Oh, NO! The Stormy Daniels Hush Money Trial Starts Next Week!
THE ANTI-TRUMP DREAM COME TRUE. Barring some last-second surprise, on Monday a dream will come true for the Democrats, resistance warriors, Never Trumpers, and lawfare specialists who have hoped for years to put former President Donald Trump on trial. It finally happens Monday in a courtroom in Manhattan.
Many legal experts, and not just those on the Right, have said the case against Trump is weak. But that doesn’t really matter. The fact is, Trump will be on trial, charged with 34 dubious felonies, and a jury in deep-blue Manhattan will likely find him guilty of something. That’s the point. After this trial, if things turn out like Trump’s enemies hope, every single Democratic reference to the former president, every single political ad, every party utterance will refer to Trump as convicted felon Donald Trump.
Even Alan Dershowitz seems slightly off the mark here: At about 12:47, he says,
Donald Trump may very well be convicted, starting next week, the case will take a while because the jury has to be selected, but Donald Trump may very well be convicted of a non-crime. What he is charged with is simply not a crime. It's not a federal crime; it could have been a federal crime; the federal government didn't think it was, and they didn't prosecute him for it; it's not a state crime, and if it is a state crime, it's a misdemeanor, and what the prosecution did is that they cobbled together a federal crime which isn't really a crime and a state crime which isn't a crime, and they created what I call the Alexander Hamilton crime. Remember Alexander Hamilton paid hush money to Mrs Reynolds to make sure that she didn't disclose their consensual affair, exactly the same as the Donald Trump situation, and I doubt that Alexander Hamilton put that on his forms. He was the Secretary of the Treasury! But I doubt that anyone in American history has ever been charged with failing to disclose hush money payments on a corporate or even a government form.
This is odd, because although Dershowitz is a legal scholar, he's also a brilliant media strategist (I note that as of that YouTube from this past Tuesday, he appears to be back in Israel). A much more apposite case is one he's discussed himself recently, and I quoted him here over that Chicago Seven case:
I was a consultant on the case, because there were free speech issues, and the trial turned into a farce, because they had picked a judge named Julius Hoffman, who was a very right-wing jurist to preside over the trial, and he hated these radical defendants, and the radical defendants hated him, and Abby Hoffman came up with a tactic, he said basically to his lawyers and everybody else, "Look, we can't win this case in front of Judge Julius Hoffman. Let's see if we can go about getting it reversed on appeal, and the best way to do it is to provoke this judge, he has a short fuse, and provoke him into making error after error."
It seems to me that Trump and his attorneys are following a twofold strategy not much different from Abby Hoffman's: they've been filing motion after motion in recent weeks, in the view of the media aimed at delaying the trial, but I'm sure Trump and his attorneys are fully aware that the game is rigged, and there isn't going to be any delay. The motions are meant to build a record for post-conviction appeal -- the attorneys are professionally obligated to do this, but they're also fully aware that the intent of the trial is to convict Trump of something -- anythng -- before the election, and the appeals will be after the election. So all their motions are pro forma and not important to Trump's actual strategy.But Abby Hoffman's strategy wasn't just to build an appellate record, it was to turn the trial itself into a circus. This was brilliantly successful, and it worked right away, no need to wait for the appeals court. It turned Hoffman and his codefendants into celebrities -- their celebrity status even outshone their status as martyrs, which was entirely secondary. Trump is a brilliant media strategist himself -- he has even Dershowitz's grudging admiration.
The upcoming trial is likely to put Trump in a perfect storm of media attention, with tabloid-style allegations of an affair with a porn star, but with the added feature of additional lowlifes like Michael Cohen and Michael Avenatti doing what comes naturally, namely, trying to extort Trump. We had a preview of this with E Jean Carroll. By that point, the public had tuned out the legal issues and focused on the circus, the narcissistic old woman who fantasized about being raped by Donald Trump. He kept edging up in the polls throughout the case. The media won't be able to turn their attention away from this case, either, which is the sort of environment in which Trump thrives. Abby Hoffman could have cooked this up himself.
As far as anyone knows, Joe Biden was the one who thought up the lawfare strategy. How's that been working out for him so far? The problem with this case for the Democrats is that nothing can go wrong -- but they're relying on a wonky cast of characters for whom much has already gone wrong. Frankly, I can't wait for the circus to start.
