Trump’s incendiary Texas speech may have deepened his legal troubles, experts say

Donald Trump's incendiary call at a Texas rally for his backers to ready massive protests against "radical, vicious, racist prosecutors" could constitute obstruction of justice or other crimes and backfire legally on Trump, say former federal prosecutors.

Trump's barbed attack was seen as carping against separate federal and state investigations into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and into his real estate empire.

Trump's rant that his followers should launch the "biggest protests" ever in three cities should prosecutors "do anything wrong or illegal" by criminally charging him over his efforts to overturn Joe Biden's victory, or for business tax fraud, came at a 30 January rally in Texas where he repeated falsehoods that the election was rigged.

Legal experts were astonished at Trump's strong hints that if he runs and wins a second term in 2024, he would pardon many of those charged for attacking the Capitol on 6 January last year in hopes of thwarting Biden's certification by Congress.

The former Nixon White House counsel John Dean attacked Trump's talk of pardons for the rioters as the "stuff of dictators", and stressed that "failure to confront a tyrant only encourages bad behavior".

Taken together, veteran prosecutors say Trump's comments seemed to reveal that the former president now feels more legal jeopardy from the three inquiries in Atlanta, Washington and New York, all of which have accelerated since the start of 2022.

Trump's anxiety was palpable when he urged supporters at the Texas rally to stage "the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington DC, in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere," should any charges be brought, a plea for help that could boomerang and create more legal problems for the former president.