Donald Trump gives away that he knows his trial is a lost cause for him

| 9:09 am EST January 10, 2024
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When someone’s private conversations or private thoughts make it into the media, it’s not because the media happened to stand next to an open window or learned how to read minds. It’s more often because that person wanted that information in the media for strategic reasons. This is especially true when the source is listed as being “someone familiar with” that person’s thinking. And it means you have to stop and ask why that person decided to feed this information to the media.

This brings us to Tuesday’s news that Donald Trump is considering delivering part of the closing argument himself in his New York civil fraud trial. Where is this information coming from? “Sources familiar with his thinking.” Well okay that narrows it down.

There are only two possibilities here. One is that Trump wants there to be a bunch of headlines about how he’s going to deliver the closing argument himself, because he thinks such headlines will make him look strong and powerful and dangerous. If this is the case, then it does not at all mean that Trump will actually go through with this. It simply means that he wants to see headlines about how he’s supposedly going to do it.

The other possibility is that Trump really does want to deliver his own closing argument, and that his own babysitters have leaked this to the media so that there will be enough pushback to convince Trump that it’s a bad idea.

Either way, this story was obviously fed to the media for strategic reasons, and shouldn’t be taken at face value. Of course it’s too late for that. The media has already printed this story in exactly the way that Trump (or his handlers) wanted it printed. And now other media outlets will spend days talking about this story as if Trump is definitely going to deliver his own closing argument. If it ends up not happening, the media will just act as if Trump must have changed his mind at the last minute, or just ignore it.

But the real story is this: either Trump wants to deliver his own closing argument, or he wants people to think he’s going to deliver his own closing argument. What this means is that he’s desperate. He feels completely helpless in this trial. He sees his financial house of cards on the verge of being toppled, and he can’t do anything to stop it. So true to form, now that it’s too late to matter, Trump is belatedly trying to flex muscles that he doesn’t have. The real news here is how badly he’s losing.