The multiple judicial fronts that the former president of Donald Trump has open do not represent a legal obstacle in the face of his aspirations to return to the White House, since the US Constitution does not contemplate limits for candidates in the event that they are imputed or even found in prison. prison.
Trump received last week what is already his second battery of charges, this time federal, for storing classified information in his Florida mansion. The tycoon had already been charged at the end of March for the bribe given to an exactriz on the eve of the 2016 elections in exchange for him keeping silent about an alleged ‘affair’.
The Constitution does not mark the absence of a criminal record among the few criteria established to be president, since it only stipulates that the candidate must be a citizen by birth, older than 35 years and have lived at least 14 in the United States. The Twenty-second Amendment does state that a person who has already served two terms cannot be president.
And there is little room to add new requirements, as constitutional experts point out to ABC News, recalling that there are already Supreme Court rulings that stipulate that Congress cannot add new requirements to occupy the highest political office in the North American country.
Technically, Trump could be a candidate even from jail, a circumstance that will not be unprecedented. During the 1920 presidential election, Eugene Debs, a candidate for the Socialist Party, was in jail for opposing World War I and won 3 percent of the vote.
Thus, a hypothetical conviction or the adoption of precautionary measures against Trump, the favorite for now in the Republican Party primaries, would only limit his ability to campaign or even vote for himself, since the right to vote is restricted to convicted persons. for serious crimes or serving sentences –they vary depending on the state–.
The tycoon has already made it clear that he does not plan to withdraw from the still budding race in the face of what he continues to consider a “witch hunt” by his political rivals, despite the fact that the crimes imputed to him by the stored documents may entail a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.
