The Chicago Seven Strategy Still Works

Trump was back in court for the second E Jean Carroll civil trial in New York on Tuesday, and his exchange with Judge Kaplan was true to form:

"Mr. Trump has the right to be present here. That right can be forfeited and it can be forfeited if he is disruptive, which what has been reported to me consists of. And if he disregards court orders, Mr. Trump, I hope I don’t have to consider excluding you from the trial," Judge Lewis Kaplan told Trump, who was reportedly making comments throughout the trial, according to CNN.

Trump responded to Kaplan by throwing his hands up.

"I understand you’re probably eager for me to do that," the judge said.

"I would love it," Trump said, according to reporters in the courtroom.

"I know you would," Kaplan responded. "You just can’t control yourself in this circumstance apparently."

This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of Trump's public demeanor, as well as his conduct in the courtroom. It echoes similar comments by William Barr:

Former Attorney General Bill Barr said it would be a "particularly bad idea" for former President Donald Trump to take the stand in New York because the latter "lacks all self-control."

In a Sunday interview with Fox News' Shannon Bream, Barr was asked whether Trump would personally defend himself in court if his indictment went to trial.

"I'm not his lawyer, generally I think it's a bad idea to go on the stand," Barr replied. "And I think it's a particularly bad idea for Trump because he lacks all self-control, and it would be very difficult to prepare him and keep him testifying in a prudent fashion."

As I pointed out last October, Trump's strategy, at least in the New York civil cases, is based on the Chicago Seven defense, something Alan Dershowitz recognizes, and Dershowitz worked for the defense on that case. I quoted him in that post:

[T]he 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."

And that's exactly what [Abby] Hoffman did, he stood up, he made speeches, he wore costumes, he did everything possible to provoke the judge, and the judge fell into the trap, and I was one of the lawyers on the appeal, and we won the appeal, and he held the lawyers in contempt, and we won the appeal on contempt. So we had a total victory, and [Julius] Hoffman really was laughed at by his fellow judges, and he was condemned by jurists and appellate judges. So I call this the Chicago Seven tactic, and I think this is what Donald Trump is using now.

Unlike Judge Kaplan or Mr Barr, Dershowitz recognizes Trump's strategy as fully calculated. Both Trump and Dershowitz recognize Trump can't get a fair verdict in either of the New York civil trials, so on one hand, he's aiming to provoke Judge Kaplan, and it looks very much as though he'll succeed. But in addition, as Abby Hoffman was at the time, Trump is media savvy, and he's playing his courtroom performance for the media. Trump understands the media needs him as a story, and he's getting free coverage every day, while at the same time he calls attention to the other bizarre characters in the drama, this time "whack job" E Jean Carroll.

During the Letitia James trial, he's been able to play himself against Judge Engoron. Whether Judge Kaplan will prove as effective a foil, Trump is nevertheless now able to bring up Ms Carroll and her absurd allegations, which if nothing else prove delicious entertainment and keep the focus on Trump. He doesn't need campaign ads, and he doesn't need to debate. His name is in front of the public all day, every day, for free.

This is the error of NeverTrumpers like Andrew McCarthy. I quoted him yesterday in his apostrophe to Trump's supporters:

You need to put yourselves in the shoes of the country as a whole. Most Americans do not see this as you do. They vote, but they don’t follow politics closely. They are not attuned to the partisan machinations, the way incumbent Democrats convert the legal system into a campaign weapon. They know only the broad outlines of news coverage.

Trump knows well enough that most Americans won't necessarily understand whatever subtleties may be involved in HR 2 vs the Senate Lankford compromise, but they know entertainment when they see it, and they see it every day with Trump. Trump is a truthteller, a Huckleberry Finn, a Holden Caulfield, James Dean as Caleb Trask in East of Eden, or John Belushi as Bluto in Animal House.

Andrew McCarthy and William Barr misunderstand this as Trump's lack of self-control, when it's more like Bluto's pure irrepressibility. The American people understand this completely, and they'll be in the process of rejecting the NeverTrump alternative, that paragon of self-control Gov Haley, within the next few weeks.

