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Mark Meadows, the final White House chief of staff under President Donald J. Trump and a potentially key figure in inquiries related to Mr. Trump, has testified before a federal grand jury hearing evidence in the investigations being led by the special counsels office, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Meadows is a figure in both of the two distinct lines of inquiry being pursued by the special counsel appointed to oversee the Justice Departments scrutiny of Mr. Trump, Jack Smith.

One inquiry is focused on Mr. Trumps efforts to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, culminating in the attack by a pro-Trump mob on the Capitol during congressional certification of the Electoral Collegeresults on Jan. 6, 2021. The other is an investigation into Mr. Trumps handling of hundreds of classified documents after he left office and whether he obstructed efforts to retrieve them.

It is not clear precisely when Mr. Meadows testified or if investigators questioned him about one or both of the cases.

For months, people in Mr. Trumps orbit have been puzzled by and wary about the low profile kept by Mr. Meadows in the investigations. As reports surfaced of one witness after another going into the grand jury or to be interviewed by federal investigators, Mr. Meadows has kept largely out of sight, and some of Mr. Trumps advisers believe he could be a significant witness in the inquiries.

Mr. Trump himself has at times asked aides questions about how Mr. Meadows is doing, according to a person familiar with the remarks.

Asked about the grand jury testimony, a lawyer for Mr. Meadows, George Terwilliger, said, Without commenting on whether or not Mr. Meadows has testified before the grand jury or in any other proceeding, Mr. Meadows has maintained a commitment to tell the truth where he has a legal obligation to do so.

Mr. Meadows was a polarizing figure at the White House among some of Mr. Trumps aides, who saw him as a loose gatekeeper at best during a final year in which the former president moved aggressively to mold the government in his image.

Mr. Meadows was around for pivotal moments leading up to and after the 2020 election, as Mr. Trump plotted to try to stay in office and thwart Joseph R. Biden Jr. from being sworn in to succeed him. Some of them were described in hundreds of text messages that Mr. Meadows turned over to the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol before he decided to stop cooperating. Those texts served as a road map for House investigators.

But Mr. Meadows also has insight into efforts by the National Archives to retrieve roughly two dozen boxes of presidential material that officials had been told Mr. Trump took with him when he left the White House in January 2021. Mr. Meadows was one of Mr. Trumps representatives to the archives, and he had some role in trying to discuss the matter with Mr. Trump, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Meadows is also now connected tangentially to a potentially vital piece of evidence that investigators uncovered in recent months: an audio recording of an interview that Mr. Trump gave to two people assisting Mr. Meadows in writing a memoir of his White House years.

Mr. Meadows did not attend the meeting, which took place in July 2021 at Mr. Trumps club at Bedminster, N.J. During the meeting, Mr. Trump referred to a document he appeared to have in front of him and suggested that he should have declassified it but that he no longer could, since he was out of office.

That recording could undercut Mr. Trumps claim that he believed he had declassified all material still held at his properties for months after he left office.

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Mark Meadows Testified to Grand Jury in Special Counsel ... - The New York Times

Turning on his iPhone one day last year, the lawyer M. Evan Corcoran recorded his reflections about a high-profile new job: representing former President Donald J. Trump in an investigation into his handling of classified documents.

In complete sentences and a narrative tone that sounded as if it had been ripped from a novel, Mr. Corcoran recounted in detail a nearly monthlong period of the documents investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Corcorans narration of his recollections covered his initial meeting with Mr. Trump in May last year to discuss a subpoena from the Justice Department seeking the return of all classified materials in the former presidents possession, the people said.

It also encompassed a search that Mr. Corcoran undertook last June in response to the subpoena for any relevant records being kept at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trumps private club and residence in Florida. He carried out the search in preparation for a visit by prosecutors, who were on their way to enforce the subpoena and collect any sensitive material found remaining there.

Government investigators almost never obtain a clear lens into a lawyers private dealings with their clients, let alone with such a prominent one as Mr. Trump. A recording like the voice memo Mr. Corcoran made last year during a long drive to a family event, according to two people briefed on the recording is typically shielded by attorney-client or work-product privilege. Some details of the notes were reported earlier by The Guardian.

