Donald Trump Jr.’s Perry Mason moment

| 9:09 am EDT November 2, 2023
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Hours before he took the stand yesterday, Donald Trump Jr. had an unhinged meltdown for the ages, as he tried to equate Ron DeSantis’ heel lifts to World War III or something. But there’s the cartoonishly over the top manner in which things go on social media, and then there’s the very different way things tend to go in a courtroom.

So it wasn’t a surprise that Donald Trump Jr.’s testimony – at least during his first day on Wednesday – wasn’t all that dramatic. He didn’t scream “You can’t handle the truth!” No one came bursting through the courtroom doors with last minute evidence. Junior and the prosecutor questioning him didn’t even scream at each other. There was no “Perry Mason moment” – at least not the kind everyone has come to expect from fictional TV and movie dramas.

Instead what we saw was the prosecutor gradually cornering Donald Trump Jr. on a factual basis, so that Junior was ultimately unable to advance any argument about the Trump Organization having been run legitimately. Remember, this is how a civil trial works. Junior is a defendant along with his father, so it’s up to them to provide a defense of their actions. Junior’s inability to provide any such defense means that his testimony was helpful to the prosecution, and hurtful to his own side.

We’ll see what ends up happening when Donald Trump Jr. returns to the stand later today. Perhaps there will be more fireworks. But it’s important to remember that trials – particularly ones based on something as cut and dried as financial fraud – aren’t really about theatrics. They’re about the prosecution coming in with financial documents that appear to prove guilt, and the defendants trying to make the case that the documents show something other than fraud. As long as Trump family members keep failing to make that case while on the stand, they’re losing.

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