Andrew McCarthy On Trump's Iowa Win

The National Review continues to be solidly NeverTrump, and it's brought out an old NeverTrump stalwart, Andrew McCarthy, to, prognosticate on the Iowa outcome:

. . . I took in a wide array of television and web coverage of former president Trump’s 30-point win in the Iowa caucuses last night.

What I found most curious was the Trump crowd’s crowing that Democrats woke up this morning to the news that their plan has failed — because, the irrational exuberance goes, Trump looks strong while Biden is floundering. This misapprehends the Democrats’ plan, which, in fact, continues to be working to perfection.

The plan was built on the four indictments and sundry civil suits, all brought by Democratic partisans (led by the Biden Justice Department). The point of the lawfare siege, which is the target of Trump’s constant ire and is thus scoffed at by his fans as ineffective partisanship, was to get Trump nominated. In that sense, the siege has been effective beyond the Democrats’ wildest dreams.

But doesn't this neglect what appears to be an across-the-board consensus view that a key aspect of the lawfare strategy is to start the January 6 trial by March 4, the day before the Super Tuesday primaries? For instance, via the Daily Beast, which commented before the US Supreme Court denied Jack Smith's request to rule immediately on Trump's immunity claims:

With Trump’s election fraud case set to start March 4, and the screening of potential jurors set for Feb. 9, the Supreme Court at this point would have to hear the case over the holidays—and speed through one of the most historic decisions in modern history.

. . . Any delay—even by a day—would seriously hamper one of the most significant aspects of Trump’s upcoming trial in Washington for lying to the American public in an attempt to stay in power. Days and hours matter because Trump’s D.C. trial is set to start the day before the massive primary election contests on Super Tuesday.

. . . It’s terrible timing for Trump, who will be portrayed by seasoned prosecutors representing the U.S. government as a man who betrayed the very Constitution he swore to protect and defend. And it’s an unprecedented opportunity for Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and the few other candidates desperately trying to replace him as the GOP frontrunner.

In other words, as best anyone can surmise, a key Biden intent in the overall lawfare strategy is to head Trump off by Super Tuesday in hopes of promoting NeverTrumper candidacies by Haley and DeSantis, whom Biden, at least at the time he developed the lawfare strategy in the middle of last year, apparently felt he'd have an easier time beating. As far as we know now, the March 4 deadline for Jack Smith to start the January 6 trial is still a must-do. But wasn't this supposed to be in order to hurt Trump, not to help him?

By McCarthy's argument, no, starting the January 6 trial just before Super Tuesday will simply inflame Trump's base and further lock in his nomination. His reasoning is this:

The biggest factor in Trump’s early clinching is the Democrats’ lawfare. . . . Before the first indictment, Ron DeSantis was within striking distance. Once the indictments began, the base rallied to Trump and he blew the field away. As Phil notes, even DeSantis now concedes that the indictments “distorted the primary.”

Sometime in the next week or two, we will get a verdict and judgment from Judge Arthur Engoron, the elected progressive Democratic judge in elected progressive Democratic New York attorney-general Letitia James’s civil fraud lawsuit. . . . Trump will run for election judicially stamped as a fraudster who’s been put out of business (much of the country won’t care about the details, or know that the judge is a partisan hack).

. . . But here’s the thing: Hard as this is, Trump-sympathetic Republicans need for analytical purposes to set aside their seething over the Democrats’ exploitation of punitive legal processes against the former president. You need to put yourselves in the shoes of the country as a whole. Most Americans do not see this as you do. They vote, but they don’t follow politics closely. They are not attuned to the partisan machinations, the way incumbent Democrats convert the legal system into a campaign weapon. They know only the broad outlines of news coverage.

