The real reason Elise Stefanik just filed that weird “ethics complaint” in the Donald Trump trial

| 12:47 am EST November 11, 2023
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House Republican Elise Stefanik has filed an ethics complaint against Judge Arthur Engoron, alleging that… well, it doesn’t really matter. The complaint reads like a cross between legal gibberish and a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, as one would expect from her. But people keep asking why she’s filing it.

For starters, this has nothing to do with saving Donald Trump. Stefanik’s complaint won’t have any impact whatsoever on Judge Engoron, or the Trump trial he’s presiding over. For that matter the trial is mostly over; filing this complaint at this late stage is like telling the waiter they brought the wrong food after you’ve already finished eating the whole thing.

This is, simply put, a political stunt. Donald Trump and his supporters are seeing how poorly this trial is going, and they’re giving up hope. If this civil trial is this damaging to Trump, what are his four criminal trials going to do to him? And so, even as Trump is taking such a devastating blow in this trial, Stefanik is trying to rally the troops by giving them an (imaginary) thing to rally around. She filed an ethics complaint, yeah sure, that’ll turn things around. When that doesn’t work she’ll ask to speak to a supervisor. It’s all silliness. But when you’re as desperate and hopeless as Trump and his supporters are, you grab onto anything that comes along.

So yeah, this isn’t anything, really. It’s a meaningless filing aimed solely at generating a day’s worth of headlines about the filing, in order to give Donald Trump and his remaining supporters a little bit of a reason to keep their chin up as it all falls apart for them. If this kind of “ethics complaint” were something that could actually help Trump in any way, well, it would have been filed a long time ago. We’re way past that stage by now.