No, Donald Trump isn’t suddenly calling the shots in the Texas Supreme Court
Today the Texas Supreme Court announced a brief procedural hold of a few weeks in a case involving state Attorney General Ken Paxton, in order to allow for additional depositions. This move doesn’t kill the case. It doesn’t put the case at risk. It doesn’t even really seem to benefit Paxton. And while the Texas Supreme Court doesn’t have the best track record, there doesn’t appear to be anything off about this ruling – except that shortly before the ruling came down, Donald Trump publicly demanded that the case be dropped entirely.
This has led major media outlets to portray this as Donald Trump having successfully pressured the Texas Supreme Court into mothballing a case against his ally Paxton. But that’s absurd on so many levels. For one thing, the court didn’t even do what Trump wanted. He wanted the case killed off. Instead this move from the court is more of a standard procedure kind of thing.
There are two realistic explanations for what happened here. One is that this was pure coincidence. Trump spends all day every day demanding that every court case against him and his allies be thrown out, so it’s entirely realistic to believe that this is coincidence. Another explanation would be that Trump’s allies saw that the ruling was about to get briefly delayed for procedural reasons and tipped Trump off, so that he could “demand” that the trial be shut down and then take credit when when the brief delay was announced.
It’s not realistic to believe that after Donald Trump publicly demanded that this trial be killed off, the Justices on the Texas Supreme Court felt pressure to do so, and so they… very briefly delayed the trial? Come on, that doesn’t even make sense.
And again, Trump spends all day every day publicly demanding things like this. They never happen. If we’re going to assign magical powers to Trump because he happened to coincidentally hit on one trial delay, shouldn’t we also be looking at all the hundreds if not thousands of times that he’s demanded this kind of thing and he hasn’t gotten it? Sooner or later one of them was going to coincidentally line up, right?
But the media knows that it can get bigger ratings by implying that Trump is indeed so magically powerful that he was able to pressure the Texas Supreme Court into killing off a case. And in turn, the loudest pundit voices on our side know that they can get the most retweets and TV bookings by diving into “professional lamenter” mode where they go on and on about how awful it is that Trump is so dangerously powerful.
Meanwhile Donald Trump is getting exactly what he wants. In reality he’s mostly powerless, mostly senile, and mostly just sits around whining about how he keeps losing. But as long as everyone keeps jumping on every opportunity to falsely portray him as being more powerful than ever, it keeps him in the game.
I’ve said it many times, and it’s more true than ever. If we would all start focusing on Donald Trump’s increasing weakness and powerlessness, he’d be gone from the stage by now. He’s only still on the stage because so many folks on our side are keeping him there by continuing to falsely portray him as being more powerful than ever.
