IN 1920, THE perennial Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs ran for president of the United States while serving time in a federal prison for delivering a seditious speech. He received nearly a million votes. His sentence was commuted by his erstwhile rival, the newly elected Republican Warren G. Harding, two days before Christmas in 1921.
No one expected Debs to actually win the White House. His best showing was in 1912, when he captured nearly 6 percent of the popular vote (but no presidential electors). So the nation has never had to seriously grapple with the possibility of someone winning the presidency while behind bars.
It might be time to think more seriously about that contingency. The Donald Trump years have brought many strange constitutional hypotheticals to life, and Trump promises more to come if he has a second term, recently demanding, for example, the courts must recognize “COMPLETE & TOTAL PRESI-DENTIAL IMMUNITY” from all criminal acts that he might commit during a term of office. The 2024 elections promise more possibilities even before we get to serious third party candidacies or faithless electors.
Trump has not yet been outfitted with an orange jumpsuit, but stranger things have happened. The former president is now defending himself against four separate criminal indictments. The wheels of justice turn slowly, and these cases are unusually complicated. Moreover, Trump has an incentive to throw up as many procedural obstacles as possible with an expectation (an expectation that has not been legally tested) that all pending prosecutions will be put on hold if he were to return to the White House.
It is a decent bet that none of his criminal trials will reach a conclusion before November. But there is a genuine possibility that one or more of his trials