But in March, a federal judge ordered Mr. Corcorans recorded recollections now transcribed onto dozens of pages to be given to the office of the special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the documents investigation.

The decision by the judge, Beryl A. Howell, pierced the privilege that would have normally protected Mr. Corcorans musings about his interactions with Mr. Trump. Those protections were set aside under what is known as the crime-fraud exception, a provision that allows prosecutors to work around attorney-client privilege if they have reason to believe that legal advice or legal services were used in furthering a crime.

Judge Howell, in a sealed memorandum that accompanied her decision, made clear that prosecutors believe Mr. Trump knowingly misled Mr. Corcoran about the location of documents that would be responsive to the subpoena, according to a person familiar with the memos contents.

Mr. Corcorans notes, which have not been previously described in such detail, will likely play a central role as Mr. Smith and his team move toward concluding their investigation and turn to the question of whether to bring charges against Mr. Trump. They could also show up as evidence in a courtroom if a criminal case is ultimately filed and goes to trial.

The level of detail in the recording is said to have angered and unnerved close aides to Mr. Trump, who are worried it contains direct quotes from sensitive conversations.

Mr. Corcoran, who was brought into Mr. Trumps orbit by a political and legal adviser to the former president, Boris Epshteyn, did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement that the attorney-client privilege is one of the oldest and most fundamental principles in our legal system and he accused the Justice Department of trying to deny Mr. Trump this basic right.

Mr. Cheung added that whether attorneys notes are detailed or not makes no difference these notes reflect the legal opinions and thoughts of the lawyer, not the client. And he maintained that Mr. Trump had tried to cooperate when Justice Department officials came to the property in June last year.

In an early scene in his account, Mr. Corcoran describes meeting Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago last spring to help him handle a subpoena that had just been issued by a federal grand jury in Washington seeking the return of all classified material in the possession of his presidential office, the people familiar with the matter said.

After pleasantries, according to a description of the recorded notes, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Corcoran if he had to comply with the subpoena. Mr. Corcoran told him that he did.

That exchange could be useful to prosecutors as they collect evidence on whether Mr. Trump sought to obstruct the subpoena process and interfere with the governments broader efforts to retrieve all of the sensitive records that he took with him from the White House.

But people close to Mr. Trump have said the conversation could be read in a more favorable light as a client merely asking his lawyer about how he should proceed.

The recording also describes how Mr. Corcoran conducted a search of a Mar-a-Lago storage room in an effort to comply with the subpoenas request for documents, the people familiar with the account said. Mr. Corcoran told a grand jury in May that several employees at the compound had told him everything he needed was being kept in the storage room, located in the basement of the property, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Mr. Corcoran subsequently handed over to Justice Department officials more than three dozen documents he turned up in his search, and drafted a letter to the department stating that a diligent search had not found any more.

The notes in the recording do not suggest that Mr. Corcoran was waved away from searching anywhere other than the storage room, the people familiar with them said. But they also indicate that no one at Mar-a-Lago including Mr. Trump spoke up to tell him that he should look elsewhere.

In the end, it turned out the employees who directed Mr. Corcoran to the storage room were wrong. In August, when F.B.I. agents descended on Mar-a-Lago with a court-approved search warrant, they found classified documents not only in the basement of Mar-a-Lago, but also in Mr. Trumps office.

The issue of who moved boxes into and out of the storage room and why has become one of the central parts of Mr. Smiths investigation. Prosecutors have focused much of their attention on Walt Nauta, an aide to Mr. Trump who took part in moving boxes, and on another Mar-a-Lago employee, Carlos Deoliveira, a maintenance worker who helped Mr. Nauta.

Mr. Smiths team has also focused on a related question: whether there were any efforts to interfere with the governments attempts to obtain security camera footage from Mar-a-Lago that could shed light on how the documents were kept in the storage room and who had access to them. Mr. Corcorans notes provide some details about Mr. Nautas involvement in the search.

They say, for instance, that Mr. Nauta unlocked the storage room door for Mr. Corcoran, according to the people familiar with them. They also say that Mr. Nauta brought Mr. Corcoran some tape so that he could seal in a folder the classified documents he found, in preparation for giving them to prosecutors.

