How a Convict became President: The Case of Donald Trump

Muhammad Nur Fitri Mahad

Image Credits: Library of Congress via Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/president-donald-trump-jPN_oglAjOU

Editorial note: This article was written in February 2025, and may not reflect further events since then.

Summary: Trump’s third campaign for the US Presidency — and his success — raises an important question: should convicted individuals be allowed to run for political office? Should a criminal indictment immediately disqualify you to hold elected positions, or should voters be allowed to render judgment on the question?

The Second Electoral Victory and How it Came to Be

On November 5, 2024, the United States (U.S.) re-elected the twice-impeached Donald J. Trump as President, and Ohio Senator and former Trump critic, JD Vance, as Vice-President. The former won a staggering 312 electoral votes that overshadowed his Democratic counterpart, then-Vice-President Kamala Harris, who garnered 266 votes, and even overturned all seven swing states in his favour.

This came amidst multiple civil and criminal proceedings against Trump, who has been indicted on everything from a hush money scandal with adult film star Stormy Daniels to inciting an insurrection on January 6, 2021. But how can a twice-impeached convict still be allowed to run for the highest office of the nation, much less win the election?

This essay seeks to explore the civil and criminal proceedings against Trump, why he is still able to run, and still retain a large amount of electoral support, in comparative perspective with other countries that have also fallen prey to a similar “convict candidate” phenomenon.

Civil and Criminal Charges

In May, Trump was found guilty on all 34 felony counts in a trial that involved falsifying business records as part of a hush money scheme to pay adult film star Stormy Daniels, alongside other women, with whom he had sexual relationships with.

Even whilst midway through his campaign trail, Trump still faces criminal and civil convictions. Here are some prominent ones:

Trump, alongside his sons and his former aide Allen Weisselberg, faces a civil suit in New York where they fraudulently reported property values to lower his tax bill or improve his loan terms. He has since appealed the case and has been ordered to pay USD $175 million.
Trump is indicted in Fulton County, Georgia, in a racketeering case involving him and 18 others with allegations of a conspiracy in stealing the 2020 election.
He also faces four federal felonies in Washington, D.C. for his connection in attempting to remain in power after losing the 2020 election.

After a brief glance at these cases, one would reasonably assume that any one of these proceedings is enough to disqualify a candidate from running for President. But they have not.

The Enabling System

The main technical, and arguably most jarring, factor supporting Trump’s candidacy would be the U.S. Constitution — or rather, what it lacks. Very little is required of a Presidential candidate. Under Article 2, for an individual to be deemed eligible for Presidential candidacy, they must be at least 35 years old, a natural-born citizen, and have lived in the U.S. for at least 14 years. However, the Constitution does not explicitly disqualify candidates based on personal character or criminal record.

While certain states prevent felons from running for office at the local and state levels, the federal level bears no such safeguards. Attempts by states like Colorado, Maine, and Illinois to bar Trump from the ballot have been overruled by the Supreme Court — of which three judges were appointed by Trump — spotlighting a deeper, systemic issue. This systemic issue is also found within the Republican party, or the Grand Old Party (GOP). Normally, delegates in the GOP declare their support for their desired Republican nominee. In the 2024 Republican Primary, Trump won the majority of the delegates. Institutional factors merely explain why Trump is still allowed to run despite his criminal charges. But what reasons explain his continued popularity within the GOP and among its voters?

Sources of Support: Fear and Distrust

The first reason stems from the general distrust his supporters have towards the incumbent government. Some find the indictments to be baseless (and those behind it to be untrustworthy), perceiving it to be a tactic by the Democrats or other Republicans — dubbed by Trump loyalists as Republicans-In-Name-Only (RINO) — to attack Trump. Trump is then hailed as someone who is willing to speak against the “big, bad establishment”, akin to previous sentiments such as “Drain the Swamp” that view the government as corrupt while painting Trump as the one to clean up the government. For instance, in New Hampshire, a Washington Post poll found that just over half of the state’s Republican voters believe Biden won due to voter fraud, where 85% of Trump voters share this view.

The second reason is that key Republican figures have closed ranks behind Trump out of fear. Despite finding their Trump loyalist counterparts too extreme, some Republicans worry they may lose their party votes should they speak out against Trump. Trump and his aides have also been explicit in their threats to donors supporting his political opponents like Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, publicly condemning former aides working for Trump’s rivals. These warnings and threats have forced senators like Ted Cruz to eventually endorse Trump.

