No, Judge Aileen Cannon can’t magically help Donald Trump in any way – and she may not even get a chance
Even as the DOJ was unsealing the devastating criminal indictment against Donald Trump and making clear that he’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison, everyone was sucked into a panicked hysteria at the news that Judge Aileen Cannon may have been preliminarily and/or temporarily assigned to Trump’s trial. This set off a wave of doomsday predictions about how Trump will (stop us if you’ve heard this nonsense before) get away with it all. But as usual, such prognostications are nonsense.
Fortunately, actual legal experts began stepping in and pointing out the various ways in which Cannon will very likely not have any real impact on things. Joyce Vance and Andrew Weissman, former federal prosecutors who have actually tried cases in front of federal judges, pointed out that it should be easy for Jack Smith to get the case reassigned to another judge if needed.
It’s also important to keep in mind that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees Cannon’s courtroom, has already put quite the smackdown on her in this very same case over the “Special Master” nonsense. So they’d be primed to take this case away from Cannon, and could even do so before we get to arraignment on Tuesday. If Cannon does last through arraignment, it’s still extremely unlikely that the trial will end up being assigned to her. And even if it were, the appeals court would overrule her every rogue move, meaning she might be afraid to even make any rogue moves in the case.
But none of these facts or logic have seemed to have any impact on the doomsday hysteria types on social media, who are still insisting with certainty that Cannon will just dismiss the case, or just let Trump drag out his trial as long as he likes – as if these were real things that could ever actually happen, without the case being immediately taken away from her.
Meanwhile back in the real world, it’s more important than ever to remember two things. First, there are no magic wands in any of this, on either side, ever. Anything that sounds like a simplistic magic wand path, such as “Cannon will magically get Trump off the hook,” never ends up being a real thing. The real world just doesn’t operate like that.
Second, the panic addicts and outrage addicts on our side – and those in the media and pundit class who pander to these addicts – are simply never going to stop pushing doomsday hysteria on us. They told us the “DOJ would never indict Trump no matter what,” and now that it’s happened, they’re skipping straight to “Cannon will get Trump off the hook no matter what.”
These types have a literally 0% track record of being right. When bad things do happen, they never correlate to doomsday stuff that these types are hyping, because they’re just making things up to begin with. This kind of doomsday hysteria, about Trump and his allies having a magic wand, only serves to distract us from the real world threats that we actually face. When it comes to being vigilant, step one is to automatically tune out these doomsday hysteria types, and to silence them whenever possible.
