 2020. The city had higher turnout than Pennsylvania as a whole in both 2008 and 2012, when Barack Obama led the Democratic ticket, but it has lagged further and further behind in each election since. Last year, turnout in Philadelphia was just 43 percent, compared with 54 percent statewide.

Yet automatic voter registration might have less impact in Philadelphia than in other parts of the state. Studies have found that the switch drives higher turnout outside urban areas, where Democratic voters are most concentrated. That’s partly because automatic voter registration is operated through the state Department of Motor Vehicles—an agency with which people who rely on public transit are less likely to interact. For that reason, when New York implemented automatic registration in 2020, voting-rights advocates lobbied aggressively for the state to enroll voters through other agencies in addition to the DMV; as of 2018, a majority of the more than 3 million households in New York City did not own a car.

Pennsylvania has no plans to implement automatic voter registration beyond the state DMV. Democrats have been adamant that in enacting the new system, Shapiro was not trying to benefit his party but merely trying to reach the 1.6 million Keystone State residents who are eligible but not registered to vote. Although Republicans argued that the change should have gone through the state legislature, they have not formally challenged automatic registration in court. Few of them seemed to agree with Trump that the reform would doom the GOP. “Its impact will be somewhere between inconsequential and a nothingburger,” Christopher Nicholas, a Republican consultant in Pennsylvania, told me.

Democrats say it’s too early to assess the electoral impact of automatic voter registration, but they acknowledged that Republicans might gain more voters as a result. More than 13,500 Pennsylvanians registered to vote through the new system during its first six weeks of implementation, according to numbers provided by the Shapiro administration. Of that total, Republicans added about 100 more voters than Democrats. “Our former president is almost always wrong,” Joanna McClinton, who leads a narrow Democratic majority as the speaker of the Pennsylvania state House, told me. The fact that Trump is so opposed to the reform, she said, “reveals something we’ve always known, which is Republicans want to keep the electorate small, selective, and they don’t want to expand access to voting even if they could be the beneficiaries of it.”

Whether Trump regains the presidency next year could hinge on the tightest of margins in Pennsylvania. I asked McClinton if she worried that by implementing automatic voter registration, Shapiro had unintentionally bestowed an electoral gift on Republicans ahead of an enormously significant election. McClinton didn’t hesitate. “Not at all,” she replied quickly. “I look forward to seeing the full data, but I definitely am not looking at this from a political perspective but from a big-D democracy perspective.”

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A group of voters in Colorado are trying to use the power of the court to keep Donald Trump’s name off the state’s 2024 ballot. Below, I look at this week’s contentious Fourteenth Amendment trial in Denver—and speak with Trump’s co-defendant in the case.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The solar-panel backlash is here. Adam Kinzinger: Kevin McCarthy is the man to blame. Whatever happened to carpal tunnel syndrome? Political analysis needs more witchcraft.

Testing the System

Back when X was called Twitter (back when it was fun), certain tweets had a way of explaining the Trump era better than any news article ever could. This one, from Jesse Farrar, comes to mind:

Well, I’d like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam!

*Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily*

Ah! Well. Nevertheless,

That tweet was sent six days before Trump’s Access Hollywood tape scandal. (He wriggled his way out.) Trump later went on to survive not one but two impeachments. Though he’s currently a defendant in numerous state and federal cases—my colleague David Graham has written an excellent summary of it all—Trump remains the GOP front-runner by more than 40 points. He sometimes seems like a perpetual motion machine, if that machine were designed explicitly for wriggling.

Many people have argued that the only way to defeat Trump is at the ballot box. This week in Colorado, one group is trying to use the power of the court to keep Trump’s name off the state’s 2024 ballot altogether. This is a bench trial, meaning that no jury is present, and everything will come down to one judge’s interpretation of one section of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In August, a pair of legal scholars published a widely discussed paper arguing that, under the Fourteenth Amendment, the former president’s role in the January 6 insurrection made him ineligible to hold public office again. One month later, six voters in Colorado—in conjunction with CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington)—filed a lawsuit against Trump and Jena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state, seeking to block Trump’s name from the state’s 2024 ballot. This is where it gets complicated: CREW is a left-leaning organization working with a mix of Republican and unaffiliated voters to achieve its goal, Griswold is a Democrat but also a co-defendant with the de facto leader of the Republican Party, and Trump’s lead lawyer in this case, Scott Gessler, used to have Griswold’s job. Confused? It gets trickier.