To support his argument, McCarthy relies mostly on the New York civil trials, the one now ending under Judge Engoron and the one getting under way in which E Jean Carroll insists yet again that Trump raped her. He leaves aside the question I've raised about the Jack Smith January 6 trial and why the Democrats want it to take place before Super Tuesday to damage Trump's prospects for the nomination, and even more significantly, he leaves completely aside the problem of the Fulton County trial and the new and salacious allegations of misconduct against DA Fani Willis.

The Fulton County trial is quickly degenerating into farce, and the sexual allegations are dominating the headlines -- as of today, likely even more than Trump's Iowa win. This is the best political entertainment since Monica Lewinsky, and the country as a whole is tuned in. But again, the consensus opinion seems to be that it will hurt the Democrats in the general election if the Fulton County case is dismissed or delayed. Here is Andrew Fleischmann in the Daily Beast:

So what happens next? Judge McAfee has stated his intention to hold a hearing in February to look over the truth of these allegations. If they are true, the case will not be dismissed, but it is likely that he will disqualify Fani Willis, which, under Georgia law, will require disqualifying her entire office. The case will then go to the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, which will decide who the case can go on to next.

. . . But even if everything goes as smoothly as humanly possible, it is difficult to imagine trying the former president before the November election. And it’s also possible the case may go to someone who will choose to dismiss it.

Mr Fleischmann's assumption is that the Fulton County case must be tried before the election -- and his unspoken premise is that if he isn't found guilty before then, he'll be elected and pardon himself. He clearly thinks this is a potential outcome in the likely timeline of events. The same set of arguments applies here as to the need to start the January 6 trial before Super Tuesday -- otherwise, it will be very hard to prevent Trump's nomination and subsquent general election victory.

I think Andrew McCarthy's theory that the Democrat lawfare strategy is meant deliberately to inflame the Trump base and get him nominated as the candidate most likely to lose in November is too clever by half. Other Democrat opinion is clearly that the lawfare strategy was intended to use ongoing trials early in 2024 to deny Trump the nomination or, failing that, somehow to convict him of a crime before the election, sentence him to prison, and ensure he loses the general election.

The problem has been two practical obstacles. The first is that the prosecutors and judges have been party hacks who, like Judge Julius Hoffman in the Chicago Seven trial, have played into the defense strategy of discrediting the judicial process. This was and is, given appropriate overreaction and misconduct, an effective strategy. The second is that the lawfare strategy appears to have been developed and implemented only in mid-2023, and given the nature of legal proceedings, the trials are vulnerable to delay, when to be effective, they need to deliver credible results, either in key testimony or outright convictions, before definite 2024 election dates. This is increasingly unlikely. Murphy's general laws state, in part,

• Nothing is as easy as it looks.
• Everything takes longer than you think.
• Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
• If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. Corollary: If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.

He Won't Make It To November

There were several articles last week that noted the White House has changed tactics for Joe's 2024 campaign appearances, minimizing situations where he appears on stage to avoid scenes where he wanders around looking for the exit and switching to the low stairs for Air Force One to reduce the potential for stumbles and falls. The formal on-stage events are to be replaced by smaller gatherings in places like retail stores that give the impression of spontaneity, but of course, any such venues must be thoroughly vetted and precisely scheduled both by Joe's handlers and the Secret Service.

As of this past weekend, the shift doesn't seem to have worked out as hoped. In Emmaus, PA on Friday and in Philadelphia yesterday, we saw a new aspect to Joe's appearances: the aimless departures trying to find the exit offstage have been replaced by a vacant expression that suggests he may not be fully aware of his surroundings, or he may be heavily medicated. At about 2:20 in the video below, Megyn Kelly notes a vignette of Joe's confusion in Emmaus, while the photo at the top of this post is from a Martin Luther King Day event at a Philadelphia food bank.

One question I have is that in both Emmaus and Philadelpia, Joe was nevertheless able to evade his handlers and try to chat up underage girls.

Look how far this girl moves away from Biden...☠️ pic.twitter.com/cUK0gxwLkH

— Woke Societies (@wokesocieties) January 12, 2024

There was a similar episode in Philadelphia yesterday:

What's disturbing is that he seems generally checked out, but he seems to have retained one dominant compulsion, to impose himself on preteen girls. His expressions are vacant and affectless until he spots one, at which point he suddenly becomes animated and aware of his surroundings.

