It’s all down to Donald Trump now
There’s a thing in politics, and in life, called betting on yourself. If you’re an athlete and your team is offering you a lowball contract extension, then go into the final year of your deal and play amazingly, and then the team will have to pay you big. You get the idea.
If you’re Donald Trump, the last thing you want to have to do is bet on yourself. This is a guy who was handed a fortune by his father and still went bankrupt repeatedly. This is a guy who ran such an ineffective 2016 campaign that he lost by three million votes, and had to have the election handed to him by external forces. This is a guy who abused the power of the presidency to try to steal reelection in 2020 and still lost. All he ever does is lose – and that’s before he started going severely senile. Yet now Trump finds himself in a position where he has to bet on himself.
In a civil trial, both sides are expected to actively make their case. If you’re the defendant and fail to defend yourself, you lose. Trump’s sons, who are also defendants in the New York civil fraud trial, utterly failed to defend themselves or their father while on the stand last week. Between the two of them, they put zero points in the “Trump” column, and several points in the “Letitia James” column.
Ivanka Trump is set to testify this upcoming week, but she’s a witness, not a defendant. There’s roughly zero chance that her testimony will help Donald Trump, and a decent chance that her testimony will hurt Donald Trump.
This means that Donald Trump’s only remaining hope of minimizing the financial penalties in this trial is to knock it out of the park during his own testimony. To be clear, “knocking it out of the park” means giving a compelling and believable explanation as to why the Trump Organization’s business practices weren’t fraudulent after all.
Does this sound like something that Donald Trump, particularly in his current cognitively diminished state, can pull off? I’ll wait a moment for you to stop chuckling. And yet it’s Trump’s only remaining chance to save his assets from being seized. There are no antics on the stand that can save him. If he tries lying, or “forgetting” the answers, or pleading the fifth, or spewing conspiracy theories about the judge’s clerk, he’ll just be forfeiting the case. Trump would need to be an extremely credible witness in order to save himself even fractionally. And this is playing out while Trump is working with a fraction of a brain.