The plaintiffs hope to prove that Trump engaged in insurrection against the United States and is therefore ineligible to pursue the presidency. Although many people accept that the former president incited the mob that stormed the Capitol, Trump himself was not among those who donned face paint and Viking horns and entered the building. Nevertheless, he clearly did not aid in the peaceful transfer of power. Does incitement count as engagement? For his role in January 6, Trump was impeached in the House but acquitted in the Senate. Can a presidential candidate be disqualified without a conviction? Also, how does disqualification occur at the state level—does the secretary of state have that power? None of these questions have clear answers.

Opening arguments and witness testimony began yesterday morning. Representative Eric Swalwell of California described the horrible scenes he experienced inside the Capitol on January 6. Eric Hodges, a D.C. police officer, also told a grisly story on behalf of the prosecution. Trump’s defense claims that the case is based almost entirely on the House January 6 committee’s report, calling it “poison” and “a one-sided political document of cherry-picked information.” Gessler derided the lawsuit as “anti-democratic” and, in a twist of irony, “election interference.”

Last night, I spoke with Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state, about the case. She searched for the right word to describe her situation of being sued alongside the most famous person alive, and eventually settled on unanticipated. “At the end of the day, we’re listed as defendants, but I am not defending Donald Trump,” she said. “I believe he incited the insurrection. I also believe there are big questions around how Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment works, and that a judge should weigh in.”

The most important job of any secretary of state is to oversee elections. Last cycle, Trump unsuccessfully tried to pressure the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, into overturning his state’s results. Raffensperger refused, and he faced death threats. Within three weeks of the Colorado lawsuit’s filing, Griswold told me that she herself had received 64 death threats, in addition to more than 900 nonlethal threats. Trump’s “words are powerful to a big portion of the public. And he uses his words to try to intimidate and to get out of accountability. I won’t be intimidated,” she said.

Griswold had no problem speaking plainly about the actions of her co-defendant: “One of the things that makes Donald Trump a danger to American democracy is that he thinks he’s above the law. He’s tried to stop cases through alleging presidential immunity. He stormed out of a case in New York. And in Colorado, he’s not even showing up to testify or give a deposition. You’d think with such a big case that is so foundational as to whether or not he can be president or appear on the ballot, he would want to show up and testify. But ultimately, with these cases, he grandstands.”

The trial is expected to last one week. Judge Sarah Wallace is determined to have the matter settled by Thanksgiving. Colorado is a “Super Tuesday” state, so its presidential primary will occur on March 5. Military and overseas ballots must be sent out 45 days before then, meaning that the ballots themselves will be printed in December or very early January. Griswold could not offer an exact ballot-printing deadline, noting that the sheets are prepared at various plants throughout Colorado.

Whatever happens, this case may soon wind up before the conservative-majority Supreme Court. Though a third of the bench was appointed by Trump himself, the Court is not guaranteed to take his side if he loses and appeals. And if Colorado blocks Trump from the ballot, other states, such as Michigan and Minnesota, could follow.

But all of this is a legal solution to a much larger political problem, which is that Trumpism seems destined to endure. Any successful effort to keep Trump’s name off the ballot will only enliven his cult of supporters. The wriggling continues. Ah! Well. Nevertheless: What was once a brilliant joke now seems like the beginning of a dark era.

Related:

The Constitution prohibits Trump from ever being president again. The Fourteenth Amendment fantasy

Today’s News

Israel said that it struck a densely populated refugee camp in Gaza in order to kill a senior Hamas commander; hundreds were killed or injured in the attack, according to the medical director of Gaza’s Indonesian Hospital. The Highland Fire has led to evacuation orders across Southern California for about 4,000 residents. The Senate Judiciary Committee will subpoena the wealthy donors Harlan Crow and Robin Arkley as it investigates undisclosed gifts to Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

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