Trump toggles between the courtroom and the campaign in the final week before 2024 voting begins

Donald Trump is turning the last dash to the Iowa caucuses into a showcase for his claims of political persecution as he seeks to suck oxygen from his trailing Republican opponents.

Trump’s expected juggle of courtroom appearances and campaign events this week will stand as an metaphor for an entire election overshadowed by the former president’s legal entanglements.

His strategy of anchoring his campaign on his falsehood that he won the 2020 election – which is at the heart of two of his four looming criminal trials – and his explicit calls for “retribution” have helped make him the strongest front-runner for a presidential nomination in years. It has also complicated efforts by his chief rivals – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who meet in a ''debate'' this week – to disqualify him as strong nominee.

While Trump’s rhetoric puts off many Americans, his refusal to accept decorum and to recognize the constraints of the rule of law is a key part of his brand among disaffected grassroots Republican voters. By setting Trump – who faces 91 criminal charges across four separate cases – on the road toward a third straight nomination, Iowa’s January 15 caucuses would encapsulate the fateful collision between the ex-president’s legal plight and the 2024 election.

The next few weeks are likely to show the extent to which the nation’s future remains entwined with Trump, who’s making clear how he’d be an even more untamed force in a second term, in which he’d likely seek to end federal cases against him.This week alone, he’s expected to arrive in Washington, DC, for a key appeals court hearing in his federal election interference case and is also expected in New York for closing arguments in a civil fraud trial.

No other presidential candidate has spent the days leading up to the critical first nominating contest in courtrooms as the defendant in two separate trials. But no other White House hopeful could have hoped to mount a viable campaign under the same legal cloud as Trump, who has made evading accountability his life’s work.

The ex-president’s vow to use a new administration as an instrument of personal vengeance will be foreshadowed when his lawyers argue in a federal appeals court in Washington on Tuesday that his actions after the 2020 election were all covered by a constitutional cloak of presidential immunity and that he cannot be prosecuted for seeking to overturn the election. While the gambit in his federal election interference case is a legal long shot since it would suggest that future presidents could get away with crimes committed to stay in power, the case encapsulates Trump’s vision of the presidency granting almost monarchial powers – a distinctly un-American proposition.

Trump has made plans to attend the hearing, and also intends to be in court in New York on Thursday for the start of final arguments in the civil fraud trial targeting him, his adult sons and the Trump organization, multiple sources said. Between those two appearances, he’s due to fly on his private jetliner back to Iowa on Wednesday before another return trip to the Hawkeye State over the weekend, in the final hours before the first voting in a 2024 election season likely to submit the US political system to a historic test.

Trump has used his criminal indictments and his civil fraud trial in New York as a platform for his campaign narrative that he’s an innocent victim of banana republic-style justice and to dominate coverage of the GOP campaign in a likely preview of how he will handle this week.

Juxtapositions between courts and campaign rallies this week will hand DeSantis and Haley a stiff task in halting Trump’s campaign, which is dominating polls in Iowa and elsewhere.

The rivals will clash in a debate in Iowa on Wednesday night, in the most significant moment yet in their campaigns, while seeking strong showings in Iowa and in the New Hampshire primary the following week to remain viable. But the former president will not be there, choosing instead to take part in the safer environment of a Fox News town hall event in Iowa.