Just as Jamaicans had started to feel a sense of pride that Kingston-born Judge Tanya Sue Chutkan would be presiding over one of the cases against former United States President Donald Trump, he has indicated he wants her off the case.

Mr Trump, who was indicted last week in Washington, DC, for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, posted on his Truth Social platform: “There is no way I can get a fair trial with the judge ‘assigned’… Everybody knows this, and so does she.”

Judge Chutkan was appointed by US President Barack Obama, in keeping with the US system, where every judge is appointed by a president. But her nomination was unanimously approved 95-0 in the Senate in 2014. She is one of a dozen judges on the Washington federal district court bench and was randomly selected for the Trump case.

Mr Trump is apparently still roiled by her ruling against him in a 2021 case in which she notably declared that, “Presidents are not kings.” And he would have taken notice that she didn’t seem to go easy on Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6 of that year.

Moreover, on Saturday she denied his motion to extend a deadline for responding to the US Government’s protective order request that could limit what he and his lawyers can share publicly about his case.

However, Judge Chutkan, who was born in the year of Jamaica’s Independence, is said to be highly regarded as a much-qualified, fair, but no-nonsense judge. She was educated at George Washington University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and later graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School with a Juris Doctor degree in 1987.

Beyond their interest in the fate of Ms Chutkan, many Jamaicans are keenly following the tragic drama surrounding Mr Trump, in which a former president of the United States is facing prison time, after being slapped with his third indictment this year, while he yet remains the leading contender for the Republican Party’s nomination in the 2024 presidential election.

In this unprecedented state of affairs, Mr Trump has been indicted in Florida, Manhattan, and Washington, and federal and state prosecutors elsewhere have opened a number of investigations against him.

Twice-impeached in the House, though not in the Senate, the ex-president continues to maintain that the 2020 election was stolen from him through fraud, even after losing 61 court cases. Recent polls show that he has convinced 70 per cent of Republicans that Mr Joe Biden is not the legitimate president.

As he runs the gauntlet of cases, Mr Trump has routinely unleashed a stream of invectives against those prosecuting him or running the case in which he faces charges over attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and defraud the United States.

One of the unusual features of the situation is the likelihood of Trump facing his vice president, Mr Mike Pence, in court as a witness against him in the case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith in Washington.

Mr Pence claims that his former boss tried to force him to not certify the election results, which he had no constitutional power to do. He faced grave danger during the January 6 insurrection when Trump supporters chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!”

Old-time Jamaicans would say, “What a prekeh!”