The continuing leaks and direct statements from Democrats expressing discomfort with Joe's campaign have an oddly disconnected tone. For instance,

"Obama has raised questions about the structure of President Biden’s re-election campaign, discussing the matter directly with Biden and telling the president’s aides and allies the campaign needs to be empowered to make decisions without clearing them with the White House," the Washington Post reported.

How will empowering lower-level campaign staff fix Joe himself, when Joe seems to be the real problem? The same applies to remarks Sunday from Sen Sanders:

“So I think people will end up rallying around Biden. But there is no question, it is very hard for young people, I think for most Americans, to be excited about what is going on right now. [The] president has got to change course,” he said.

Change course? Precisely how? If anything, Joe doesn't seem to have any particular course, and as I noted last week, the episode of Secretary Austin being in intensive care and nobody in the White House knowing about it suggests Joe is checked out, and nobody is interested in doing much beyond keeping that bit of news covered up. But even the expressions of discomfort from prominent Democrats look like they're in a kind of code -- Joe needs to empower his staff, he needs to change course.

The problem is simply Joe himself, but so far, there's no Plan B.

Leon Panetta On Biden's Cabinet

An interview with Leon Panetta, who had been Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff and Barack Obama's Defense Secretary, in yesterday's Politico confirms my surmise about the state of Joe Biden's cabinet:

There’s been a gradual deterioration here with regards to the role of the Cabinet. Because so much authority is centralized in the White House these days, the Cabinet really only comes together usually for a press briefing by the president.

Normally, what should be the case is there’s a secretary to the Cabinet, and there should be regular meetings with the Cabinet to not only inform them about issues going on but also to stay in touch with them, so that they feel like they’re part of the team. As that relationship generally has been strained in the last number of years, I think everybody kind of operates on their own. You saw a little bit of that happen here.

To reword this slightly, it seems like what Panetta, who's had plenty of high-level experience in government, is saying is that Biden has centralized authority in the White House at the expense of the cabinet, except that Biden basically isn't doing anything. Thus the cabinet gets no guidance, although they can bungle issues like Ukraine or border security on their own authority. But they were appointed primarily to satisgfy particular constituencies that would get Joe elected, and beyond that, Joe has no particular expectations for them.

This is consistent with reported concerns that Barack Obama transmitted to Joe in a recent White House lunch:

Barack Obama recently had an off-the-books White House lunch with President Joe Biden to share his concerns and advice about his former running mate's campaign, according to a new report.

Obama grew 'animated' as he discussed the 2024 election and Donald Trump's bid to return to the presidency, and suggested Biden should restructure his campaign to be more agile, the Washington Post reported on Saturday, citing people familiar with the matter.

. . . According to the Post, Obama suggested that Biden's campaign, which is headquartered in Delaware, needed to grow more nimble and be empowered to act without sign-off from the White House, where many of Biden's top advisors remain.

This was pretty clearly leaked from sources close to Obama, and the impression was reinforced when the Biden campaign responded a day later:

Quentin Fulks, principal deputy campaign manager for President Biden’s reelection bid, on Sunday defended the campaign’s approach and stressed that Obama and Biden are aligned in their position that Trump needs to be defeated.

. . . Fulks’s defense of the president and his reelection bid comes after The Washington Post reported a story about concerns Obama expressed to Biden at a lunch at the White House in December. Obama reportedly told Biden that it’s important to have more top-level decisionmakers in the campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., or that he needs to empower those already there.

Fulks did not respond to a specific follow-up question on whether the campaign plans to make any structural changes to the campaign.

The implicit complaint from both Panetta and Obama is that Joe wants to reserve decisions to himself, but he doesn't want to be bothered to make decisions, so nobody knows what to do. Thus the whole organization is pretty much out to lunch.

There's more to say about how this is reflected in Joe's campaign.

