The Trump trial tedium

Donald Trump was falling asleep. The former president of the United States was, as we have all been at one point or another, stuck in an interminably long and boring meeting. This one happened to be in a courtroom, one that he protested was being kept too cold — the presiding judge agreed but said that the choice with their limited thermostat was between too cold and too hot, and it was better not to swelter.

So the room was cold, the talk was boring, and the former president was falling asleep. The bowed head and jolt awake were dutifully reported to the world by bespectacled New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, for whom the tiniest gesture, glance or pout from Donald Trump does not go unnoticed and can be the basis for a CNN hit and a follow-on clip lauding her on Mediaite. For the failed stand-up comedians who host such shows these days, the sleeping Don inspired a dozen late night quips, but it was only Jon Stewart — returned to once a week duty on the reduced-to-irrelevance Daily Show — who actually got the point of it all, noting:

Look, at some point in this trial, something important and revelatory is going to happen, but none of us are going to notice because of the hours spent on his speculative facial tics. If the media tries to make us feel like the most mundane shit is earth-shattering, we won’t believe you when it’s really interesting. It’s your classic “Boy Who Cried Wolf Blitzer.”

The only thing Stewart is wrong about, of course, is the assumption that something important and revelatory will come out of this trial, which involves a convoluted attempt by prosecutors to claim that by engaging in hush-money payoffs to hide his former liaisons, Trump was engaged in an act of campaign-finance fraud.

On the surface, the claim is absurd. Kill fees and agreed-upon NDAs are common practice in the world of politics, whether for ex-spouses or non-spouses whose claims could derail careers. The present question is more about whether the proper forms were filled out along the way, if business records were falsified, or if former Trump fixer Michael Cohen butchered the process in a way that could make the former president liable for some punishment, which New York’s Democrat-dominated legal machine will seek to exact to the maximum degree as penalty for Trump having the audacity to beat Hillary Clinton and be on the cusp of beating Joe Biden.

The American people do not care. To measure the degree to which they do care, note the poor ratings the trial has received on television, or the mid-April AP poll which found that only about one in three Americans thought Trump did anything illegal. It coincided with a CNN poll which found 55 percent of registered voters consider Trump’s first term a success, while 61 percent consider Joe Biden’s first term a failure.

Since Democrats began their lawfare pursuit of the former president, promises to get him by any means necessary have boosted their political fortunes, elevating several prosecutors and acting as a shield against primary opponents focused on the more mundane aspects of doing their jobs. But the problem with this approach is increasingly obvious. The plethora of cases across the country have combined to seal Trump’s hold on the GOP, ensure his renomination, and create a gray morass in the minds of voters who view these cases as the partisan attacks they are.

In some cases, the legal assaults have backfired considerably. In Georgia, Fani Willis’s overbroad RICO lawsuit and the sudden revelations of her improper hiring and payments to a former lover risk derailing her career. And in the Jack Smith-led documents case resulting from the August 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago, the biggest loser so far has been Joe Biden, whose own improper document possession led to the most personally embarrassing special counsel’s note since the Starr Report, finding the president incapable of standing trial due to his mental infirmity.

All this suggests that, much as Democrats had hoped to peg Trump down with a thousand Lilliputian threads of legal attack, the irony has been that his campaign trundles on even as the Man-Mountain is confined to the courtroom. His polls are undamaged, and the absence of any major revelation that could doom his cause makes some voters more likely to support him, mindful as they are of $300 grocery bills and a world that seems far more chaotic than it was before the pandemic. As a lawfare assassination attempt, it may well turn out Democrats have loaded their machine gun with blanks.

Of course, that means nothing to the people who are actually seeking real profit returns from the trial gauntlet. On CNN, Haberman provided a beat-by-beat breakdown of the dramatic afternoon following her report of the former president’s brief slumber: “I noticed that he made a pretty specific stare at me and walked out of the room.” All the news that’s fit to print — and thank you for your service.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2024 World edition.