by Larry Thornberry
Like so many Americanos, I’m spending more time than I should listening to news out of Manhattan, where the local prosecutor there has charged the leading Republican candidate for president with 34 felony counts of being Donald Trump. I challenge anyone to find more than this in the charges and specifications. I really should ration myself on trial news. I could even take a day off. I’m beginning to know how Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day must have felt as though the news out of the trial is pretty much the same from day to day.
Listening to the learned legal talking heads on TV, including defense attorneys, dissecting Fat Alvin’s legal circus, I can’t but wonder if the bar exam is too easy. Or perhaps it just includes no questions about juries and their quirks, blind spots, and prejudices. These “experts” bang on, correctly, about what a hollow political farce the charges are, to the extent that anyone can understand the charges to be anything beyond that Donald Trump, from time to time, has had his swinish moments around women, has had to pony up for his indiscretions, and has not been eager for his wife or the public to know about them. Stuff American voters knew about before electing him president in 2016. They didn’t elect him because of this but in spite of this, considering the alternative, which if you’ll recall was the chief enabler and defender after her presidential husband’s numerous “bimbo eruptions” and his squalid May–December Oval Office peccadilloes.
The experts, including the defense attorneys who should know better, also keep telling tell us “what the prosecution must prove,” or “what the prosecution must establish,” as if the evidence, or even the legal soundness of the charges themselves, are what matter here. They seem to be forgetting that this trial is taking place in Manhattan, where, I fear, all the prosecution has to establish to get a guilty verdict is that the defendant’s name is Donald Trump. In Manhattan, Old Scratch himself likely would have a better chance at a fair trial than Donald Trump does. In the O.J. trial we had what we’ve learned to call jury nullification, where no amount of evidence was sufficient for jurors to deliver a guilty verdict. This case may be the opposite, where no evidence, not even a plausible crime, is necessary to convict. I hope I’m wrong. But should the worst come to pass, I’m confident two things would follow: There would be dancing in the streets of Manhattan, and the Donald’s poll numbers would go up. Make no mistake — for anyone not far gone in Trump derangement syndrome, Manhattan is more on trial here than Donald Trump is.
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Larry Thornberry is a writer in Tampa.
PHoto “Donald Trump” by Trump White House Archived. Background Photo “New York City Supreme Courthouse” by wallyg. CC BY 2.0.
