How Trump could still run for president from prison if convicted in documents case

Since taking the oath of office as president in 2017, Donald Trump has been impeached twice, has lost a civil suit to E. Jean Carroll when a jury found he had sexually abused and defamed her, and faces concurrent investigations from the Justice Department and authorities in New York state, New York City and Georgia. But he has yet to face jail time, nor has the slew of investigations hurt his standing in the Republican presidential field, where he is still the frontrunner for 2024. His long history of litigation predates his career in politics, and a years-old meme features someone saying they’d “like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam!,” only to find Trump easily sidestepping the potential trouble befalling him.

But the 37-count indictment that Trump was arraigned on Tuesday, tied to his personal retention of classified government documents and alleged obstruction of justice, has been deemed something different by many legal analysts: a serious threat to his freedom.

“It's one of the most serious espionage cases in recent memory, not only because it’s against a former president but because the documents are so incredibly sensitive,” Duncan Levin, a criminal defense attorney and former Manhattan prosecutor, told Yahoo News.

But even if Trump is convicted and sentenced to what could be dozens of years in prison, there’s nothing in the Constitution that would prevent him from running for the GOP nomination or against President Biden in November 2024. And he wouldn’t be the first candidate to try for federal office from a cell.

An antiwar Socialist

The most famous American to run from prison was Eugene Debs, who ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket four times between 1900 and 1912 as a free man.

In 1918, Debs was imprisoned for speaking out against the United States’ involvement in World War I.

“The working class, who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace,” Debs said in July 1918 in an Ohio park. “It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.”

Under the Sedition Act of 1918, put into law two months earlier, those words were considered treasonous, and Debs was convicted on 10 counts and sentenced to a decade in prison, with the Supreme Court ruling against his appeal. He made his fifth run for president in 1920 from federal prison in Georgia, earning nearly 1 million votes, or 3% of the popular vote.

More recent runs from prison

President Barack Obama, otherwise running unopposed by his party as he went for a second term, lost 40% of the vote in the 2012 West Virginia Democratic primary to convict Keith Judd. While serving time for extortion, Judd filed to run in the state from a federal prison in Texas. In his candidate bio, he described himself as a multi-time presidential candidate and Rastafarian-Christian who had been a bandleader in the Air Force and was seeking public office “to make the world a better place.” Judd had previously entered the 2008 Idaho Democratic primary, where he earned 1.7% of the vote, or 734 votes, finishing a distant third to Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Former Rep. Jim Traficant, D-Ohio, attempted to keep his seat in the House of Representatives while in federal prison for bribery. He had represented his northeast Ohio district for nearly two decades when his colleagues expelled him after he was convicted on a federal corruption charge. Traficant filed to run as an independent in the race for his open seat and earned 15% of the vote, losing to Democrat Tim Ryan.

Earlier this year, Joe Maldonado-Passage — better known as Joe Exotic or the “Tiger King” — announced he would be running for president while serving a 21-year sentence for attempted murder-for-hire and animal abuse. He has previously made two bids for president.

What would happen if Trump ran from prison?

Officials have the ability to limit media access to prisoners, and an inmate’s hypothetical ability to hold virtual events or participate in debates is unclear. (Maldonado-Passage did phone interviews with Fox News and ABC while incarcerated.) When Debs ran, film footage of him learning of his nomination played at “moving picture houses,” and his campaign literature called for support for “Convict No. 9653.”

If Trump were to win from behind bars, there’s nothing in the Constitution that says the oath of office must be delivered in a specific place, so he could be sworn in at prison, but it’s unclear how the day-to-day of a president serving from behind bars would work. There’s also the possibility of his being able to pardon himself as president, which would be unprecedented but not impossible. In 2018, Trump claimed he had the “absolute right” to pardon himself.