Throughout his life, whether as a flamboyant developer, reality TV star, or politician-turned-president, Trump has always found a way to keep the spotlight on himself. Good stories or bad, it never really matters. What was always important was to dominate, to be the center of attention, to win the ratings war, to outshine everyone else.
There has rarely been a day that emphasized this aspect of his being as much as Thursday. Supreme Court justices and jurors in the Manhattan courtroom were confronted with the former president’s alleged misdeeds. Nothing about these two topics gave Trump a positive impression. And yet, we do not know today whether these procedures will help or harm his chances of being re-elected president in November.
The high court’s nine justices were asked to answer a historic constitutional question: Is a president immune from criminal prosecution? In the Manhattan courtroom, the issues were far trickier, involving money paid to an adult film actress for an alleged affair and the National Enquirer’s catch-and-kill practice of suppressing stories negative comments about Trump before the 2016 election.
The justice system has placed Trump in the dock, currently in Manhattan, but potentially in three other cases and jurisdictions in the future. At the same time, he and his lawyers have attempted to tilt the system in his favor, legally and especially politically, with motions, appeals and requests to delay his judgment long enough to potentially free him from all charges. pursuit.
Trump is headed for a rematch with President Biden in November. But there is nothing normal about this campaign. For Trump, who is required to be in court four days a week as the New York trial continues, typical campaigning is limited. But once again on Thursday, the election campaign played out in court and Trump sought to turn bad news to his advantage.
In Washington, if the Supreme Court ruled on a historic question, it was entirely due to what Trump did in refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election and the steps he took to prevent a peaceful transfer of the power to Biden, which culminated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. The former president never gave in to his false claims that the election was stolen.
The Supreme Court, under the leadership of nine different judges, ruled in 1982 that Richard M. Nixon was immune from civil suit, based on a complaint filed years earlier by a fired government official. But no president has ever done what Trump did, and no former president has ever been accused of so many crimes. And so the court, which is now composed of three justices appointed by Trump, will have to answer a question that has remained unanswered for almost 250 years.
What these judges decide in the coming weeks will determine whether a president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution and, if not, and whether the federal trial is allowed to proceed, whether it will take place before the election of November.
Based on analysis of nearly three hours of oral arguments Thursday, it seems clearly possible that the Court’s conservative majority reject Trump’s broad claim of immunity, but could issue a ruling that would cause further delays in the federal trial, perhaps until after the election. This would represent at least a partial victory for the former president.
The high court has already aided Trump in his efforts to delay the decision. The justices might have simply let go of the appeals court’s ruling that Trump did not have immunity from criminal prosecution. By accepting the case and waiting for closing arguments until Thursday, the court prevented a faster trial on the largest indictment facing the former president.
The conventional presumption is that there can be no benefit to a political candidate from being criminally charged and forced to stand trial in the middle of a campaign. Yet the four indictments issued against Trump had the opposite effect during the Republican primaries. His support solidified in the wake of the accusations, and he easily eliminated his Republican rivals, although pockets of resistance continue to appear in state after state.
Until the Manhattan trial began, Trump had the freedom to campaign mostly on his own terms, with occasional appearances at court hearings. He used these moments to his advantage and regularly denounced the justice system as a weapon against him.
Now that the Manhattan trial is underway, he no longer has that freedom. Trump lashed out repeatedly as he left court last week, risking being held in contempt for violating the terms of a hush order. His petulance is on display daily. Will it hurt him? Not everyone thinks this will be the case.
Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican strategist and staunch anti-Trump critic, wrote in the New York Times that it is entirely possible that the trials would have the effect of politically strengthening the former president, as would the actions of accusation did so earlier. Stevens called the trials a “gift from the political gods” to a disgruntled and angry candidate. “The trial will give Mr. Trump the opportunity to define the essence of his candidacy: I am a victim,” he wrote.
Stevens made another observation. Trump’s signature rallies have become a bit stale, and cable news networks no longer limit themselves to routine campaign events like they did in the past. He does not do still gets the attention it once did. “On the other hand, the trial gives Mr. Trump the benefits of renewed interest from voters and the media, without his team having to intensify its campaign or produce a newsworthy event” , he wrote.
With court cases, the cable comes to Trump. It started with the indictments, with the cable channels following his motorcades and tracking his flights from Florida to New York for court appearances. Not that his team isn’t looking for opportunities for traditional campaign events. The former president rose early Thursday to greet union workers at a Manhattan construction site, where he was warmly greeted amid chants of “We want Trump.”
And he is still active on Truth Social, using it to attack the New York trial, at risk of being held in contempt for violating the terms of a silence order imposed by the Supreme Court justice of New York, Juan Merchan, and for taking shots at Biden and other opponents.
Wednesday evening, Trump drew a comparison between pro-Palestinian rallies on college campuses and the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville in 2017, which was filled with anti-Semitic chants and left a young woman dead after a protester rammed his car on a group of counter-protesters.
He noted that Biden said the Charlottesville event pushed him to run against Trump in 2020, and he widely criticized the current president’s handling of the war between Israel and Hamas. “Charlottesville is like a ‘peanut’ compared to the anti-Israel riots and protests happening across our country,” he wrote.
For the next few weeks, However, these electoral incursions will take a back seat to the legal dramas. For all intents and purposes, Trump is grounded. Attention will be focused on the Manhattan trial as everyone waits for the Supreme Court to rule on the immunity question, likely near the end of its term at the end of June.
Thursday was just one day in the long campaign, and it was just one of two major candidates. It reminds us again how much Trump has distorted the lens through which politics is seen, and what’s at stake when voters make their choice in November.
washingtonpost
