On April 15, the first morning of his first criminal trial, the Nodfather caught some zzzzzz’s at the defense table – perhaps to protest the proceedings, perhaps to inadvertently demonstrate that he’s a cognitively impaired 77-year-old – but that wasn’t the highlight of the day.
The best stuff happened in late afternoon, when Donald Trump trudged to the waiting cameras and did what he does best: Whine like an entitled little brat.
Having failed to kill off the trial or postpone it until forever – he’s credibly charged with buying the silence of a trysting porn star, paying her off as part of an illegal campaign finance scheme to hide the evidence from voters on the eve of the ’16 election – his only recourse is to mewl that the judge is being mean to him.
He’s mad, for instance, that the judge won’t let him skip the trial the following Thursday so that he could attend the U.S. Supreme Court’s oral arguments on whether presidents deserve total immunity. In his words, “He (Judge Juan Merchan) won’t allow me to leave here for half a day, go to DC, go before the United States Supreme Court – because he thinks he’s superior, I guess, to the Supreme Court. We got a lot of problems with this judge…”
I got a lot of problems with that drivel.
(1) All criminal defendants are required to attend their own trials. That rule applies equally to everyone, from the pettiest larcenous thief to an adjudicated rapist allied with Russia. By contrast, there’s no requirement whatsoever that someone named in a Supreme Court case must attend oral argument in that chamber.
(2) Ponder this one: An ex-president charged with multiple election-interference crimes (the ’16 election) demanded April 15 that he be excused from his criminal trial so that he could sit in a hearing that’s about whether he can kill off a different criminal trial in which he’s charged with fomenting violence in order to overthrow democracy (the ’20 election). Lewis Carroll and Joseph Heller must be spinning in their graves.
Trump was also mad April 15 – or merely purported to be mad – that Judge Merchan didn’t immediately give him permission to skip the trial and attend son Barron’s school graduation slated for May 17. In his words, “We had some amazing things happen today. As you know, my son is graduating from high school. It looks like the judge will not let me go to the graduation of my son who’s worked very, very hard and he is a great student … I’ve been looking forward for years to have this graduation, with his mother and father there, It looks like the judge won’t allow me to escape this scam, this scam trial …”
Three points:
(1) Trump lied (big surprise, that’s his brand). Merchan did not rule that Trump can’t go to Barron’s graduation; the judge merely said he’s not yet prepared to rule on that – and, indeed, he said that if the trial proceeds in a timely fashion, he may be willing to say yes. But Trump’s lie was recycled online by top-tier MAGA sycophants and grassroots MAGA dolts, which, of course, was his intention all along.
(2) Trump purporting to care about Barron’s grad ceremony (“I’ve been looking forward for years to have this graduation”) was truly the howler of the day. According to multiple reports, he didn’t go to the high school ceremonies for any of his kids. None of them, nor his wife, came to court to show support.
3) This is the same son who was home with Melania while the criminal defendant was canoodling in secret with Stormy. He seems not to grasp the irony.
Trump will be whining about stuff like this for weeks to come. This election-interference trial will be a long slog, but – finally! – there’s a decent chance that the weight of evidentiary facts will trump his propaganda. His signature is on the hush money checks, for starters. I feel sorry for his lawyers. When they address the jurors, they should simply echo Groucho Marx, who, in the film Duck Soup, defended Chico this way:
“Gentlemen, he may talk like an idiot and look like an idiot. But don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.”
Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net and is distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2024
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us