Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani are just forfeiting at this point
Last week Donald Trump announced that he would hold a press conference today to announce new proof that he secretly won the 2020 election and is thus innocent of all charges, only to cancel the whole thing. Over the weekend Rudy Giuliani also announced that he’s about to present proof that Trump secretly won the 2020 election and is thus innocent.
There’s a running theme here. Trump and Giuliani and the others have been criminally indicted, and are going to stand trial, and go to prison for the rest of their lives if convicted. Their entire lives now have to consist of coming up with viable criminal defense strategies for use at their trials. If they fail at that, there’s nothing else waiting for them in life. Coming up with a winning trial defense strategy has to be their only goal, at the expense of anything and everything else. And when there’s this much overwhelming proof of your guilt, your only possible trial defense is to try to carve out some sliver of reasonable doubt. But they’re not even trying to do that.
Instead Trump and Giuliani are still obsessively focused on “proving” that Trump secretly won the election. As a trial defense, this is an automatic loss for them. It’s a way to get automatically convicted, and automatically spend the rest of their lives in prison. For one thing, they can’t find any evidence that Trump won, because there is no such evidence. And even if there were, it wouldn’t save them.
Imagine you’re in a dispute with your bank. You’re convinced that they incorrectly took a thousand dollars out of your account. Instead of fighting them on legal grounds, you decide to rob the bank at gunpoint and take a thousand dollars. You’re still going to prison, even if it later turns out that you did have valid grounds to believe that the bank improperly took your money to begin with.
In other words, even if Trump and Giuliani could come up with something to show that they honestly believe Trump won the election, it still wouldn’t save them. It might make some of the charges against them go away, but not others. They’d still be convicted and go to prison. Maybe for less time, but they’d still go to prison. And at their age, with their frail health, any sentence would be a life sentence.
So what’s their strategy here? There isn’t one. This is pure delusion. This is Trump and Giuliani clinging to the imaginary notion that they can magically piece their broken lives back together if they can just find that mythical evidence that shows Trump secretly won the election after all. The fact that no such evidence exists doesn’t matter. It’s about them being able to pretend their lives aren’t over.
Once we get closer to trial, we’ll see if either man awakens from his delusional fantasy about magically coming out of this on top of the world, and instead ultimately settles for mounting a reasonable doubt defense in the hope of giving themselves some tiny chance of an acquittal. But if they’re not going to wake up from that fantasy, they might as well just report to prison now, because there’s no other possible outcome for them anyway.