There is also a reference to Mr. Corcorans meeting with the prosecutors, which took place at Mar-a-Lago on June 3 last year. He and another lawyer for Mr. Trump, Christina Bobb, met Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterespionage section of the national security division of the Justice Department, to turn over the documents he found and convey the letter asserting that to the best of their knowledge no more remained at Mar-a-Lago.

The notes refer to Mr. Trumps appearance related to Mr. Bratts visit, according to one person briefed on the contents of the notes.

Judge Howells memorandum compelling Mr. Corcoran to answer questions in front of a grand jury and to produce his notes described the lawyer as essentially a casualty of Mr. Trumps months of gamesmanship with investigators and National Archives officials about returning the documents, according to a person familiar with the memos contents.

As The New York Times reported in April, Judge Howell wrote in the memorandum, according to the person familiar with its contents, that Mr. Trumps earlier actions and misdirection of archives officials efforts to retrieve what turned out to be more than a dozen boxes of records were a dress rehearsal for the May subpoena.

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Trump Lawyer's Notes Could Be a Key in the Classified Documents ... - The New York Times

(Reuters) - If you believe the most ardent defenders of newly indicted former president Donald Trump, theres a silver bullet hiding in Bill Clintons sock drawer.

The reference to Clintons socks, which has cropped up not just in the former presidents Truth Social feed and at conservative news outlets but even in Trump court filings, stems from a 13-year-old case in which the right-leaning nonprofit Judicial Watch sought access to 79 audio tape recordings of Clinton interviews conducted by the historian Taylor Branch while Clinton was in office.

During his presidency, according to GQ magazine in a 2009 Q&A with Branch, Clinton squirreled away the cassettes in his sock drawer. But for Trumps purposes, what matters is Clintons handling of the tapes after he left office: Clinton designated the recordings as personal records, not official presidential records, that were therefore not required to be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration under the Presidential Records Act.

Judicial Watch sued over that designation, arguing that the tapes captured classified information including Clinton conversations with foreign leaders.

But in a 2012 opinion, the trial judge overseeing Judicial Watchs lawsuit ruled that even if the tapes should have been designated to be presidential records, she could not order the National Archives to recategorize them.

The [Presidential Records Act] does not confer any mandatory or even discretional authority on the archivist, wrote U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in that 2012 ruling. Under the statute, this responsibility is left solely to the president.

That language, as Ill explain, has emboldened Trump supporters who contend that under Jackson's analysis, the Justice Department had no authority to seize documents from Mar-a-Lago.

That theory is vigorously disputed by national security experts, including former National Archives litigation director Jason Baron, who is now a professor at the University of Maryland, and Bradley Moss of the Mark S. Zaid law firm.

Both Baron and Moss told me by email that there are clear distinctions between the audiotapes at issue in the Clinton case and the classified records in the Trump criminal case.

The Clinton tapes, Baron said, were in the nature of a diary or journal in recorded form, fitting the definition of a personal record in the Presidential Records Act. But the documents with classified markings that were seized from Mar-a-Lago, Baron said, were official government records that should never have been transferred out of the government's hands.

Moreover, Moss said, the question of whether the documents were personal or presidential records is beside the point in a case involving the Espionage Act, like the one against Trump.

Whether as a presidential record or a personal record, the records at issue in this indictment still have classification markings and contain information relating to the national defense, he said.

Trump defense counsel Todd Blanche did not immediately respond to a query sent to his law firm.

Judicial Watchs Tom Fitton nevertheless maintained in an interview on Friday that Jacksons opinion in the Clinton case shows Trump had unfettered power to designate documents as personal records outside of the reach of the National Archives.

The strong opinion from the court says the president has prerogatives that cannot be second-guessed, Fitton said. These are not presidential records, he added. These are personal records.

Under Fittons theory, Trump who has said he is innocent of all wrongdoing -- cant be criminally liable for refusing to turn over documents he designated to be personal. Trumps attorneys posited a similar argument in a brief last November to a special master appointed to review the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.

