What was all that back there?
There’s an old joke about a rude driver who does everything he possibly can to cut off and get ahead of every other driver on the highway, only to end up stuck at the same red light as the rest of them. One of the other drivers then goes up to the rude driver’s window, the joke goes, and says “What was all that back there?”
That pretty much explains Donald Trump’s noisy, bizarre, and ultimately pointless behavior during the E. Jean Carroll trial. He started off by having his attorney announce in court that he might or might not testify. Then he headed overseas. Then he told the media he was going to race home and confront Carroll. So the judge invited him to file a motion to testify, with a strict deadline, forcing Trump to admit that he in fact had no intention of testifying.
It’s not clear what Trump was attempting to accomplish with any of this. But whatever his goal was, he didn’t achieve it. His initial evasiveness about testifying didn’t trick Carroll into changing up her trial strategy. His last minute threat about showing up at the trial merely prompted the judge to call his bluff. Trump probably made it more difficult to pull off an appeal because he ultimately had to flat out state his refusal to testify, closing the door on any potential claim that he was somehow shut out of testifying. And the whole stunt didn’t delay the trial or its conclusion by even so much as a day.
This is the kind of chaotic, bizarre stunt that might have helped Donald Trump back when he was merely fighting political battles. But now that he’s no longer a politician and is instead merely a defendant, this stunt didn’t help him in any way, shape, or form. If anything it’s helping to demonstrate that Trump has no idea what he’s doing, and has no ability to stop or even delay what the justice system is doing to him.
