It was supposed to be a win-win proposition. Tie Donald Trump down in a Lilliputian web of criminal prosecutions and, whatever the outcome, it would greatly enhance the likelihood that he would never again win a presidential election.
Either he would be convicted in at least one of the cases against him, and those swing voters already uneasy about the man would have to decide whether they could actually elect a bona fide felon as president.
Or, even if somehow none of the cases produced a conviction, he would still be so consumed in an election year with trial proceedings, the airwaves so full of sworn testimonies to his moral turpitude, that the sheer weight of it all would sink him.
We are less than six months from the election and it looks like the multi-year, multi-jurisdictional effort to incarcerate Trump may prove his redemption. Instead of sending him to the Big House, it is more likely to propel him back to the White House.
A recap: there are four criminal cases against the former president; two at federal level, two in state courts. The federal cases, brought by Jack Smith, the special prosecutor appointed by President Joe Biden’s Justice Department, relate to Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left office, and to his attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 election, in which he stands accused of trying to defraud the American people.
One of the state cases is in Georgia and also concerns Trump’s efforts to change the election result in that state. The other is in New York, where he is charged with illegally misrepresenting money paid to a porn actress as a business expense before the 2016 election, to keep her quiet about a sexual encounter.
Like a man who falls down a well and comes up with a bag of gold coins, Trump is blessed with timely good fortune. The Georgia case has been ensnared in a wrangle over the prosecutor’s romantic dalliance with one of her investigators, and whether she used public funds for the furtherance of it. Her fate awaits resolution by the state’s appeals court.
The federal cases now seem to face indefinite delay. Last week the judge in the classified documents case again postponed a trial date because of the complexities involved in the pretrial process of determining what is classified information. And the whole federal process now rests on a pending ruling from the Supreme Court, some time in the next couple of months, on whether and in what circumstances a former president may even be charged with a crime. Meanwhile the clock ticks down to November 5.
So all we are left with, it seems, between now and election day, is the lowering spectacle unfolding in a New York courthouse. Even the most spittle-flecked, Trump-loathing Democratic Party activists acknowledge that this was always the weakest of the cases.
Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, alleges that the $US130,000 (currently $195,000) hush money paid to Stormy Daniels was an improper election expense, designed to help Trump avoid embarrassment and lost votes.
But even if that can be judged a crime (case law is not promising) it would be a federal offence, not a state one, over which a state official has no authority.
So to make the facts fit the law, Bragg has produced a contorted legal theory that Trump committed the minor crime of falsifying business records (a misdemeanour under New York law that carries no jail penalty) in furtherance of a supposed federal felony relating to the election (a crime that, incredibly, a month into the trial, Bragg has still not specified).
These shaky foundations are matched by the tawdriness of the proceedings and a cast of characters out of a low-budget TV courtroom drama.
Last week, Daniels spent hours on the witness stand recounting details of her night to forget from 2006 (which is irrelevant to the case since Trump is not disputing that an encounter took place or that she was later paid), including answering such compelling questions about whether a condom was involved (it wasn’t) and what Trump was wearing (silk pyjamas).
If that wasn’t enough for delicate stomachs, the star prosecution witness this week has been Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer. The prosecution wants to portray Cohen as a loyal fixer, always ready to bully and bribe on behalf of his boss, a Tom Hagen to Trump’s Vito Corleone.
But the bumbling consigliere with a law degree from Thomas Cooley college was always more of a Baldrick to Trump’s Blackadder. As a previous witness put it, he was a fixer only in the sense that he used to fix things that he himself had broken.
Another problem is that Cohen is already a convicted felon himself, having served time for tax evasion, perjury and other crimes. The prosecution wants the jury to believe this makes his evidence against Trump all the more compelling since he has nothing to gain or lose by testifying. But resting your case on the testimony of a convicted perjurer is a risky call.
The wider impact of the trial – probably the only one Trump will face this year – is not working out as planned. Even if he is convicted, it will be easy to portray the verdict as the inevitable result of a preordained sham. Bragg is an elected Democrat; the jury are all residents of New York, where Trump is about as popular as the rats on the subway.
They promised us an inspiring picture of the administration of sacred justice, where no one is above the law. The spectacle we got instead is this: the majesty of the law enthroned on the testimony of a porn star and a convicted liar, placed there by a partisan prosecutor, all in search of a crime that may not even exist.
The Times
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