The Presidential Records Act, Trumps brief said, gave Trump the sole authority to decide how to categorize his records. When he made a designation decision, he was president of the United States; his decision to retain certain records as personal is entitled to deference, and the records in question are thus presumptively personal, the brief said. (The merits of that argument were never decided because the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held in December that the special master should not have been appointed.)

Fitton told me he explained his Presidential Records Act theory to the Washington, D.C., grand jury in the Trump document case last winter. Fitton said prosecutors seemed to use his four-hour grand jury session to sus out Trumps potential defense.

Special counsel Jack Smith and his team, Fitton joked, probably didnt think much of it hence the indictment.

It nevertheless seems likely that Fitton and other Trump allies will continue to use the sock drawer case to argue that the Justice Department is selectively prosecuting the former president.

Fitton, for instance, accused the Justice Department of flipping its position on presidential discretion under the Presidential Record Act to go after Trump. In the Clinton case, he said, the Justice Department argued that the Archive was not empowered to recategorize material that Clinton had designated to be a personal record. The department, Fitton said, abandoned that stance when it seized Trump's documents.

Its so outrageous, he said. I think this is a substantial issue.

That argument could have political salience among Trump backers asserting that the Justice Department has been weaponized to pursue the former president. But as a matter of law, said professor Margaret Kwoka of Ohio State University, Jacksons ruling in the Judicial Watch case isnt going to be much help for Trump. These are completely different kinds of records, she said. And there are different legal obligations when it comes to the handling of classified records.

In other words, for a former president accused of repeatedly violating the Espionage Act, the sock drawer case is probably more of a red herring than a silver bullet.

Read more:

Trump risked national secrets, US prosecutors allege in indictment

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Opinions expressed are those of the author. They do not reflect the views of Reuters News, which, under the Trust Principles, is committed to integrity, independence, and freedom from bias.

Thomson Reuters

Alison Frankel has covered high-stakes commercial litigation as a columnist for Reuters since 2011. A Dartmouth college graduate, she has worked as a journalist in New York covering the legal industry and the law for more than three decades. Before joining Reuters, she was a writer and editor at The American Lawyer. Frankel is the author of Double Eagle: The Epic Story of the Worlds Most Valuable Coin.

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Donald Trump, the Presidential Records Act and 'Clinton's sock ... - Reuters

Such a plot always struck me as a bit far-fetched, for starters because politicians arent known for putting party ahead of self. Yet the appetite among elite Republicans to move past Trump was and is so immense I thought there could at least be a do-the-right-thing effort.

Yet as spring turns to summer, traditionally the period when presidential hopefuls consider whether theyre gaining any traction, this vision seems more fantasy than strategy.

In fact, if Trump does emerge as the GOP standard bearer next year we will look back on this week to grasp why, just like in 2016, he was able to take advantage of a divided opposition.

There was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis muffed launch, the fitting, sad trombone conclusion to a preannouncement period in which his stock sagged, at least among political insiders.

Nobody was more thrilled about DeSantis decision to begin his campaign on a balky Twitter stream than his current and prospective Republican rivals: Trump sees his fellow Floridian as weaker today than at any point since last years midterm, and the other non-Trumps are hardly going to step aside anytime soon, even after DeSantis eye-popping first fundraising haul.

And if DeSantis needs any more evidence that his giving the Heisman to the press has earned him only bad will, well, he can just take a look at the headlines from a range of outlets. Dont discount this: Complain as they may about the media, Republican primary voters are just as susceptible to the tides of coverage as their Democratic counterparts.

Shortly before DeSantis began his bid for the office of Washington and Lincoln in a chat room with other very online influencers, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) entered the race in a fashion that further underscored why its going to be so hard to dethrone Trump.

Announcing his candidacy Monday in the gym of his alma mater, Charleston Southern University, Scott matched DeSantis Elon Musk with Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) and Larry Ellison (Billionaire-Oracle).

Each of them conveyed an important message.

By laying hands on Scott, Thune, the second-ranking Senate Republican, sent a signal to the wider, pre-Trump GOP establishment that the only Black senator in the GOP is one of them. That may not mean a lot of votes, but along with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnells tacit embrace (I reported last year that McConnell was enthusiastic about a Scott candidacy), it conveys a message to the Republican donor class.