Working Hard Or Hardly Working?

The biggest issue that's struck me about the Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ICU kerfuffle is that he didn't show up for work for almost two weeks, and nobody noticed. I simply don't know how you get around that. This normally doesn't happen at lower levels, at least when I was working, although COVID's lasting effect may have changed some things -- but even there, the current consensus seems to be that "working from home" hasn't worked out, and employers have reimposed some level of required attendance. And of course, there were and are some jobs for which you simply have to show up. You can't drive a bus and work from home.

This might even apply to a job like US Secretary of Defense, who is in the military chain of command. Even in the December holiday period, issues like Ukraine, Gaza, and Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping didn't go away. But the Secretary was gone, nobody noticed, and nobody knew why. Beyond that, his deputy, who would be his understudy in such a case, was on vacation and was also unaware of his absence:

After being admitted to the hospital last week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin transferred responsibility to Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks on Tuesday. But Hicks, who was on vacation in Puerto Rico at the time, was not informed about his hospitalization until Thursday, a senior defense official told NBC News.

Again, this doesn't happen at lower levels. Everybody knows about out-of-the-office phone mail or e-mail messages that explain how long you'll be gone and whom to contact while you're away. This didn't happen at the highest levels of the Biden administration, and nobody noticed. But the problems don't stop there.

Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said over the weekend that Austin went into the hospital for an elective procedure on December 22 when he was on leave, went home the following day and “continued to work from home through the holidays.” The secretary, Ryder said, began experiencing “severe pain” and was transported from his home to Walter Reed by an ambulance on January 1, where he was admitted to the intensive care unit.

We're really back to the whole "working from home" charade here.

Late Friday afternoon [January 5], the Department of Defense released a statement saying that Austin was in the intensive care unit at Walter Reed NMC due to "complications" from an unspecified "elective" surgical procedure. The statement revealed that he'd been admitted to the ICU on New Year's Day. As happens with these things, more facts started dribbling out. . . .The service chiefs, service secretaries, and other senior Pentagon staff found out two hours before the public announcement. We were told that Austin's deputy, Kathleen Hicks, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Joe Biden got the news on Thursday (keep this sentence in mind because we're going to talk more about that later). Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman C. Q. Brown was told on Tuesday. Supposedly, Austin's chief of staff, Kelly Magsamen, found out on Tuesday, but she was home with the "flu" and decided to wait until she got back to work on Thursday before telling anyone.

At some point, Austin's personal staff started telling people that he was "working from home."

It gradually emerged that Austin's original surgery had been under general anesthesia for prostate cancer treatment. Any type of surgery under general anesthesia is a big deal, and based on my own recent experience, you're generally put on some kind of restricted activity regimen afterward. Beyond that, Secretary Austin is reported to be a devout Roman Catholic, for whom it is generally felt appropriate that someone undergoing surgery under general anesthesia, especially at Austin's age, receive the sacrament of anointing of the sick. In other words, major surgery is a big deal. Recovery from such surgery is not "working from home", but of course, "working from home" isn't really working from home in any case.

I will say that I've occasionally been in jobs where nobody cared whether you showed up or not. They were in organizations that gave new meaning to the word "dysfunctional", and by the nature of things, they never lasted long. This says more about what working in the Biden administration is actually like than it says about Secretary Austin, although there are reasonable questions about whether he should have made the reason for his initial hospitalization, and his subsequent return to the ICU, much clearer than he did.

The big question isn't that Austin didn't show up for work for almost two weeks without anyone noticing. The big question is that Joe Biden was also gone for even longer, and apparently so little work was getting done by anyone else that nobody noticed the Defense Secretary was in the ICU. That reflects much more on Joe and his handlers than on Austin. As I say, I've been in jobs where that sort of thing could happen, but they never lasted very long, and that's the real point.

