The United States v Donald Trump Will Be the Trial of the Century

We’re Watching History Being Made — And That’s Exactly What the GOP’s Afraid Of

Image Credit: Emily Clark

What happens now — now that Donald Trump’s been indicted? Let’s talk about it — and not on a superficial level, on a deeper one.

On a simple, surface level, what happens next is obvious. Trump is out there gaslighting America and the world as usual — it’s not just that he’s screaming his innocence at the top of his lungs, though he is, it’s that he has been forever, and so now, of course, he can paint justice and due process as a “witch hunt.” And imply that it’s led by the sinister “dirty liberal” Marxist communist conspiracy that secretly runs the world — even though, as anyone with eyes open can see, the world’s plunging into a new wave of autocracy, from Turkish style authoritarian-theocracy, to the rise of the European far right, good Europeans pretending that, hey, electing parties founded by actual SS members is totally OK and normal and fine, to Britain’s poisonous consequences of Brexit, and on and on. LOL, nice, uh liberal conspiracy you’ve got there.

Nevertheless, what’ll happen is something like this. Trump will plead “not guilty” to all the charges. He’ll cycle through lawyers viciously, dumping them at the slightest challenge or loss or just absence of victory for whatever cockamamie rationale they come up with — leaving the rest of us wondering: why does anyone want to work for this demagogue, anyways? Have they no dignity or honor or even…just…plain…self-respect? Never mind. 

If the case isn’t thrown out by the judge — who, remember, was appointed by Trump and has been lenient towards him — there’ll be an endless series of not guilty pleas, alongside delays, obstruction tactics, justified by ludicrous “theories” which any freshman law student would earn a solid F for, and the idea will be to drag the case out as long as possible…so that Trump can try to seize the Presidency again, right down to another Jan 6th if necessary.

After all, isn’t that what the already growing, open calls for violence in Trump’s name, to defend him from the “witch hunt” now basically point to?

So. That’ll be the Trump side’s strategy, and of course we know because we’ve seen it a million times before. Only in this case, the entire point will be to try and prevent what due process suggests should happen next — and what Jack Smith said would. A speedy trial. Jack Smith insisted on that precisely because he knows Trump’s strategy will be to drag all this out past the horizon of the next election, and thus render it moot — Trump then basically intimidating the DOJ to drop the case.

What Trump really, really doesn’t want? A trial. Before a jury of average Americans. Because that, my friends, is going to be quite literally the trial of the century.