LOS ANGELES - Calls are growing for Donald Trump’s criminal trials to be broadcast live, as the United States grapples with the prospect of seeing a former – and possibly future – president in the dock.

Lawyers and politicians are lining up to urge that cameras be allowed inside the courtroom, particularly when the one-time reality television star faces a jury on charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

“Given the historic nature of the charges brought forth in these cases, it is hard to imagine a more powerful circumstance for televised proceedings,” read a letter signed on Thursday by California congressman Adam Schiff and dozens of his Democratic Party colleagues.

“If the public is to fully accept the outcome, it will be vitally important for it to witness, as directly as possible, how the trials are conducted, the strength of the evidence adduced and the credibility of witnesses.”

Trump has now been charged in three separate criminal cases: lying about hush money payments to a porn star, mishandling secret documents, and trying to subvert the election.

An indictment looms in a fourth, related to a phone call to a Georgia election official in which Trump pressured the man to “find” the 11,780 votes that would reverse his defeat to Mr Joe Biden in the southern state.

Despite extensive and detailed media coverage of Trump’s alleged crimes, an overwhelming majority of Republican voters – 74 per cent – and a third of all voters believe he has done no wrong, according to a poll by The New York Times and Sienna College.

Trump himself insists he is innocent, the victim of a “witch hunt” by an establishment desperate to silence him as he runs again for the White House.

Busting this myth and exposing the depth of his malfeasance is a prime reason to show the trials to a wide audience, said constitutional law specialist Alan Dershowitz.

“If the Trump trial is not televised, the public will learn about the events through the extremely biased reporting of today’s media,” he wrote in The Hill newspaper.

“It will be as if there were two trials: One observed by reporters for MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times and other liberal media, the other through the prism of reporters for Fox, Newsmax and other conservative outlets.

“There will be nowhere to go to learn the objective reality of what occurred at trial.”

While some state-level proceedings have been shown on US television – football star OJ Simpson’s nation-stopping murder trial was a ratings blockbuster – federal trials cannot be photographed or broadcast, courtesy of rules dating to 1946.

Georgetown University law professor Neal Katyal argued in the Washington Post that it was time to update this “antiquated” edict.

“We live in a digital age, where people think visually and are accustomed to seeing things with their own eyes,” he wrote.

The decision on whether to allow cameras into the courtroom will ultimately rest with the Judicial Conference – the policymaking body of the federal court system, which is run by the nation’s Chief Justice John Roberts.

Alternatively, Congress could change the law.

Mr Katyal, who was a prosecutor in the murder trial of Derek Chauvin, the white Minnesota police officer who killed Mr George Floyd, a black man, said the broadcasting of those proceedings had helped a highly divided public to accept the guilty verdict when it came.

The same would be true of the Trump trials, Mr Katyal maintained.

“This criminal trial is being conducted in the name of the people of the United States. It is our tax dollars at work,” he wrote.

“We have a right to see it. And we have the right to ensure that rumour-mongers and conspiracy theorists don’t control the narrative.”

Professor Christina Bellantoni, an expert in media and political journalism at the University of Southern California, said the problem with putting it all on the small screen is Trump’s formidable ability to dominate the discourse and bend the narrative.

“My prediction… would be that his public opinion ratings would go up, no matter what evidence is presented,” she told AFP.

The risk is that a trial about an alleged attempt to overthrow democracy becomes little more than entertainment, where no one’s mind is changed.

“I think people aren’t on the fence about this individual in either direction,” she said.

“People will hate-watch it; people will rally and root for him. And there’s not going to be anybody that’s like, ‘Gee, I think I’ll watch this and see how justice plays out’.”

AFP