The last reason lies in how living under the Biden administration has been, for many voters, more difficult than Trump’s. Supporters cite financial reasons, such as inflation and a perceived apathy from Biden’s administration towards their financial constraints. Others felt that had Trump won, conflicts like the Russia-Ukraine war would have been avoided and there would be more stability on both a domestic and international scale.

It is clear that even without systemic enablers, Trump’s political opponents will have to contest with a large and loyal opposition base that seemingly ignores Trump’s criminal history.

Beyond the U.S.

Politicians running for office despite past or ongoing convictions is a phenomenon not unique to the U.S. We observe how the lack of institutional safeguards in Brazil also allow “convict candidates” to run for office.

The country’s own convict candidate, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was initially sentenced to nine years and six months in prison in 2017 for corruption and money laundering. The sentence was a result of an extensive corruption probe, Operation Car Wash, that initially focused on the state-owned oil company Petrobras. The operation uncovered that the two-time former President had accepted bribes, particularly a seaside apartment, for helping the Brazilian construction firm OAS achieve deals with Petrobras. Lula eventually began serving a 12-year sentence in April 2018. However, Brazil’s Supreme Court overturned the decision only a year and a half into Lula’s sentence. This ruling allowed determined defendants to remain free until they have exhausted their appeals to higher courts.

The sentencing meant that Lula was ineligible to run for office under electoral rules, but in 2021, the Supreme Court annulled Lula’s criminal convictions and by extension, allowed him to run for office. Consequently, the leftist politician defeated incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 election. Lula’s short-lived punishment and eventual ascension to Presidency underscores the judiciary’s failure to prevent convict candidature. The same institution that punished Lula, albeit lightly, also enabled him to run for office by tossing out his previous convictions. Not only did the institutional safeguard fail, it achieves the opposite effect and empowers such convict candidates.

However, Brazil’s case does not indicate that such reversals are always flawed. Instead, they can allow an unfairly convicted candidate to still run for office. Such a case can be observed in India. Opposition Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi was convicted in March 2023 for defamation, particularly over comments deemed to have insulted India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and anyone with the Modi surname. He was found guilty and sentenced to jail for 2 years — enough to disqualify him as a Member of Parliament (MP) from India’s lower house — where he vowed to appeal his case.

This year, the Supreme Court had agreed to hear his appeal and consequently suspended his jail term, allowing the party leader to return to parliament. The judges’ ruling followed the rationale that despite Gandhi’s comments, the conviction had also punished voters who elected him. With Gandhi, the institutional safeguards kicked in. Conversely, India’s case also underscores another flaw with these safeguards against “convict candidates”: weaponisation. Modi was able to use the defamation laws to convict and disqualify Gandhi, until the Supreme Court’s intervention.

Ironically, the conviction further propelled the convicted party leader in politics. Modi’s decision points to the potential of these safeguards being abused by incumbent leaders to maintain power by disqualifying potential candidates that would otherwise win electorally. Controversial defamation laws aside, Gandhi is an indication that not all convict candidates are necessarily a bad thing and can instead serve as an intermediary filter that determines whether an individual should continue to run.

We see in both Lula and Gandhi how even if there are institutional safeguards to prevent convict candidates from running for office, those safeguards can still be circumvented, for better or for worse.

What can we take away from this?

Trump’s ability to run can thus be explained by a combination of the absence of institutional safeguards with a vast and growing support for him. Systemic issues like the U.S. Constitution’s oversight of criminal behaviour and its simplistic eligibility criteria, and the GOP’s internal candidate selection mechanism’s inability to eliminate rogue nominees make for potential pipelines for any malicious actor to unlawfully gain power.

Having convicted candidates is not limited to the U.S. As observed in Brazil and India, this phenomenon can occur in a state that lacks or abuses its own institutional safeguards. Countries would do well to revise their own Constitution to prevent the same phenomenon from happening during their elections.

The solution is clear: these systemic holes must be patched. Intuitively, the next step would be to ensure that the system prevents the next rogue candidate from being anywhere near the elections.

With regard to the support Trump receives, they are mainly rooted in distrust towards the establishment and the perceived incompetence of the Biden administration. Addressing this tenet would not be so straightforward and would require the long process of changing hearts and minds.

Electoral victories aside, Trump’s campaign has exposed troubling loopholes in the U.S.’ electoral system. Even more tragically, it took a convicted felon for both the U.S. and the world to finally uncover these systemic flaws that stood under their noses the whole time. The result is a convicted criminal as President.

February, 2025