Math Favors Donald Trump Prison Sentence, Professor Predicts

Former President Donald Trump is “mathematically likely” to end up in prison due to his various criminal indictments, according to one prominent New York University professor on Saturday.

Trump is currently facing four criminal indictments at the federal and state levels, resulting in 91 criminal charges that are the first ever leveled against a former president. Two of the cases, one brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and one brought by the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney’s office, revolve around Trump’s alleged efforts to contest and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential nomination after he claimed without evidence that the election was stolen from him due to widespread voter fraud.

The former president, for a second time, has been charged by the DOJ, which accused him of illegally retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, after leaving the White House in 2021 and hiding them from government investigators. In addition, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Trump for falsifying business records in relation to the years-long probe into whether the former president made an alleged hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election. Daniels said she had an affair with Trump a decade prior, which he denied.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges against him and has accused the investigations that produced them of being efforts to hurt his political prospects in the 2024 election, where he is the leading candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. Should he be convicted for even just one of the charges, polls have indicated that voters will abandon him in significant numbers.

This scenario is likely to play out during this year’s election, according to Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, who made the judgment during a Saturday interview appearance on CNN, basing his argument on the conviction rates in the jurisdictions where Trump is charged.

“If you look at the jurisdictions he’s been charged in, they have between a 70 percent and 92 percent conviction rate, and only a third of people who receive the indictments or the charges that he’s received don’t end up with prison time,” Galloway explained. “Even if you discount the statistics or cut them in half because it is a different situation, it just seems mathematically improbable that he won’t be sentenced to prison at some point.”

He continued: “It’s become a game show, and that is his objective…to slow down the trials until after [the election]. If you look at, statistically, the likelihood that one of these [91] charges will stick, it just feels mathematically likely something is going to stick here.”

Newsweek reached out to Trump’s office via email for comment.

Given the unprecedented nature of a former president being criminally charged, it is unclear how much Trump’s case will exist within the realm of traditional conviction statistics.

Trump, meanwhile, has stated in the past that he intends to continue running his campaign from prison if he is sentenced before the 2024 election, something which the U.S. Constitution would not bar him from doing for all but a few of his charges.