A Possible Answer To Yesterday's Question About Jack Smith

The big thing that struck me yesterday about Jack Smith's petition to the Supreme Court for a near-immediate ruling on Trump's presidential immunity was its apparent urgency, and I posited that there must be someone in the background (for convenience, a lizard person) who's able to prod Mr Smith into that level of haste. As I said, this plays into the Trump team's Chicago Seven strategy of forcing hasty actions on the judge and prosecution that play out badly in front of the public and eventually result in appellate reversals.

Oddly enough, Larry Johnson at the Gateway Pundit may have an explanation. But keeping him in context, he's the same Larry Johnson who, as a PBS News Hour talking head a generation ago, discounted Al Qaida and Osama bin Laden as terrorist threats, something that's hurt his credibility ever since, although more recently, he's been an important contrarian voice on the Ukraine war who's proven correct on that issue so far. Here's his allegation:

My old friend and business partner, John Moynihan, filed a whistleblower complaint with the Department of Justice Inspector General’s Office on November 28 alleging that Jack Smith, the Special Prosecutor pursuing Donald Trump, was engaged in an extortion scheme while he was working at the International Court of Justice. . . . It is no coincidence that Jack Smith, in the wake of that complaint, made an impromptu move on Monday (December 11) asking the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether Donald Trump had immunity to the charges filed by Smith. Moynihan’s complaint was filed on November 28, 2023 and Smith, 13 days later decides to bypass the Appeals Courts. Smells like politics.

The Moynihan complaint is political dynamite because it provides circumstantial evidence to support Donald Trump’s belief that Jack Smith is not only politically motivated but corrupt. The Trump team wisely has refrained from piling on this news in order to avoid accusations that this was a manufactured hit job.

The complaint alleges in brief that Smith, while serving as chief prosecutor for the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague from 2018 to 2022, engaged in bribery and extortion. In one instance, his job was to track down Kosovo war criminals, but in the process, he solicited bribes to avoid prosecution:

In August 2020, Imeri contacted Halit and tasked him with contacting three “war criminals” in Kosovo. Imeri said that Jack Smith’s office was going to leak dossiers on the three individuals and that Halit’s job was to contact them and solicit a bribe. Halit did as instructed and incurred the wrath of the three targets. His next conversation with Imeri was unpleasant, with Imeri accusing him of botching the bribe request. To earn the trust of Smith’s operation, Halit was asked to “donate” more than $400,000 to a black fund used by the Prosecutor’s office. Halit did as instructed.

Another source reported that Smith was interested in tracking down Russians who may have been aware of corruption by Hillary Clinton. Johnson asks,

How did Jack Smith know that the Russian Potanin possessed incriminating evidence about Hillary Clinton? And why was a prosecutor with the International Court of Justice meddling in that area? Legitimate questions that merit an investigation.

Another article makes the point that the information in the Moynihan November 28, 2023 complaint had already been provided to the Justice Department in April 2022. That author surmises,

Attorney General Merick [sic] Garland learned about this material 18 months ago, and he (or Lisa Monaco, the Littlefinger of Garland’s DOJ) summoned Jack Smith back to Washington, DC to tell him something along the following lines: Listen you SOB, we know that you have been blackmailing people over in Europe and we are going to put you away for 30 years…. or you are going to come home and prosecute Donald Trump. We don’t care how far-fetched the legal theories, you are going to indict him and hound him to thwart his return to office.

Thisis at least a potential explanation for the impression I get that the urgency in Smith's request to the Supreme Court comes from someone well above his paygrade. But we'll have to see what shakes out.

Yeah, It's Still The Chicago Seven Strategy

All I can conclude is some very serious lizard people have told Jack Smith that Trump's DC trial must start on March 4, or else. Alan Dershowitz hasn't commented on Smith's move to take Trump's appeal based on presidential immunity directly to the Supreme Court, but Dershowitz has already noted that Trump's strategy is essentially the same as the Chicago Seven defense: force the judge and prosecutors into errors the defense can get reversed on appeal.

The stakes are high:

The outcome of this fight may determine whether Trump faces any of his four pending criminal trials in 2024. His other three remain in flux or unscheduled. And if the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court consider the former president’s immunity claims on their typical timelines, that may force Chutkan to slow down her own.

