Why Trump’s legal troubles may soon catch up with his reelection campaign

Former President Donald Trump has clinched the Republican presidential nomination — but that may have been the easy part for his second reelection campaign. While a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that opinions of Trump’s record in office have improved in the years since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, multiple criminal trials still pose a major risk for the presumptive Republican nominee. Yahoo News National Correspondent Andrew Romano breaks down the numbers as the former president heads into uncharted electoral territory.

Video Transcript

ANDREW ROMANO: So, in a lot of ways the Trump-Biden rematch is kind of baked in. We know these guys. We know what they did as president. But there are a couple of big x-factors. And the biggest one probably is the Trump trials.

Donald Trump, over the course of his presidency, was one of the least popular presidents in US history. When he left office, only 44% of Americans approved of the job he did as president. 52% disapproved. Those numbers have kind of reversed now, and Americans are looking back on Donald Trump's presidency, as it gets further and further away in the rearview mirror of history, and they're saying, maybe this guy wasn't so bad.

So Donald Trump won the Republican primary, but that might have been the easy part. His legal troubles really start now. His criminal trial will start in New York City. After that, he's going to have a hearing at the Supreme Court over his claims of absolute presidential immunity. And depending on how that goes, his federal trial for attempting to overturn his 2020 election loss could begin later this spring.

Trump's strategy has been to delay his trials as long as possible, in part because if he were re-elected as president, he would be able to dismiss the federal cases against him. But Americans don't agree, they don't like it. 63% say it's important that voters get a verdict in these Trump trials before the 2024 election. What I'm going to be watching for is how Trump's own voters, and particularly those voters who might have been on the fence about him, react to a potential conviction. How does that affect the sort of calculus of an election that is actually very familiar in a lot of ways?