Politico reports:

What once resembled a wall of legal obstacles that stood between Donald Trump and his return to the White House is now looking like little more than a series of speed bumps.

Prosecutors handling cases from Georgia to Florida to Washington, D.C., are discovering that bringing groundbreaking criminal charges against a former president is a lot easier than getting them to trial.

The four criminal cases that Trump is facing have diverted him from the campaign trail and — as is evident from his speeches and social media feeds — have prompted him to devote an even greater share of his mental energy to his courtroom adversaries.

But, as of now, the wave of prosecutions don’t seem destined to deliver the kind of legal accountability that Trump’s investigators promised — or the devastating political blow to Trump’s presidential prospects that has animated his detractors since the cases were announced with great fanfare over a five-month span last year.

That’s because Trump has benefited enormously from a pileup of postponements. After a pair of delays this week in Georgia and Florida, the most likely scenario for 2024 is that the only trial that Trump will face before the election is the ongoing one in Manhattan: the hush money case, which many lawyers view as the least serious of the four, both in terms of the severity of the alleged wrongdoing and the prospect of prison time.

And if that scenario comes to pass, Trump’s critics will be deprived of the teaching moment they have long hoped for: some methodical public airing of the former president’s gravest misdeeds that would convince some swath of Trump supporters to rule out supporting him. [Continue reading…]