Mixed news day
Going into today, Donald Trump was facing two nightmare deadlines. He had to come up with $464 million bond today or his properties would be seized. And the start date for his first criminal trial was likely to be locked in today. Now that the day has played out, the results have ended up being mixed.
The appeals court decided today that Trump’s bond will now be just $175 million, and that he has ten days to come up with it before asset seizures begin. This is an incremental win for him. But we still don’t know if he’ll even be able to come up with the $175 million in ten days, given that bond companies have spent the past ten days laughing at him. Crucially, today’s ruling does not affect the size of the actual verdict, which remains unchanged. It’s strictly an adjustment of the bond size. Trump still owes close to half a billion dollars.
Separately, the judge in Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial shot down the last of Trump’s appeals and locked in April 15th as the start date for the trial. This means that in about three weeks Trump will be on criminal trial. As I’ve pointed out before, the opportunity for delaying a trial is early on, not at the last minute. Once a judge finally locks in an imminent start date like this, any last minute filings from the defendant get swatted away in real time.
So where does this leave us? Trump has just ten days to come up with $175 million cash or else he loses nearly half a billion dollars in assets. And he has about twenty days before he goes on criminal trial. It sure feels like a mixed news day to me.
Yet if you look at social media, you’ll see one doomsday term trending after another. “Special Treatment!” Well no, not really. Sometimes you just get an incrementally favorable adjustment on appeal. “Teflon Don strikes again!” Really? Trump is teflon? He keeps losing on every level, and today he managed to have one mixed day. That’s the opposite of teflon. Besides, the original Teflon Don, mobster John Gotti, died in prison. Gotti wasn’t made of teflon, and neither is Trump.
If you really want to put today in perspective, try looking at it from Trump’s angle. He has ten days left in his financial empire. And he’s now utterly failed to save himself from going on criminal trial. Today was not a good day for him. It was a mixed day for him at best. And today was the best day he’s had in a long time, which tells you just how badly he’s losing.
As always, the most dangerous thing we face on a day like this is the doomsday hysteria that inevitably comes with it. Large numbers of folks on our side are now convinced that “all hope is lost” and that Trump is going to magically win no matter what and that there’s no point in our side even trying to fight and win. And most or all of the media pundit class is pushing that doomsday hyperbole into the stratosphere in an attempt at milking it for ratings.
The one thing we can’t afford is to let ourselves stop being activists. We can’t let ourselves be baited into becoming useless outrage addicts who sit back and pretend that posting defeatist hyperbole on social media means we’re “doing something.” In reality, defeatist ranting is a complete waste of time that accomplishes nothing, and merely allows the other side to get a head start on trying to fight and win.
So let’s take this mixed news day for what it is, and get back to it tomorrow. If you can’t stand the doomsday hysteria on TV and Twitter today, turn it off. Go to the beach. Get ready to get back in the game and get back to fighting and winning tomorrow and the next day. Let’s go win this.
