Donald Trump is “on his way to the big house”
Ever since Donald Trump was forced out of office, he was always on a path to an eventual prison cell. I used to take a lot of heat for saying this, even from folks on my own side of the fence. But these days more folks are starting to see it – including an increasing number of legal experts.
The notion that Trump was going to be able to get off the legal hook was always based on the premise that he had the magical ability to delay his criminal trials for as long as he liked. There was always the possibility that Trump might get lucky with one trial, which may indeed be happening with the Judge Cannon debacle (though the doomsday takes on that trial are wildly overstated). But Trump wasn’t going to get lucky with four different criminal trials.
Sure enough, we’re now one imminent Appeals Court ruling, and one shrug from the Supreme Court, from Donald Trump’s Washington DC criminal trial starting more or less on time. This is how it was always very likely to go. We just saw in the Appeals Court hearing that Trump doesn’t have a “delay” wand, and never really had any chance of being able to delay this trial.
Now former prosecutor Nick Akerman is saying that the minute the trial jury is sworn in, Donald Trump is going to be a lock for prison. His view is that Trump has no chance at trial. His only hope of avoiding justice was to keep the trial from happening – and it’s becoming rather clear that the trial is going to happen well before the election.
If the Republican Party wants to make Donald Trump its nominee for President on his way to prison, then so be it. We’ll take those election odds, we’ll use Trump’s situation to our advantage, we’ll put in the work, and we’ll win.
But it’s becoming more clear that Trump will be a convicted felon by the time we get to the Republican National Convention this summer. Even if a convicted Trump goes into the convention with the majority of the delegates, we’ll see if the party moves to try to take the nomination away from him under the premise that he’ll be non-viable. That’s up to the Republicans. But either way Trump is going to prison. It’s becoming more clear by the day.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report