Turn out the lights, Donald Trump is over

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In the end, all that Donald Trump could do was complain. He couldn’t stop his civil trial from happening. He couldn’t find a last minute way to delay the start of the trial. He couldn’t intimidate the judge or the prosecutor. He couldn’t incite his base to help him. He couldn’t come up with a trial strategy. He couldn’t win the trial. He couldn’t delay the verdict. And he won’t be able to stop the enforcement of that verdict.

The kicker is that the above paragraph could be referring to Donald Trump’s New York civil fraud trial or his E. Jean Carroll trial. They each played out almost identically. We heard all this endless doomsday hyperbole every step of the way about how Trump was going to be able to fend it off, and in the end none of it happened. He simply lost. He lost big. He lost in overwhelming fashion. He lost even bigger than he was supposed to lose, because all he knows how to do is lose. Specifically, all he knows how to do is make things worse for himself and then lose big.

It all serves as a timely reminder that Donald Trump’s criminal trials aren’t going to play out any differently. We know the pattern by now. Trump will whine and complain and then lose. And the entire time he’s losing, the folks with the contrarian hot takes will tell us that he’s winning. But he’ll be losing his criminal trials in helpless fashion, just like he lost his civil trials in helpless fashion. The only magical power Trump has when it comes to these things is how he finds a way to make them even worse for himself.