Champagne delay
Today is the first time I can recall in which Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial has been in session on a Wednesday, which is fitting because it’s also likely the last day of the trial. The case should be in the hands of the jury before lunchtime, the odds are strong that a guilty verdict will be returned before today is over.
There are, of course, no guarantees in anything. But the prosecution came into this trial holding four aces in terms of the evidence and testimony it had in hand, while the defense came in empty handed, and nothing has happened during the course of the trial to change that. Trump and his people have done literally nothing to help themselves in this trial. On the off chance that there’s an acquittal or a hung jury, it’ll be a result of pure luck for Trump and nothing more.
But for now, even though we know the likely outcome, we wait. Call it a champagne delay, if you will, as we wait for the tail end of the legal process to play out and the guilty verdict to come in. The jury has to do its job, and it gets to take as much or as little time as it feels it needs. There’s no point in trying to predict how long it’ll take. A swift verdict would very likely be bad news for Trump. But even if the verdict takes all day, that still wouldn’t necessarily be good news for him. The deck is simply stacked. Not because the trial is rigged, as Trump loves to claim. But rather the deck is stacked simply because Trump is very guilty and he was very bad at hiding it. Now we wait.
