It’s time to just admit it

| 3:00 pm EDT April 8, 2024
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All along I’ve said that the odds of Donald Trump going on criminal trial well before the 2024 election were about as close to 100% as you can get. This wasn’t “optimism” on my part. I wasn’t “keeping the faith.” I wasn’t trying to “give people hope.” I was just pointing out the obvious. And now we’re one week away from the start of Trump’s first criminal trial.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that we’ve reached this point. Experienced prosecutors know how long the legal process tends to take. They know when they need to bring an indictment by, in order to safely get it to trial within a certain timeframe. Defendants and defense attorneys have their tools for trying to delay things, but those tools are always finite. There’s simply no such thing as a criminal defendant delaying a trial for as long as he likes, against the will of the prosectors and the courts.

For Trump to have avoided going to criminal trial before the 2024 election, all of the following would have needed to happen: Alvin Bragg, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis would all have had to turn out to be complete idiots. And Trump would have needed to draw corrupt or inept judges in all four of his criminal trials.

There were fairly realistic odds of some of that happening. But the odds of all of it happening were infinitesimally small. That’s why it was always a near total lock that Trump would end up on criminal trial in at least some of his trials before the election.

As it turns out, none of the prosecutors are idiots. Awhile back the media and pundit class tried to convince everyone that Alvin Bragg had tanked his own investigation. But there was never any evidence of this, and sure enough, Bragg is now getting his case to trial first. More recently the media tried to convince us that Fani Willis’ private life had somehow tanked her Trump probe. But that was never going anywhere, and Willis’ Trump trial is seemingly on track for this summer.

Jack Smith is also, obviously, not an idiot. He has had the worst luck of any of the Trump prosecutors. He got stuck with inept judge Aileen Cannon in his one Trump trial. But even then, Cannon doesn’t have a magic wand, and her attempts at slightly delaying the trial have resulted in her now being in danger of having the trial taken away from her. Smith has also been unlucky in that the Supreme Court is forcing him to wait until later this month for the all-clear on his other Trump trial. But all that this really did was cause Trump’s New York trial and his Washington DC trial to flip flop on the calendar.

And that’s why Donald Trump never stood a chance when it came to trying to push all of his criminal trials past the election. The odds of him getting lucky in any one criminal trial were small but realistic. The odds of him getting lucky in all four of his criminal trials were unrealistically small.

Sure enough, it looks like Donald Trump will go on criminal trial two or three times between now and the 2024 election. As I’ve said all along, it’s difficult to predict precisely what impact these trials, convictions, and prison sentences will have on the election cycle. We’ll see what happens. But the notion that Trump was going to be able to push all of his criminal trials past the election was always laugh out loud delusionally unrealistic. The doomsday types who insisted that Trump could magically make his criminal trials go away should now admit that they were always full of it.