Trump’s Trial Theatre: Drama, Deception, and Dubious Claims

by Jeff Childers

Reuters ran a Trump trial summary story yesterday headlined, “On first day of Trump hush money trial, prosecutors say he corrupted 2016 election.” Following opening statements and the calling of the state’s first witness, liberal commentators were as overjoyed yesterday as Zelensky racing to the bank after getting his next big U.S. government check, and as deliriously excited as Joe Biden in a day care center suddenly realizing no one is watching him.

The prosecution’s opening statement revealed District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s trial strategy: he’s going wide, trying to camouflage his case’s biggest shortfall, which is that his whole ruckus is all just about the wording on some check notations. But not according to Bragg’s team, who claim it’s much bigger than that. “It was election fraud, pure and simple,” gushed prosecutor Matthew Colangelo in his opening statement, while the jurors listened intently.

Pure? Simple? Rubbish. Trump was never charged with election fraud. Not one single count.

But rather than fight about it, Trump’s lawyers seemed to lean into that claim, which is fair given there are no “election influencing” charges to worry about. “I have a spoiler alert,” attorney Todd Blanche advised the jury. “There is nothing wrong with trying to influence an election. It’s called democracy.”

In this case, truth seems to be something nobody cares about. I complained yesterday that journalists seemed disinterested in whether the stories Trump was forced to buy were actually true or not. To its credit, in Reuters’s article, it referenced one alleged “story” that journalists ran to ground. His old doorman was peddling a story that Trump had a Hunter Biden-style love child.

And, guess what? Journalists figured out that story was fake, even though Trump is alleged to have paid thirty grand for an NDA anyway (allegedly via a friendly tabloid magazine):

The tabloid reached a similar deal to pay $30,000 to a doorman who was seeking to sell a story about Trump allegedly fathering a child out of wedlock, which turned out to be false, according to prosecutors.

How about that? It turned out to be false! So, when the only one of the several claimed stories was run to ground, it wasn’t true. In other words, Trump was blackmailed. But vexingly, media doesn’t care, and Alvin Bragg doesn’t care. The odious falsity of the doorman’s made-up love child story is irrelevant to them. Trump still mischaracterized the blackmail payment to the doorman.

Regardless of how they try to frame it, this case is only about how Trump worded the description of the payments in his own books.

I was not expecting fair treatment from CNN, so I was shocked to discover the platform actually ran an even-handed opinion piece, penned by its criminal defense attorney-slash-CNN analyst Joey Jackson and headlined, “Opinion: I’ve been a criminal attorney for decades. Here’s what I think about the case against Trump.” Nothing in the op-ed will surprise you, as informed and alert C&C readers, but if you needed a sane, left-leaning link to send a distressed relative, this will fill the bill.

A couple points in the op-ed stood out. First, Attorney Jackson described the Trump trial much as I have, contradicting Reuters’s overheated “corrupted election” headline:

 
More interesting was how the piece ended. The penultimate paragraph recognized the case’s historical nature; in other words, no prior political party was brainless enough to open the presidential prosecution Pandora’s box. To his credit Jackson decorated his words better than usual, but the legal analyst did his best parrot impression, reflexively offering the left’s singular, feeble excuse for its massive transgression of socio-political mores, uttering the oft-repeated liberal shibboleth “no one is above the law:”

 
“No one is above the law” is a neat concept, and not wrong, but the definitions seem to have strayed to some extent. Not to mention that democrats never before seemed particularly bound to the concept that “no one is above the law.” (Ahem, Hillary.) Mr. Jackson, again to his credit, generously invoked the Constitution’s presumption of innocence “even” for Trump, but most liberal commenters seem to think the slogan “no one is above the law” fully accounts for eight concurrent lawsuits and criminal prosecutions all exquisitely timed to interrupt Trump’s presidential campaign.

If history proves anything, it’s that when people repeat foolish sayings in haste, often later they have the opportunity to repent in leisure. Liberals’ love affair with reciting like talking dolls the mantra “no one is above the law” could easily boomerang. Hopefully when it does, it won’t boomerang on us all.

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