For the last time, Donald Trump doesn’t have magical powers for delaying his trials
A lot of things are happening at once right now, creating the opportunity for a lot of confusion and distortion. So I think it’s time for us to circle back to the central question that I’ve long said will guide us through this entire process: is Jack Smith an idiot? As long as we all still agree that the answer is no, then we can barrel down to what’s really going on right now.
Yesterday, Donald Trump’s classified documents trial was tentatively set for August 14th, 2023. But then a number of talking heads began frantically trying to scare everyone into believing that the trial will somehow get delayed all the way until 2025, because it involves classified information.
To be clear, Trump’s trial will not be delayed by a year and a half simply because it involves classified information. Nor will Trump be able to just delay the trial to his liking. These aren’t real things. And they don’t become real things, no matter how much misleading fast paced double speak you might hear from the people on your television whose sole goal is to scare you into staying glued to your television.
The thing is, there will be delays. There always are. And that has nothing to do with this case, this kind of evidence, this judge, or this defendant. It’s the court system. Delays happen, for mundane reasons. The odds of this trial starting on August 14th, 2023 are very low. Maybe it’ll start two weeks or two months after that. But there is realistically every reason to expect that this trial will conclude at some point in 2023.
The problem is that once the first minor delay for mundane reasons inevitably happens, the talking heads will point to it as supposed proof that Donald Trump really can magically delay his trials for as long as he pleases, and that the trial really will somehow magically get pushed back until after the 2024 election. And at that point you may be inclined to fall for their fear mongering, because you weren’t made aware up front that mundane minor delays happen with almost every trial, and that it’s not some doomsday thing to panic over.
For instance, think back to the Trump vs. E. Jean Carroll trial. That was a civil trial, but it’s the same concept. There were some delays, but the court finally got locked in on April 25th as the starting date. Then Trump did everything he could to push it back. He’d demand a delay. And the court would say nope, April 25th. His lawyers would make nuisance filing after nuisance filing as a stall tactic, and each time the court would say nope, April 25th. And sure enough, the trial started on April 25th. Trump tried everything, but it didn’t work.
All that talking head nonsense you’d heard about Trump having magical powers for delaying trials, it turned out to be fiction. You saw with the Carroll trial that it reached a point where he simply couldn’t do anything to delay it further. Yet now that we’re gearing up for another Trump trial, the talking heads are back to portraying Trump as having magical powers for endlessly delaying trials. That’s because they’ve spent years drilling it into that Trump somehow has these magical trial-delaying powers, to the point that it now “sounds true” to you, even though it was just disproven by an actual Trump trial.
It’s not just the notion that Trump has the magical ability to indefinitely delay trials. There’s also the narrative out there that Trump’s trial will get delayed because he’s having trouble finding new attorneys (nothing works that way). And of course there’s the latest narrative that the trial will get delayed because the evidence is classified (again, nothing works that way). By next week they’ll be hurling some other new doomsday narrative at us about why this trial is supposedly going to be delayed, and that won’t be a real thing either.
So how do you even parse this stuff? For one thing, you can turn off your television. That’s the simplest move you can make in order to educate yourself about how things really work, because you’ll no longer be subjected to the endless barrage of misleading outrage-inducing contrarian hot takes that dominate MSNBC throughout the day. If you want to know what legal experts really think, you have to look at what they’re spelling out on Twitter or other social media – not what they’re saying when they’re mugging for the cameras.
But even then, you can filter almost everything through that same central question of whether you think Jack Smith is an idiot. For instance, Smith knew there was about a twenty percent chance Aileen Cannon would get assigned to the Trump classified documents case when he moved it to the Florida circuit, yet he made the move anyway. So is he an idiot, or did he come into this with a good plan for dealing with Cannon? It’s obviously the latter.
Similarly, Jack Smith knows that if he can’t get Trump to trial before the 2024 election, and Trump wins, Smith will be immediately fired and Trump will get away with it all. Yet Smith was on the job for eight months before he charged Trump. He could have brought a less comprehensive case sooner, and instead he decided to make his case more comprehensive before bringing it now. So ask yourself again: is Smith an idiot, or did he time these charges with an accurate sense of how long it’ll actually take to get through the court system? Again, obviously, it’s the latter.
Of all the ratings-driven fear mongering that you’re hearing about this trial, you can pretty much immediately discard about 95% of it simply by asking yourself if Jack Smith is an idiot. Because every one of these fear mongering scenarios you’re hearing about would require Smith to be the most obliviously incompetent idiot in the history of idiots. And that’s just not the case.
As I’ve pointed out before, even the smartest of proven professionals are going to make occasional judgment calls along the way that don’t end up working out in their favor. But you can expect someone with Jack Smith’s track record to have mostof his judgment calls work out. And he only needs most of them to work out.
For all these doomsday fear mongering scenarios to be valid, Jack Smith would need to be making every naive mistake in the book. He forgot Judge Cannon existed when he moved the case to Florida! He doesn’t know how long it takes a case to reach trial! He forgot that this case involved evidence that’s classified! You see how utterly ridiculous these takes are, right? These mistakes are on a level of forgetting to wear pants to work. And unless you think Jack Smith is that much of an inept idiot, none of the fear mongering you’re hearing makes any sense. Then again, it’s not supposed to make sense. It’s only supposed to scare you into staying glued to your screen.
