We just saw the blueprint for how Donald Trump’s criminal trials are going to play out
Donald Trump’s New York civil fraud trial wrapped up on Thursday, and it went poorly for him in every way possible. His nonsense filings and appeals failed to stop the trial from starting on time. He and his attorneys failed to mount any semblance of a coherent defense during the trial. Trump’s intimidation tactics didn’t work against anyone involved. And in spite of some in-trial stunts, Trump didn’t manage to carve out any avenues for getting anywhere by appealing the verdict.
It’s not just that Trump got his butt kicked in every way imaginable. It’s that in spite of all the advance hype about Trump’s delay tactics and intimidation tactics and courtroom stunts, it’s easy to see in hindsight that nothing Trump was going to try had any chance of working. He was always going to get destroyed in this trial. And guess what? It’s a preview for what his criminal trials are going to look like.
Trump just showed himself to be one of the most inept high profile trial defendants of all time. That’s not going to change when it comes to his criminal trials. He’s not suddenly going to have a magic wand for delaying his trials to his liking. His lawyers aren’t suddenly going to be good at this. Trump isn’t going to stop being senile and start being a savvy defendant. What we just saw in this civil fraud trial is what we’re going to get in Trump’s criminal trials.
Donald Trump is going to lose his criminal trials in comically inept fashion. And given that at least some of those trials will take place well before the 2024 election, Trump will be a convicted criminal on his way to prison by the time we get to the general election. If the Republicans still want to nominate this guy, so be it.
Remember, we’re not being “vigilant” by sitting around overstating Trump’s prospects and fretting over it. That’s just a way of enabling Trump. If we really want to finish the guy off, we do that by accurately assessing his abilities and playing up his weaknesses. It’s just a reality that Trump is going to keep getting destroyed in his trials. We should be talking about how to use that to our advantage. It’s not as if we don’t know how Trump’s trials are going to go. We just saw exactly how a Trump trial plays out.
