How Donald Trump will seek to turn his Manhattan hush-money trial into political gold

One of the biggest downside for the candidate is that he’s had to divert millions in campaign funds to legal fees.

Smikle said Trump will attempt to use the prospect of a prison sentence to rally support from a wider swath of voters.

“He will seek to convince working-class white voters and even Black men that the system is rigged against him the way it’s rigged against them,” Smikle said.

But some analysts note that the very nature of a criminal trial puts Trump on the defensive and makes him appear powerless. That can be a huge liability for a candidate who has cultivated a tough-guy image and even compared himself to Al Capone, falsely saying he’s been indicted more times than the notorious mobster.

“Trump wants to be talking about the issues that he wants to be talking about, like immigrants and inflation,” said Republican strategist Alex Conant. “Those are issues independent voters care about and they are the ones who are going to decide the election.”

New York prosecutors accuse Trump of falsifying business records to cover up payments to Daniels, Playboy model Karen McDougal and a doorman at Trump Tower to hide potentially damaging information during the 2016 election. They say the crimes, which would ordinarily be a misdemeanor, are felonies because they were carried out to help Trump commit other election-related crimes.

The case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg marked the first indictment that Trump was hit with, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that it’s the first case to go to trial.

But legal analysts broadly agree it is the least consequential of the criminal cases.

After all, it involves actions taken mostly before Trump became president eight years ago. Unlike the Georgia case and Special Counsel Jack Smith’s federal election interference case, the Manhattan trial will not touch on the ex-president’s efforts to overturn the results of an election he lost.

The Manhattan case doesn’t directly affect national security like the federal case accusing him of taking classified documents with him after leaving the White House, either.

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