Thune may soon have more company in the Senate GOP: He told Scott supporters privately later in the day that other Republican lawmakers would already be backing their colleague, the only senator in the race, were it not for their concerns about angering Trump, according to a person present for the conversation. Even more to the point, Thune, when asked who Scott as nominee could win back to the party, asked, How much time you got? and then ticked off demographic groups ranging from women to moderates to educated voters.

Such potential is what will make Scott appealing to victory-hungry Republicans. Theyre also the sort of party regulars DeSantis will ultimately need as part of any coalition he forms to stop Trump. If such voters migrate to Scott, that task gets harder.

While Thunes appearance, along with the veritable battalion of former Bush and Romney strategists working for Scott, signaled establishment acceptability, Ellison demonstrated why coalescence could prove difficult against Trump.

Scott has relentlessly wooed the Oracle co-founder. The senator flew to Hawaii to meet with Ellison over the holidays and even name-checked him as a mentor in his announcement speech.

Now, Ellison is prepared to spend tens of millions of dollars on behalf of Scott.

As the saying goes, presidential campaigns dont end, they run out of money. But thats less of a factor when one of the worlds richest men is willing to part with tens of millions of dollars on a super PAC extending the life of a candidacy.

Ellison was hardly alone: Also in the stands, before being herded away by Scott campaign officials after the event, were a group of noticeably well-tailored individuals. The donors later convened at a restaurant on Charlestons old market before attending another event with Scott on Tuesday morning at the luxe Hotel Bennett, where many of them stayed.

Lastly, there was Scotts speech itself. There was alliterative call-and-response (Victimhood or victory?), there was entering the crowd at the end, there were testimonials to Americas greatness and there was the gospel of Jesus Christ, self-help and the power of positive thinking. It was the Black church meets the mega church, set to a Lee Greenwood-Thomas Jefferson soundtrack while Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan smiled down from above over a Chick-fil-A lunch.

In other words, Scott happily railed against wokeness without ever saying the word woke, precisely the sort of messaging that will appeal to Republicans done with Trump who want a duller edge than DeSantis. That may not be enough for Scott to emerge as Trumps top rival let alone claim the nomination of a party craving the clenched first more than the open hand but he could find a constituency.

Yes, Black Republicans have had boomlets before. But Herman Cain and Ben Carson didnt begin with nearly $22 million in the bank and have Senate leaders and plutocrats, to say nothing of respected moderates such as former Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam and former Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner at their announcements.

Another reveal this week came from the emerging Hamlet-on-the-James, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Axios reported right as Scott launched and DeSantis was preparing to that Youngkin was again considering a presidential bid. The story irritated some members of the governors inner circle, who want to focus on Virginias legislative midterms this fall, but what was striking was their denials stopped short of, well, actually denying that he will get in the race.

Youngkins refusal to fully rule out a 2024 bid illustrates both how much he wants to keep the option open and the lingering hunger in the top ranks of the party for another option. That said and insert a trigger warning here for veterans of the Wes Clark, Rick Perry and Michael Bloomberg campaigns late entrants have invariably flopped in modern primaries.

But, again, this is all delightful to Trump, who is thrilled about the prospect of more candidates carving up the opposition. Never one for subtext, the former president responded to Scotts entry by gleefully saying the primary is rapidly loading up with lots of people.

Lastly, there was one other sign this week of Trumps unique strength in the GOP, but you may have had to look for it. It was when former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley used an appearance before reporters in New Hampshire to target DeSantis for copying Trump with his speaking style and even his hand gestures.

It was an admission from Haley, the first candidate after the former president to enter the race, that shes not breaking through and must dislodge DeSantis to take on Trump. It was also an illustration of how little regard the other Republicans in the race have for DeSantis and the risk the Florida governor faces of these candidates cutting a deal with Trump to stay in the race and divide up the vote in exchange for some promise of, say, the vice-presidency or wokeness czar.

Perhaps most significant, Haleys criticism of the person in second rather than the one leading most state and national surveys by double-digits highlighted the central challenge non-Trump Republicans are confronting: their own voters.

