Donald Trump is under multiple indictments in multiple jurisdictions for various crimes, including paying off hookers, refusing to return classified documents that belong to the Federal Government, possible insurrection, obstruction of justice, and trying to influence election officials. But wait…he’s not the first politician to seek election while under threat of imprisonment.
In 2006 Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, was indicted on two felony charges by a Grand Jury. It was unresolved when he announced his candidacy for President in 2014. His campaign never gained traction in an overcrowded Republican field. He dropped out in 2015 and the felony charges were eventually dropped.
In 1920, Eugene V. Debs, an avowed socialist who had run for President multiple times, ran again, this time while locked up at a federal penitentiary in Atlanta. He had been convicted under the federal Sedition Act for giving an antiwar speech a few months before the end of World War I. Campaign lapel pins and other paraphernalia played it up: “For President — Convict No. 9653.” He garnered nearly one million votes.
Lyndon LaRouche was a perennial fringe candidate who ran for president eight times starting in 1976, He was convicted in the late 1980s on federal conspiracy and mail-fraud charges. He ran two campaigns from prison, one for a House of Representatives seat and one for president. It is estimated that the LaRouche movement never exceeded a few thousand members, but it had a significant political influence, raising more than $200 million and running candidates in more than 4,000 elections in the 1980s.
Marion S. Barry Jr., the colorful mayor of Washington, D.C., was convicted in 1990 on a cocaine charge, only to make a remarkable comeback, winning his fourth mayor’s race in 1994. D.C. voters looked beyond the ignominy of his arrest, because Mr. Barry had amassed a long track record of addressing the needs of the city’s most historically neglected communities.
In Louisiana, the former Gov. Edwin Edwards, who spent eight years in prison on corruption charges, tried, and failed, to mount a political comeback with a run for Congress in 2014.
Derrick Evans, a former member of the West Virginia House of Delegates, resigned from his seat after filming himself entering the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021, as part of the pro-Trump mob trying to stop Congress from certifying the Joe Biden’s election victory. Mr. Evans later pleaded guilty to a civil disorder charge and was sentenced to three months in jail. Presently he is running for Congress. His campaign website notes continue to assert that the 2020 election was stolen.
While these individuals are part of our nations colorful past, Donald Trump is part of our present and each day the news trumpets another revelation. It is hard to turn away, and harder still to imagine what another four years might bring.
It all makes Barbie look plausible.