If Convicted Can He Rule?

lobotero

Aug 30

That seems to be the big question now that Trump has been indicted.....can he continue to run for office? Yes. If convicted can he hold the office of president? Why yes he can.

Even if Trump is convicted of a crime, he can keep running for president (although he probably couldn't vote in his home state of Florida). The requirements for serving as president are simple — a person has to be 35 years old, a natural-born citizen of the United States and a resident of the U.S. for at least 14 years. The Constitution doesn't say anything about a criminal record or prison sentence standing in the way.

In fact, Trump wouldn't be the first person with a felony conviction to run. In 1920, socialist Eugene V. Debs famously won nearly a million votes from the prison cell where he was serving a 10-year sentence for speaking out against the draft. Conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche ran multiple campaigns for president after he was convicted for mail fraud and conspiracy to defraud the Internal Revenue Service — one, like Debs, from behind bars — while felon Keith Judd won 41 percent of the Democratic presidential primary vote in West Virginia in 2012. Trump wouldn't even be the only candidate with a conviction to run this year: Joe Maldonado-Passage, a reality TV personality known as "Joe Exotic" who was convicted of attempted murder and animal abuse, declared his 2024 candidacy in March.

The more pressing question for Trump's campaign, then, is whether he would have to join Debs, LaRouche and Maldonado-Passage in running from behind bars. For that to happen, Trump would have to be sentenced to prison time to begin with. It's very possible, for example, that the case in New York — involving hush-money payments to an adult film actress — wouldn't result in a prison sentence even if Trump was convicted. "I think it's the least likely case for him to be sentenced to jail time if he's convicted," said Cheryl Bader, a law professor who runs the criminal defense clinic at Fordham University. That's because falsifying business records is usually charged as a misdemeanor: In Trump's case, the charges were elevated to a felony based on the novel theory that the records were falsified in service of federal and state election crimes. Because of that, she said, "it's just a little bit more of a stretch that it deserves a sentence of incarceration."