Trump’s win is a huge legal victory, too. His trials will mostly vanish.

NEW YORK - Donald Trump’s election victory essentially ensures that his lawyers will seek to delay his upcoming sentencing hearing in Manhattan, where he was convicted this spring of falsifying business records to conceal from voters a 2016 hush money payment to a porn actress.

Trump is scheduled to go before New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan on Nov. 26 to learn his punishment, which some experts have said would be unlikely to include jail time - even if he had lost the election. But a second term in the White House could make it harder to impose any sentence at all, even probation.

It was not clear Wednesday when Trump’s attorneys would formally seek to postpone or reschedule the proceeding. Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche did not immediately respond to messages.

Such a request from the defense would probably trigger a discussion about how Merchan should proceed with the historic case - the first trial of a former president, who now is also president-elect. The sentencing was originally scheduled for July but was delayed until November so Trump could argue that his conviction on 34 felony counts of business fraud was built on improper evidence.

A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted the case, declined to comment.

The other criminal cases Trump faces are in even more jeopardy.

Trump vowed as a candidate that he would “fire” special counsel Jack Smith, who brought two federal cases against him: one for allegedly trying to overturn the results of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory and one for allegedly keeping classified documents after leaving the White House and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them.

It would fall to his attorney general to actually carry out such a firing. There is no doubt that Trump will try to appoint an attorney general committed to doing so and to dropping both cases.

But even without such action, Trump would not go on trial anytime soon - if at all. The Justice Department has long recognized that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution while in office. As Justice Department attorney Michael Dreeben acknowledged to the Supreme Court last April in a case involving Trump’s potential immunity from prosecution: “He can’t be prosecuted while he’s a sitting president.”

A spokesperson for the special counsel’s office declined to comment. So did a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which is prosecuting people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. In this year’s campaign, Trump made pardoning at least some of those defendants a signature promise.

Legal experts say new presidents and attorneys general in the past have not removed special counsels appointed by their predecessors. However, in past administrations, those special counsels have not been prosecuting the new president.

Directly ousting Smith “could harm the reputation of the department and make it look like the department was a political entity,” Mary McCord, who served as acting assistant attorney general for national security during the Obama administration and the beginning of the Trump administration, said in an interview before the election.

Even after he becomes president, Trump will still owe potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in civil fines and judgments related to a business fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James and a pair of defamation and sexual assault lawsuits brought by the write E. Jean Carroll. He is appealing all three of those judgments, however.

Neither Trump nor his attorney general can halt the two criminal cases he faces in state court. But prosecutors in Georgia will struggle to go forward with trying him for attempting to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, because federal guidelines say that a president should not stand trial while in office.

The four criminal cases, brought within months of each other in 2023, initially seemed to have jeopardized his chances of being elected again to public office. But he denied wrongdoing in every case and declared that the charges were proof the government was trying to hurt him politically. Soon, his support skyrocketed. Republican elected officials rallied around him, echoing his claims that the justice system was “rigged.”

Trump’s legal team filed every possible appeal and sought delays wherever they could, at times citing his presidential campaign as a reason that he could not meet court deadlines or attend proceedings. He succeeded in pushing all but the New York trial past the presidential election, in the process winning a landmark Supreme Court ruling that greatly expanded presidential immunity and narrowed the federal election interference case in D.C.

The judge in the D.C. case, U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, has been deciding what allegations can remain in the indictment, based on the limitations set out by the Supreme Court in July. Both the president-elect and the special counsel’s office face deadlines Nov. 21 and in December to file legal arguments over Trump’s challenges to Smith’s appointment as special counsel, and to whether Trump can be prosecuted while not in office for actions taken while president.

Even if Chutkan ruled on those before Trump is inaugurated, her decision probably would be appealed, with no trial date on the horizon.

In the other federal case Trump faced, in Florida, U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon dismissed the classified documents indictment in July, ruling - against legal precedent - that Smith was improperly appointed. Smith appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta in hopes of resurrecting the case.

Oral argument has not been scheduled, however, and the 11th Circuit’s ruling would also probably be appealed to the Supreme Court, again delaying the case well past the time when Trump will take power.

The election-interference investigation led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) in Georgia has also been riddled with uncertainty, and Trump’s return to the White House will probably only add to that legal drama.

Willis brought charges against Trump and more than a dozen allies in August 2023 for allegedly conspiring to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia. But the case was paused months ago after Willis was accused of having an inappropriate romantic relationship with an outside lawyer she hired to lead the prosecution.

Trump and some of his co-defendants have appealed Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee’s decision not to remove Willis and her office from the case. Oral arguments in that appeal are scheduled for Dec. 5, with a decision by March and an appeal to the state Supreme Court expected after that.

Steve Sadow, Trump’s lead attorney in Georgia, previously argued that if Trump regained the presidency, the case would have to be delayed until 2029. “Under the Supremacy Clause and its duty to the president of the United States, this trial would not take place at all until after he left his term of office,” Sadow said.

Willis, who won her own reelection race Tuesday, declined through a spokesman to comment. She has strongly implied in the past that she will seek to move forward with the case against Trump unless a court blocks her.

Even if proceedings are paused against Trump, the election interference case will move on for the 14 others who are charged, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former New York mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. A trial against them could produce potentially politically damaging revelations about Trump.

But Trump’s Republican allies in Georgia and Washington, who have already sought to stymie the case, are expected to continue those efforts, including trying to force Willis to testify before a Georgia state Senate subcommittee investigating her and her office.