Is today the day?
Given how much real political news there is, you wouldn’t think we’d need nonsense on top of it. Yet sometimes nonsense rules the day. On Monday, after Trump attorney Alina Habba filed a flimsy complaint about Judge Kaplan, there was the panicked fear that it might somehow undo the entire ruling against Trump in the E Jean Carroll trial. This, of course, turned out to be merely nonsense. Then on Tuesday after the Texas Supreme Court issued what appeared to be a standard procedure delay in a case that Trump had been complaining about, there was a bunch of panicked hysteria about how Trump was supposedly pulling the puppet strings of the court. But that also turned out to be a rather silly notion.
This brings us to today, January 31st. Today is the self imposed deadline that Judge Engoron said weeks ago that he would try to meet for delivering the final verdict in Donald Trump’s New York civil fraud trial. Engoron hasn’t said anything new about the verdict since that time, which has led a number of people on social media to worry that… the verdict won’t happen? Engoron forgot about it? He fell into a sinkhole?
No. Of course not. It’s just that trials aren’t for the public’s entertainment. The judge said that he would aim for a January 31st verdict, and the fact that he hasn’t given any updates means that things are still on track. This isn’t a TV show. Judge Engoron isn’t a host who’s going to come on before every commercial break and remind you of when the verdict is coming down. He already gave us a proposed date. His silence since that time means that nothing has changed.
Even assuming the verdict does come down today, we’ll see nonsense about it. No matter what the dollar amount ends up being, we’ll see lamenting and angry ranting about how it should have been even higher. If it’s $250 million, we’ll hear griping that it should have been $300 million. If it’s $450 million, we’ll hear griping that it should have been $500 million. And if the verdict doesn’t include a “corporate death penalty” for the Trump Organization we’ll be told this means Trump will get away with it all, even though any high dollar verdict is going to finish Trump off financially whether there’s a “corporate death penalty” involved or not.
In others words, we’re going to keep seeing a lot of nonsensical spin no matter what happens today, because there’s always nonsensical spin. But the reality is that if Judge Engoron hits Donald Trump with a multi-hundred-million dollar verdict today, then it’s a huge loss for Trump and a huge win for us. And if the verdict doesn’t come for another week, it’ll still be a huge loss for Trump and a huge win for us. No amount of contrarian spin or doomsday hysteria will change the reality of what’s going on here: Trump is losing, losing repeatedly, and losing badly – and he’s going to keep losing badly.
