"Pecker's Up!"

In the middle of her podcast yesterday, while discussing the Trump trial in New York, Megyn Kelly interrupted the discussion to announce, "This just in! Pecker's up!" and proceeded to giggle. This, of course, was a reference to David Pecker, the former publishing executive who is the lead prosecution witness in the trial. Her reference to his being "up" meant that he was taking the stand as they spoke, but the point, of course, was the bawdy implication that could be drawn from the circumstance.

This, it seems to me, is the emerging problem for the prosecution with this trial, and as with anything else, no plan survives contact with the enemy. After more than a week, it's been a bore. During jury selection, we had the usual talking heads outlining the usual defense strategies for choosing jurors, with the usual pontifications about New York juries -- except that the usual things didn't happen. Politico was one of the few outlets to notice:

As if there weren’t enough plot twists in Donald Trump’s legal saga, this week’s jury selection has produced one more: At least two lawyers will sit on his jury.

. . . Typically, prosecutors and defense lawyers alike try to keep lawyers off juries, fearing heightened scrutiny from members of their own profession. But in a Manhattan jury pool that is largely seen as unfavorable to the former president, Trump’s legal team might see a silver lining in having lawyers on the jury.

“They’re not emotional thinkers,” said Galina Davidoff, a Chicago-based trial consultant. “The profession requires them to do analysis, and emotional thinkers get more easily swayed by the side that goes first, that tells a good story.”

But this also reflects the overall dullness of the proceedings so far. No sooner did Mr Pecker come up than the court adjourned for a juror's toothache, and that led some commentators to wonder if the toothache was real, that the tedium might be more than at least that juror could bear.

Trials and hearings can be great television -- look what happened to Fani Willis in Atlanta just a short while ago. Clips and stills from that episode went viral for weeks. But in this trial, there are no cameras and no recordings, and media hungry for visuals can't get them. Did Trump fall asleep? Did he fart? Did he look annoyed? We'll never know. All anyone can do so far, like Megyn Kelly, is make bad jokes where she can find them.

Here's the pre-trial conventional wisdom from legacy media, via Doug Gordon at Newsweek:

According to the most recent New York Times/Siena poll, nearly 6 in 10 voters believe the charges of hush money payments made to a porn star are serious, including 54 percent of Independents. And the bad news for Trump doesn't end there.

Exit polls during the Republican primary showed that around 30 percent of Republican primary voters would not believe Trump was fit for the presidency if he were convicted of a crime. Even if you assume that 95 percent of those Republican voters eventually come home to Trump—a safe assumption—the 5 percent who may not are more than enough to deliver a second term to President Joe Biden.

The problem I see here is that Stormy Daniels was an issue in 2016, along with others like Karen MacDougal and the Access Hollywood tape. None of these hurt Trump badly enough to cost him the election in 2016; the voters factored them in then, and they're still going to factor them in now. The prosecutors seem to be angling to bring them into this trial if they can, but trying to take the audience back to 2016 isn't going to work, especially if they can't play clips of porn stars on the witness stand.

Doug Gordon goes on at Newsweek:

The contrast and opportunity this hands the Biden campaign could not have been any clearer than it was last week. While Trump was confined in court like a common criminal, Biden spent the week barnstorming across Pennsylvania talking about lowering taxes and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. It's a movie we're likely to see play out over and over again: Trump in court and Biden in battleground states.

Except that Joe wasn't "talking about lowering taxes and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States", he was talking about Uncle Bosey and fumbling with the takeout box. This won't be Gordon's idea of a movie -- there'll be no film of a fidgety, annoyed, or guilty-looking Trump in the trial, while Joe has an inexhaustible supply of stumbles, gaffes, malapropisms, mispronunciations, and brain freezes that will lead the headlines because there won't be any footage of Trump in the coutroom at all.

Nor can I discount Trump's attorney Todd Blanche's remarks to the jurors in his opening statement,

"Use your common sense. We’re New Yorkers. It’s why we’re here," Blanche said, adding "we trust you" to decide the case on the evidence.

Especially if there are two attorneys on that jury, I'm starting to think this isn't going to turn out like just about everyone has been predicting. Let's not forget the stunned surprise when Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell and Finance Committee Chairman Maurice Stans were acquitted of charges that they had obstructed an investigation in a New York federal trial in 1974. I'm not so sure New York juries are as precictable as everyone seems to think.