While lawyers from special counsel Jack Smith’s team pleaded with Chutkan not to alter the March 4 date, they appeared to concede that Trump’s defense won’t be obliged to respond to most legal issues in the case while his appeal claiming presidential immunity is pending at the D.C. Circuit.

Trump has argued that the entire case must be halted while his immunity appeal is pending because a ruling in his favor would shut down the prosecution. His lawyers also say he shouldn’t be subject to the “burdens of litigation” while his appeal is live.

The problem is that Joe Biden hasn't been adjusting his campaign strategy as the polls gradually turn against him. Instead, he remains focused on a strategy from last year or earlier, to put Trump on trial through the primary and general campaigns and present Joe as the less-bad alternative. But this isn't aging well:

The media are full of stories that cite Democratic Party sources and contributors suggesting that the 81-year-old president, who has shown signs of age-related mental impairment in recent years, should drop out of the running. The complaints have become increasingly urgent as Biden’s presidential favorability readings have plunged sharply.

Meanwhile, Trump faces an unprecedented legal assault, with four separate indictments covering 91 allegations of criminal behavior on his part. In normal times, that would be a political disaster.

. . . . [Based on a recent poll] Among all voters, 60% agreed that the unprecedented legal charges against Trump were politically driven by the Democratic Party, while 31% disagreed.

What’s surprising isn’t that majorities of Republicans (81% “agree,” 13% “disagree”) and independents (53% “agree,” 35% “disagree”) see eye-to-eye, but that a plurality of Democrats (49% “agree,” 44% “disagree”) also believe the prosecutions are politically motivated.

The Trump campaign jumped on the news of Smith's motion:

Smith asked the high court to quickly take up the issue of whether Trump can be prosecuted for trying to overturn the 2020 election, a move that attempted to bypass the appeals court. Smith beseeched SCOTUS that Trump's "trial proceed as promptly as possible if his claim of immunity is rejected."

The Supreme Court agreed to take up Smith's petition, directing Trump's team to submit a response by Dec. 20. The court made clear its "response does not mean the court will take up the case — only that it will consider the request in an expedited fashion."

"Crooked Joe Biden's henchman, Deranged Jack Smith, is so obsessed with interfering in the 2024 Presidential Election with the goal of preventing President Trump from retaking the Oval Office, as the President is poised to do, that Smith is willing to try for a Hail Mary by racing to the Supreme Court and attempting to bypass the appellate process," a spokesperson for Trump's campaign said in a statement prior to SCOTUS' answer.

I suspect the Trump defense strtagy had something like this in mind from the start -- file an appeal that could result in a delay of the DC trial past March 4, which would threaten to move the whole trial timing away from the election season. Someone -- and I think it was someone who gives Jack Smith de facto orders -- decided this was unacceptable, even though the Biden reelection strategy based on putting Trump in prison by November has alrweady been overtaken by events. Nevertheless, the lizard people are in full panic mode.

The Trump defense has been fully aware that putting Smith into appellate territory puts Smith at a major disadvatage:

Special counsel Jack Smith, who has brought federal charges against former President Donald Trump, is an “overzealous” prosecutor who relies on ethically dubious tactics, including media leaks and enticing witnesses, say those who have been caught in his snare.

Other reviews of his record come to conclusions like this one:

Special Counsel Jack Smith, tapped by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate former President Donald Trump for allegedly wrongfully maintaining classified documents in his residence – a fairly common practice other U.S. Attorneys General have refused to prosecute – has a troubling record of failed, botched, and/or suspect prosecutions against prominent public figures.

This record suggests the Trump team deliberately forced a bad choice on Smith -- either allow an appeal that would delay the trial, unacceptable to the lizard people, or attempt to get a quick ruling in his favor from the Supreme Court, which, given his appellate track record, is itself an iffy proposition. The Trump team's strategy all along has been to get both the judge and prosecutor rattled and force them into panic-driven decisions, and it looks like it's working.