The Waiting Game

Trump's legal delay games will run out the clock before Election Day

“This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means …. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world.” — Charles Dickens, Bleak House

On the balmy night of August 8, 2022, word reached New York that the FBI was raiding Mar a Lago. Federal agents with warrants entered the property to look for purloined classified documents that Trump had secreted around his resort. We were having dinner with friends. We clinked glasses. Surely the beginning of the end was at hand for the orange menace.

A year and a half has passed. Trump has now been criminally charged 91 times in four cases. Besides stealing national secrets, he’s accused of breaking New York law by hiding hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels, breaking federal law by inciting the January 6, 2021 insurrection, and breaking Georgia racketeering law in a conspiracy to circumvent the 2020 election in that state. On the civil side, he’s now an adjudicated sexual assaulter and an adjudicated business fraudster, and two different juries have hit him with $83 million and $5 million judgments for defaming E. Jean Carroll.

Trump’s been fingerprinted and mug-shot, and forked over $200,000 in bail money for the Georgia RICO case. He’s doxxed court workers and publicly vilified judges and prosecutors, bringing down MAGA death threats on them. I don’t know of any defendants walking around free in America with a fraction of that number of indictments while threatening judges and court officials. If any reader can come up with one, I’ll send you a free signed book.

The New York Times and the Washington Post both have a regularly updated handy guide for following the Trump legal processes. Every one of the cases is mired in a slurry of Trump-driven delays.

In Florida, Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon is in no hurry to hear the purloined state secrets case. Georgia’s RICO case against Trump and cronies - crafted to expose and turn miscreants like Jenna Ellis, Ken Chesebro, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and the rest of the gang - is on hiatus after Trump’s defense turned up evidence of a romance among the prosecutors. In Washington last year, special prosecutor Jack Smith said he would seek “a speedy trial” when he charged Trump with conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. Trump’s lawyers crafted a defense that can only be described as monarchical impunity. The March 4 trial date was jettisoned to let higher courts consider that, with no new date set.

The Manhattan DA’s case against Trump for falsifying business records to cover up hush money for Stormy Daniels - set for trial on March 25 - the only date that appears likely to stick.

Trump makes a mockery of the notion of America as a nation of laws. He has nothing but scorn for tax-paying, parking ticket-paying, waiting-their-turn-in-line chumps. A spoiled nepo-baby who went bankrupt young to the tune of $900 million, a Mark Burnett reality show businessman, he built his actual career blowing off invoices from vendors and legal norms, often stiffing lawyers who got him out of trouble. An endless supply of lawyers are still eager to test their skills on behalf of the oligarchy’s waterboy. Even if he doesn’t pay, the free advertising is better than the Better Call Saul billboard.

In Servants of the Damned, New York Times financial writer David Enrich tracked how one of the country’s biggest law firms signed on with Trump. Mega firm Jones Day reaped nearly $20 million in campaign spending in 2020. “Trump was a golden ticket” for the firm, as early as 2016, when Jones Day was already a “go-to firm for Republicans, mainstream and fringe alike.” I remember Jones Day hosting parties at the Cleveland nominating convention, while battalions of cops recruited from other states patrolled the streets outside in fear of riots provoked by the race-baiter.

There is money to be made and prestige in handling the affairs of a once and maybe future president of the United States. In the Trump criminal cases, legal elves are getting paid — just not by Trump, who never pays retail for legal if he can help it. His donors are picking up the tab, to the tune of $50 million last year. His Save America PAC spent $25 million on legal expenses over the last six months of 2023 alone, according to FEC filings. Make America Great Again, another Trump PAC, forked over $25 million on legal bills last year.

The chumping of the Trump donors makes some of us laugh. But, of the many faults in our democratic system exposed by Trump and his MAGA following - not least how poor education and a plague of mental illness has left so many voters’ without critical thinking skills - the worst is how he has shattered our self-image of America as a nation of law. American streets are crawling with felonious Trump associates, pardonees like Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn, Roger Stone, and assorted domestic abusers whose toxic masculinity earned them slots on the Trump team.

Trump-style delay games are not new (see Dickens above), nor is brazen lawlessness sui generis in American politics. Mini-Trump Texas attorney general Ken Paxton (a swamp critter I profiled here) for example, has been under indictment for securities fraud for eight years. Incredibly, during those years he has been elected and allowed to hold office, in addition to avoiding trial. Like Trump, Paxton flagrantly thumbs his nose at rules everyone else has to follow, while wielding so much power he can literally make life and death decisions for women and their doctors.

The more I think about accused felons Trump and Paxton, roaming free and exercising enormous power, the more I understand that it's really the country's legal system that's broken. It broke before our broken politics. The five-four conservative dominated Supreme Court gave us Citizens United all the way back in 2010 — the single most damaging blow to democracy to occur during my lifetime, worse than the rise of Trump, to which it is related. Citizens United was crafted by corrupt actors who waited for their moment to bring a cocked-up money-equals-speech argument to the rightist Supreme Court. The subsequent anonymity granted to big donors empowered the democracy-loathing Opus Dei Catholic fixer Leonard Leo and his vast network of tireless plotters to seed the judiciary with right-wing extremists who will ultimately decide Trump’s legal fate.

Now we have a cottage industry of Trumplaw experts explaining indictments and translating legalese for the masses and TV anchors. They yak away on CNN or MSNBC, on left-leaning podcasts and write columns and Substacks. Like everyone else without a law degree, I rely on them to explain what’s going on. But at this point, only the most devoted political junkie follows every revised trial date and legal volley. And only the most earnest Rachel Maddow watcher doesn’t know time will run out before the election. The anti-Trump public’s appetite for the appearance of action is a strong incitement to leave that problem unsaid.

Hope, Nietzsche said, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torment of man. The law is not going to stop MAGA and Trump. Prison won’t even do the trick.

At a “Stop Trump Summit” in New York last fall, a worried but hopeful member of the liberal audience asked conservative lawyer George Conway what would happen if Trump is convicted and sentenced to prison before the election. Instead of pointing out how unlikely that scenario is, Conway gave an alarming answer: if Trump is elected after being convicted and imprisoned, American law will require that he be set free. Later, he told me: “If he’s elected president, I think Article II of the Constitution would require whoever is incarcerating him to spring him at noon on Jan. 20, 2025.”

There is one truly viable legal solution. Only about two-thirds of the eligible American electorate turned out to vote in 2020 - still the highest rate since 1900. This year, we can break that record.