Nikki Haleys criticism of Ron DeSantis, the person in second, rather than Donald Trump highlighted the central challenge non-Trump Republicans are confronting: their own voters. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images

After years of absorbing attacks on Trump from Democrats and the media and the former president happily embracing, to borrow from Scott, the role of both victim and victor the GOP rank-and-file is largely inured to frontal attacks on a man most of them have now voted for twice in general elections.

The conservative media ecosystem has built a giant wall of inoculation around everything Trump, explained David Kochel. All our voters have ever known about Trump is hes constantly under attack, so hes got these antibodies built up.

Kochel, a native Iowan and longtime Republican strategist, has talked to voters in his home state at length about Trumps candidacy. He has consistently found that they defend or rationalize most every critique of the former president. Its not that they arent aware of the indictments arrayed against him (literally, folks), its that they excuse it all because its tribal, he said.

To forcefully condemn Trump as a menace to democracy is to echo the other tribe, to put on the blue jersey. Shaming your own voters is not a recipe for victory.

Kochel thinks Trump can be stopped in the primary but believes his partys voters require a permission structure. Its equal parts electability a strong and persistent drumbeat of arguments that Trump cant win the general election, a refrain I heard from the many middle- to upper middle-class voters at Scotts announcement and confronting the former president from the right on the border wall with Mexico, Covid restrictions and government spending.

Weve already seen some of this criticism from DeSantis since he entered the race. And theres a debate taking place within his orbit about how much to balance introducing the Florida governor and how quickly to get to confronting Trump, framing him, as one DeSantis adviser put it, as a whiner, not a winner.

Somebody will have to.

For anti-Trump Republicans, faith in the invisible hand has taken on a whole new meaning that has nothing to do with Adam Smith.

Theyre forever waiting for something or somebody to stop Trump.

Now its local and federal prosecutors.

Or maybe its a killer takedown on a debate stage from Chris Christie or some other candidate willing to commit to a political murder-suicide. Thats a task, incidentally, that could be more difficult given that the Republican National Committee is planning to require that candidates garner 40,000 individual donors from 20 states to appear in the initial debates and isnt inclined to back down from that threshold, Im told.

Or maybe, and yes, you do hear this in private conversations all the time, Mother Nature will take its course on Trump before the election.

But hope is not a strategy.

And not only must trailing candidates be willing to submit to an intervention, but voters do, too.

As Scott wound up his speech Monday and as if to be suddenly shaken from that Kempian fever dream and thrust back to Trumpian reality I ran into Mick Mulvaney back by the press pen. The former South Carolina congressman, who was one of Trumps four chiefs of staff, cast the primary in blunt terms.

It comes down to what Republican primary voters want, said Mulvaney. If they want a knife fighter who pays porn stars, theyre gonna get it. Then, pointing his finger back toward the stage, he said of Scott: If they want that, they can get it.

Precedent and polling would indicate Republicans prefer the former, I pointed out.

Mulvaney acknowledged as much, but he was quick to point out that its early in the race.

And then, keeping hope alive, he said it was unlikely DeSantis or Scott would be charged with a bunch of crimes.

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Are the Anti-Trump GOP Forces Starting to Implode? - POLITICO

A glitch-plagued chat with Elon Musk, live on Twitter, is an unconventional way to launch a presidential campaign. But with the entry of Floridas governor, Ron DeSantis, the race for the Republican nomination is now properly under way. The first states will not vote until January. Primaries are hard to predict, because it is expensive to conduct enough high-quality polls of primary voters in the key states. But, with that disclaimer over, one candidate has a huge, perhaps insurmountable, lead: Donald Trump. Mr Trump thus has a real chance of becoming Americas next president. Betting markets put his odds of returning to the White House at one in three.

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If you decided to pay less attention to Mr Trump after he lost in 2020, to preserve your sanity, you may be wondering how this can be the case. Parties do not usually stick with losers. Mr Trump led the Republicans to defeats in the 2018 midterm and the 2020 presidential elections. After he encouraged his supporters to stop the steal, some of them broke into Congress, with the result that one police officer died of a stroke and four committed suicide. He has since been found liable for sexual assault, too. Would the Republican Party really nominate him again?

