Good evening, have we ever seen this, a former prosecutor against a habitual criminal?
If Donald Trump is the first former US president to be criminally convicted in the Stormy Daniels case, he is not the first presidential candidate to have suffered judicial setbacks. In the past, two candidates even campaigned from his cells, the socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, in 1920, and more recently, the conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche, in 1992.
Eugene Victor Debs had campaigned from his Georgia penitentiary, where he was serving a ten-year federal sentence for opposing the draft and U.S. involvement in World War I. He received 920,000 votes, or 3.4 percent of the popular vote.
On the other side of the political spectrum, Lyndon LaRouche was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for conspiracy and fraud in 1988. He also campaigned from behind bars in his Minnesota prison in the 1992 presidential election. Note that the winner of that year’s presidential election, Bill Clinton, was, as in his case Kamala Harris, a former attorney general of Arkansas.
But the comparison ends there, as Lyndon LaRouche’s candidacy cannot be compared to that of Donald Trump: a committed independent, LaRouche had only obtained 0.2% of the vote. He died in 2019.
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