Trump’s Motivations to Stay in Office

Part #1 of a series on the 2020 U.S. election crisis

In this series of articles—first published on October 2 and updated on October 17 — I will focus on the ways in which the incumbent president is expected to cling to power. As I first published this, President Donald Trump had just announced a health diagnosis, and it remains to be seen how this will affect the election which is still one month away.

What are Trump’s motivations to stay in office?

Trump wants “to keep immunity from prosecution and the corrupt system he has for making dollars off the presidency going,” according to Ruth Ben-Ghiat in June 2020. He faces a wide range of charges relating to business and tax fraud and political corruption. Defamation lawsuits are also being brought against him.

As a sitting president, he cannot be indicted. After he leaves office, however, he will be vulnerable. It is possible that a newly inaugurated President Biden could bring charges; there is, however, a norm that a president’s successor should not prosecute his predecessor, and it may not be necessary for Biden to do so, given all the other entities who will bring charges anyway.

Trump could choose to resign so that his vice president could immediately pardon him, but such a pardon would only release him from federal charges, not from state or local charges — significantly including those from the Manhattan district attorney’s…