Trump Will Go to Trial Next Month—It’s Just Not the One We Were Expecting

Keeping up with Donald Trump’s court schedule is a dizzying task, since he faces two federal trials, a criminal trial in Georgia, and two separate civil and criminal trials in New York. (Oh, and he’s running for president.) To make it easier to follow along, each Monday we’ll be looking back on all the Trump trial-related developments you might have missed the previous week.

Last week was a blockbuster one for the Trump trials, starting with a New York judge setting March 25 as the trial date for the hush money case. Trump’s New York civil fraud trial also came to a conclusion, with Justice Arthur Engoron deciding that the former president must pay $355 million and cannot lead the Trump Organization for the next three years. And down in Georgia, a two-day evidentiary hearing quickly turned dramatic and messy as Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis fought against misconduct allegations that could get her kicked off her own case.

Trump’s first criminal trial will happen in March after all, and it’s not what many expected. After a series of setbacks, special counsel Jack Smith’s March 4 election interference trial was taken off the calendar earlier this month. Now Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s hush money case has been issued a March 25 trial date.

Bragg has charged Trump with 34 felony counts for making at least three separate payments during his 2016 presidential campaign to suppress information about his alleged extramarital affairs with adult film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, plus one payment to a former Trump Tower doorman who claimed he had intel about a child Trump had out of wedlock. (Trump has denied these affairs and payments.) The indictment also mentions a familiar name, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal fixer, who paid off Daniels, helped facilitate the McDougal payoff, and was later reimbursed by the former president. Cohen was not charged in Bragg’s indictment; he testified in front of a grand jury and became a critical witness in the DA’s investigation. Bragg argues that the alleged payments amount to falsifying business records, a felony offense in New York, and constitute a violation of election law.

Though some believe that this case is considered “the weakest of the four outstanding indictments from an evidentiary perspective,” as former federal prosecutor Robert Katzberg recently wrote for Slate, having this trial move forward means that Trump could conceivably be convicted before the presidential election in November. (If he were to be convicted and win the election, Trump wouldn’t be able to pardon himself in this state case.) Trump’s lawyers did try to have Bragg’s indictment thrown out, describing it as a “zombie” case that was brought six years too late in an attempt to jeopardize Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, an attempt Justice Juan Merchan rejected.

During a pretrial hearing last week, Trump lawyer Todd Blanche insisted that the March 25 trial date put Trump in an “impossible position,” referencing Smith’s federal election interference case, which was supposed to go to trial March 4—but Smith’s trial is now indefinitely postponed while Trump pursues a claim that he’s protected by presidential immunity all the way to the Supreme Court.

Merchan did confirm that Trump would not be put through two trials at the same time, but that his attorneys should be prepared to move forward on March 25. “You know about this case. … I had made clear this was a date certain, you proceeded at our own peril,” said Merchan.

The former president can no longer lead his namesake business empire—at least for a few years. On Friday, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron announced that Trump cannot serve as an officer in any New York corporation for the next three years, cannot apply for any loans from a financial institution in New York, and must pay a $355 million fine, with interest, to the state.

The decision marks a dramatic end to New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil fraud lawsuit, which accused Trump of overinflating his assets in order to earn tax incentives and secure loans and better insurance premiums. Engoron had issued a pretrial ruling that found that Trump had committed fraud; the eight-week-long trial was held to zero in on the extent of the fraud committed. During the trial, Trump took the witness stand himself to defend the Trump Organization operations, along with his three children Eric, Donald Trump Jr., and Ivanka. Cohen also took the stand.

In the end, Engoron ruled pretty decisively against the Trump family. “Defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways. Instead they adopted a ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ posture that the evidence belies.” Engoron also said that their refusal to acknowledge wrongdoing during the trial suggests that they “will engage in [fraud] going forward unless judicially restrained.” Engoron’s decision also referenced his court-appointed monitor for the Trump Organization, whose report found that the company’s operations still raise some red flags.

Slate’s Alexander Sammon and Mark Joseph Stern did some back-of-the-envelope math and found that Trump’s current financial situation is pretty grim. In addition to Engoron’s $355 million fine, just last month a court ordered Trump to pay $83 million to writer E. Jean Carroll after losing a defamation lawsuit against her, on top of the $5 million that he was ordered to pay Carroll last year for sexually assaulting and defaming her. Trump’s recent legal penalties add up to a whopping $438 million, while his cash holdings are reportedly sitting at $425 million.

