The convicted felons who dared to dream of the White House

There are very few holds barred in the race for the Oval Office, and all the power that goes with it.

According to the US Constitution, one simply has to be at least 35 years old, a natural-born US citizen, and have lived in the US for at least 14 years.

What it does not specify is a clean criminal record - as perhaps can be expected from a document drafted and signed by an assembly of people involved in open rebellion.

This was confirmed recently, when Donald Trump's felony conviction for falsifying business records in New York City in no way disrupted his status as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, nor, according to the polls, his better-than-decent shot at returning to the White House.

But while Trump is regarded as a unique force in US politics in many ways, he's by no means the first to run for the highest office in the country with a criminal record behind him.

He's not even the only one doing it in 2024.

Here are some others of a fairly notorious fraternity.

Debs, born in 1855, was a prominent socialist, labour activist, and five time presidential candidate, running in the 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920 elections.

Debs was a key figure in the US union movement, helping found the American Railway Union.

He later led the famous Pullman Strike after the Pullman Palace Car Company tried to hand down pay cuts in 1994.

More than 250,000 workers were involved, affecting rail lines across the US.

Debs served six months in prison over the strike and emerged a committed socialist, becoming a founding member of several socialist political parties.

It was his final campaign as a would-be socialist president that was the most successful - and it was the only one he ran while incarcerated.

Debs, a noted public speaker, was convicted in 1918 for sedition when he denounced US involvement in the Great War.

While behind bars, he amassed 3.4 per cent of the 1920 vote - roughly one million people.

His sentence was commuted in 1921, and he died in 1926, of an illness he developed while in prison.

Joseph Allan Maldonado - aka "Joe Exotic", the so-called "Tiger King" may be the only person in this gallery who can challenge Trump for name recognition - at least among punters of a certain vintage.

Without wanting to recap the entire smash hit documentary that brought Maldonado (born Joseph Allen Schreibvogel) to the eye of the international public, in brief, he was convicted in 2019 of hiring two men to kill Big Cat Rescue founder Carole Baskin, with whom he had a standing feud.

Despite only being scheduled for release in 2036, Maldonado ran in the 2020 election (he had previously run in the 2016 race while not incarcerated).

And he's doing it again this year.

Maldonado's campaign site (where he maintains his professional name "Joe Exotic") is up and running, where in a missive to visitors he notes it is his "Constitutional right" to campaign from prison.

"The best thing you have going for supporting me is that I am used to fighting my whole life just to get by. I am broke, they have taken everything I ever worked for away, and it's time we take this country back," he says in a written message.

"And yes, I have people in mind that can help run this country a hell of a lot better then they are now, so lets cross that bridge when we get to it."

His website says he's campaigning for the Libertarian Party nomination.

LaRouche ran in every US presidential election from 1976 to 2004, with his best result 78,000 votes in 1984.

He served five years in prison for fraud from 1989 to 1994.

He also repeatedly - to the frustration of the broader party - tried to gain the Democratic party nomination on several occasions.

In the year 2000 he even qualified for delegates in some primary state votes, but the Democratic National Committee refused to seat them and barred LaRouche from the party's national convention.

LaRouche has been described as a conspiracy theorist who blended far-left and far-right conspiracies.

He claimed the US had been run by the UK since the end of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency, and that he himself had been targeted for assassination.

He dismissed the history of the Holocaust as a "myth" and climate change as a hoax.

After his death in 2019, LaRouche was credited in some quarters as helping to foster the climate of misinformation and conspiratorial thinking that continues to plague modern politics.

He was interviewed by one-time Sandy Hook massacre denier Alex Jones, and his conspiracy theories about billionaire philanthropist George Soros are thought to have contribute to Soros' position as a bogeyman on the modern extreme right.

Peltier, a Native American activist and convicted murderer, may be the only US presidential candidate to make the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list.

He was convicted of two counts of first degree murder over the deaths of two FBI agents, Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, in a shootout with members of the American Indian Movement at Pine Ridge in 1975.

Despite being eligible for parole since 1993, and pleas for clemency from figured including the Dalai Lama, Mother (and now Saint) Teresa, and Nelson Mandela, he remains behind bars.

He wrote in his memoir that he participated in the Pine Ridge shootout but that he did not kill Williams or Coler.

While at Pine Ridge, he was also on the run for an attempted murder charge, of which he was acquitted in 1978.

Peltier ran for the US presidency in 2004, as the nominee of the Peace and Freedom Party.

He received over 27,000 votes in California.

He has not run for president again, but was a vice-presidential nominee for the Party of Socialism and Liberation in 2020, and has joined the tickets of other left-wing parties.

After 2020, citing his health, he withdrew from political campaigning.