Yes, it probably would. In 2016 and in 2020 it made some sense to think of the Trump movement as a hostile takeover of the party. In 2023 it no longer does. He is the front-runner because a large proportion of Republicans really like him. His supporters have had their hands on the Republican National Committee for six years now. More than half of Republicans in the House of Representatives were elected for the first time since 2016, and therefore under Mr Trumps banner. Almost all of those House and Senate Republicans who refused to make their peace with him have stood down or retired. Of the ten House members who voted to impeach Mr Trump in January 2021, only two are still there. They are outnumbered in their own caucus by more than 100 to 1.

Mr Trumps campaign is also better organised than in either 2016 or 2020. Our analysis of the primaries shows how hard he will be to beat. He has a stunning lead: polling for The Economist by YouGov suggests Republican primary voters prefer Mr Trump to Mr DeSantis by 33 percentage points. He also has a big lead in endorsements from elected Republicans, which are usually a good predictor of what will happen. In 2016, the last time Mr Trump contested a primary, he won the early primaries with much less support than he has now.

There are still Republican voters who would like an alternativehis 58% poll share means that close to half of primary voters must be open to choosing someone else. Yet the difficulties of co-ordinating the opposition to Mr Trump are daunting. People close to the Trump campaign say privately that the more candidates who enter the primary, dividing the field, the better for their candidate. Some big donors are giving money to non-Trump candidates on the condition that they drop out after South Carolina, an early primary, if told to do so. The idea is to engineer unity around a single non-Trump candidate, just as establishment Democrats united around Joe Biden in 2020 to stop Bernie Sanders, a leftist. Backroom manoeuvring by party bigwigs is less likely to work against Mr Trump, however, for the simple reason that he is the Republican establishment.

The way the primary calendar and pending legal cases against Mr Trump intersect is nightmarish. His trial for falsifying records in New York will get under way shortly after Super Tuesday, when more than a dozen states vote. Neither this case nor any of the other investigations he faces are likely to be resolved by the time the primaries are over. It is therefore possible that the candidate of one of the two great parties could be subject to criminal charges when he is on the ballot. America has had badly behaved presidents before. It has never had one who is also the defendant in a criminal trial.

You might think that, at this point, voters would abandon Mr Trump in large numbers. Maybe. But when, earlier this year, a jury found that he had sexually abused a woman 30 years ago, the verdict had no measurable effect on his poll numbers. Mr Trump, it turns out, is adept at persuading Republican voters that he is the real victim. Democrats, and plenty of Americas allies, think Mr Trump is a threat to democracy (as does this newspaper). His campaign is already turning this accusation back on the accuser: The 2024 election, a recent Trump campaign email announced, will determine whether we can keep our Republic or whether America has succumbed to the dark forces of tyranny. Those who accept that these are the stakes will probably overlook Mr Trumps innumerable and obvious flaws.

Imagine, then, that it is November 2024 and Mr Trump and President Biden are having a rematchthe first since Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson back in the 1950s. Could Mr Trump win?

The general election will surely be close. The electoral college gives Republicans a slight edge. The most recent landslide was 40 years ago. America has since become evenly divided politically and calcified because voters seldom switch sides. Mr Biden has some under-appreciated strengths, but he is no ones idea of formidable. Were the country to enter a recession, Mr Trumps chances would go up. Some mooted post-primary tactics intended to stop him, such as running a third-party candidate, smack of desperation: they could easily backfire and boost him further.

All of which means that you should take seriously the possibility that Americas next president will be someone who would divide the West and delight Vladimir Putin; who accepts the results of elections only if he wins; who calls the thugs who broke into the Capitol on January 6th 2021 martyrs and wants to pardon them; who has proposed defaulting on the national debt to spite Mr Biden; and who is under multiple investigations for breaking criminal law, to add to his civil-law rap sheet for sexual assault. Anyone who cares about America, about democracy, about conservatism or about decency should hope that Mr DeSantis or one of the other non-Trump Republican candidates can defy the odds and beat him.

Stay on top of American politics with Checks and Balance, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter, which examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. You can read other articles about the elections of 2024 and follow along as we track shifts in Joe Bidens approval rating.

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Donald Trump is very likely to be the Republican nominee - The Economist