Then again, Trump might have a backup plan already in place. The former president’s social media site Truth Social is merging with a special acquisition company, and the deal awards him over 78 million shares that, at current prices, would be worth roughly $4 billion. And over the weekend, Trump debuted $399 Never Surrender sneakers, advertised as “bold, gold and tough, just like President Trump.”

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis burst into a Georgia courtroom last week and demanded to testify under oath, to the surprise of basically everyone in the room. She wanted to personally address the allegations that she improperly engaged in a romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, whom she hired to work on her election interference case. (Willis’ indictment charges Trump and 18 others for interfering in Georgia’s 2022 election.)

The misconduct allegations were brought by Ashleigh Merchant, a lawyer representing co-defendant Mike Roman. Merchant is accusing Willis of hiring Wade because the two were engaged in a romantic relationship and that the couple have a conflict of interest in prosecuting this case, since Wade paid for vacations for the couple through funds he received for his work for Fulton County. In response to Merchant’s allegations, both Willis and Wade filed a motion admitting they were dating, and Judge Scott McAfee held an evidentiary hearing to understand what both sides had to say about it.

Wade took the witness stand before Willis and testified that the DA paid him back in cash for travel they took together and that the couple did not start dating until early 2022. (Willis started her investigation in 2020 and hired Wade in 2021.) When Willis took the witness stand, she also said that she paid Wade back in cash for trips they took together. The cash transaction was something Merchant fiercely questioned since it was a large sum of money with no paper trail. John Floyd, Willis’ father, also took the witness to defend his daughter’s use of cash, saying that as a child he told his daughter to keep “six months of cash, always.” He added, “Maybe—and excuse me, Your Honor, I’m not trying to be racist—but it’s a Black thing.”

Willis also testified that as of 2024, she is no longer in a romantic relationship with Wade—and the hearing had a distinct post-breakup vibe, as Willis remarked that Wade had once said that the “only thing a woman can do for him is make him a sandwich.”

Amid all the heated exchanges, McAfee repeatedly interjected in an attempt to differentiate questions that were relevant to Willis’ ability to prosecute her case and ones that were obviously salacious and had no bearing on the case. The two-day hearing was nothing short of messy but made one thing very clear: The optics for Willis and Wade are not good.

McAfee is now deciding whether to grant Merchant’s motion to have her client’s charges dismissed and to have Willis and Wade disqualified from prosecuting this case. The bar to remove a prosecutor from their own case is high, as Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern and Jeremy Stahl recently explained. “The defendants need to prove that Willis benefited personally from prosecuting them, or can be reasonably seen to have done so, in a way that will prejudice the case against Trump and his co-defendants.”

For the second time in the past three months, Smith filed a motion to the Supreme Court urging the justices to act quickly in order to let Trump’s election interference trial move forward. In the motion, filed last week, Smith asked the justices to reject Trump’s attempts to block a recent appeals court decision that found that he cannot claim absolute immunity from prosecution.

Trump has been continuously trying to have Smith’s indictment thrown out, arguing that he’s protected from prosecution for actions he took while he was president. After Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is tasked with overseeing Smith’s trial, rejected Trump’s presidential immunity motion, Trump appealed her decision. Smith tried petitioning the Supreme Court to bypass the federal appeals court and hear Trump’s presidential immunity appeal directly in order to maintain his March 4 trial date, but the court refused—and the three-judge panel ended up flat-out rejecting Trump’s immunity defense.

Now the former president is expected to appeal once more, and last week he asked the Supreme Court to grant a stay—keeping Smith’s case on pause—while he prepares to appeal. Last week, Smith filed a response motion with the high court and argued, “Any executive immunity that may have protected [Trump] while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.”

The special counsel also argued that if Trump’s claim to immunity is accepted, it would “upend understandings about Presidential accountability that have prevailed throughout history while undermining democracy and the rule of law.” Trump has also argued that if he is prosecuted, it would open the door for future presidents to be targeted for their actions, something Smith says blatantly overlooks “the ‘unprecedented’ scale, nature, and seriousness of his alleged crimes—a fraudulent effort to stay in office in defiance of the will of the electorate.”

So far, the Supreme Court has not yet weighed in on Trump’s request for a stay order.