All that horse crap still didn’t keep Donald Trump from being criminally indicted

| 6:27 pm EDT March 30, 2023
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What did Donald Trump think he was accomplishing by sending one of his cohorts to spew conspiracy theories to the Manhattan grand jury last week? What did Trump hope to accomplish by announcing to the media over the weekend that the Manhattan case had supposedly been dropped? What did Trump think he would get out of it when he announced yesterday that he’d gained newfound respect for the Manhattan grand jury because it was supposedly refusing to indict him? That’s still not clear. But what is clear is that none of it saved Trump from being indicted today.

Facing the specter of criminal indictment and becoming a defendant in the criminal justice system, Trump did what he always does. He tried simplistic stunts. He treated it like a reality show. He tried to litigate the case in the cable news sphere. He falsely claimed, repeatedly, that he’d already won the battle. These are the same tactics that Trump has always used. The trouble for him is that he’s now in the wrong arena for that.

Trump still doesn’t appear to understand that things work very differently in the criminal justice system than they work anywhere else. No amount of his rhetoric or petty antics were going to in any way help him in the late stages of the indictment process. It just doesn’t work that way.

Donald Trump is also about to find out that these kind of antics will seriously hurt him during the defendant stage he’s entering. Within days, a judge will decide which privileges he gets to keep while awaiting trial. Even if Trump initially gets bail with no restrictions, his ongoing misbehavior could quickly prompt the judge to circle back with anything from travel restrictions to social media restrictions. If Trump keeps up this kind of horse crap, he could even conceivably see his bail revoked before trial.

This is just a different arena. It’s one that Trump has never been in before. And he still doesn’t seem to get that. He’s about to find out the hard way.