Donald Trump could be sentenced to a century behind bars

Happy days. Donald Trump could be in jail for 100 years, if you tot up all the latest charges against him for unlawfully holding classified documents and conspiracy to obstruct justice. No doubt his supporters will already be making preparations for the Trump 2124 presidential bid, such is his perceived immortality. Trump, even if he died in jail, could be cryogenically frozen, ready for a run a century or so, perhaps against some descendant of the Clinton, Obama or Biden families. But, snarking aside, this is a grim moment for Trump, and will prove troubling for America.

Most worryingly for Trump, things in this case are moving extremely fast. The special counsel, meaning the federal prosecuting lawyer, is Jack Smith, a former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, of all things.

Before that, he was in charge of public integrity unit at the US Department of Justice. His appointment is open-ended, but that doesn’t of course mean that the prosecution will meander along at leisure. The directive establishing his investigation into Trump and the missing official papers notes that Trump is a current candidate for president, and the clear inference of that is that Smith and his team will want to complete as much of the process before the campaigning for the 2024 contest begins.

All the wisecracks about Trump conducting his campaign from a jail cell, or even moving the Oval Office into a penitentiary have a serious point — the convention is that public prosecutors must avoid interference in the democratic process. Hence Smith wanting to get this out of the way rapidly. That sense of urgency doesn’t seem to be quite the same for some of the parallel cases into Trump’s alleged interference with the 2020 election results, the transition of power in 2021 and the attempted insurrection at the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Those would be even more protracted than the present one.

Hence the fast pace of developments now, and Trump will apparently surrender to the authorities to face charges as early as Tuesday, his second time in a court room since the beginning of April (though that time not on federal charges — this is another order of judicial first). In April, Trump was arraigned and pleaded not guilty to 34 New York State felony charges relating to falsifying business records, stemming from supposed hush money payments made to the adult actress Stormy Daniels at the time of the presidential campaign in 2016.

Now, in Miami, he faces a similar ritual. There may well be many more to come, given the array of legal actions against him, including a potentially explosive one in Georgia, where the district attorney in Fulton County is mulling charges around efforts by the former president and his allies to overturn the 2020 election there. And, only last Thursday, Trump’s lawyers requested a federal court in New York to reduce the penalty awarded against him in the sexual assault and defamation civil case won by writer E Jean Carroll, from $5m down to $1m, or else grant him a new trial. Last month a jury found the ex-president liable for sexually abusing and defaming her.

Behind the arraignment in Miami on Tuesday — another media circus — it’s not clear how quickly things will proceed, but it may be that the latest case runs into the earliest stages of the Republican primaries, which begin voting in February. The pace of events is already picking up, with the declaration by former vice-president Mike Pence that he is going to run for the White House.

Will the welter of legal cases against him damage Trump? The short answer is that they won’t within his own party, where the base think him innocent and the victim of conspiracies. But for the wider electorate, voters may think more carefully about whether they want such a volatile personality back in the White House — from where he pledges to enact retribution against his enemies.