An amusing and thoroughly readable account of being at the last day of the trial.  T

The Washington Post
Opinion 

Trump lost on 34 felony counts – and a lot more

Where the trial has made a difference: the amount of distraction it has caused Trump and his campaign.

By Dana Milbank

Columnist

Updated May 30, 2024 at 7:05 p.m. EDT|Published May 30, 2024 at 4:45 p.m. EDT

NEW YORK — For once, Donald Trump seemed not to know what to say.

After the jury convicted him Thursday evening on 34 felony counts in the hush money case, he stood in the dingy green hallway on the 15th floor of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, huddling at length with his lawyers and aides.

Reporters who had been penned in the hallway all day waiting for him to appear called out questions to get a rise out of him:

“How does it feel to be a convicted felon?”

“Are you worried about going to jail?”

The former president lumbered around the metal barricades with downcast eyes, then said … not much.

“This was a disgrace. This was a rigged trial,” he said.

“It’s a rigged trial, a disgrace,” he added seconds later.

“This was a rigged, disgraceful trial,” he said, a third time.

Furthermore, he said, “our whole country is being rigged” and “it’s just a disgrace.”

“This was a rigged decision right from Day 1,” he said for a fifth time.

He didn’t offer much else in his 98-second statement, other than a thoroughly debunked non sequitur about “millions and millions of people pouring into our country right now from prisons and from mental institutions — terrorists.”

It’s not as though Trump didn’t have an inkling that this would happen. Given the huge volume of evidence in the case, an acquittal seemed out of the question. And though a hung jury was a real possibility, the Trump campaign on Wednesday blasted out a news release with a “CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM” from its pollsters saying “a conviction will not significantly change the advantage President Trump currently enjoys over President Biden in our target states, nor will an acquittal increase his lead.”

They may not be wrong about that. Polls and focus groups showed that few Americans paid attention to the trial and that few people said the verdict was likely to change their votes one way or the other. Certainly, Republican leaders aren’t wavering on Trump, even if it means trashing the nation’s justice system.

“Today’s verdict shows how corrupt and rigged the American justice system has become under Joe Biden,” said Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), the No. 3 House GOP leader. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (Ohio) attacked “the Manhattan kangaroo court,” while House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) said it was “Democrats,” not a jury of his peers, who convicted Trump as part of the “weaponization of our justice system.”

But there’s no telling how the verdict will alter the presidential race, for there has never before been a felon at the top of a major party’s ticket. The president’s eldest son, Don Jr., could come up with nothing more intelligent than a barnyard obscenity after the verdict: “Such bulls---t,” he posted on X, adding that the United States is now “a third-world s---hole.”

And the trial has most certainly hurt Trump already, for it has distracted him and his campaign during a crucial stretch of five weeks of the general election campaign. There’s a lot of justified hand-wringing among Democrats now because Biden is trailing in the polls and key Democratic groups seem unenthusiastic about his reelection. But the Biden campaign has a massive advantage in its infrastructure, and it has used the last five weeks to expand on that advantage in the eight battleground states while Trump and his campaign have been focused on the trial.

“We’ve never been trying to build a campaign that wins a poll in the spring,” Dan Kanninen, the Biden campaign’s battleground states director, told me this week. “We’re trying to build a campaign that can win an election in the fall.” The campaign has hired 500 staff and opened 150 offices in battleground states since March, and the number of staff will quadruple, supplemented by tens of thousands of volunteers. It has begun holding what will be thousands of community events in those states on top of door-knocking, phone calling and online contacts.

Trump, by contrast, focused on the crucial work of posting obscene rants on social media. On Sunday, he shared a video of a vulgarian shouting at Joe Scarborough, the former conservative Republican congressman who is now an MSNBC host: “He’ll get rid of all you f---ing liberals. You liberals are gone when he f---ing wins. You f---ing bl---job liberals are done. Uncle Donnie’s gonna take this election. Landslide, coz. Landslide, you f---ing half a bl-- job. Landslide. Get the f--- out of here, you scumbag.”

Scarborough’s reply: “He’s your uncle?”

When Trump wasn’t injecting filth into the national discourse, he was hanging out in the courtroom and discovering many new things about the legal system.

On Monday evening, before closing arguments in his hush money trial, he found something new outrage to complain about. “WHY IS THE CORRUPT GOVERNMENT ALLOWED TO MAKE THE FINAL ARGUMENT IN THE CASE AGAINST ME? WHY CAN’T THE DEFENSE GO LAST?” he demanded on his Truth Social site. “BIG ADVANTAGE, VERY UNFAIR. WITCH HUNT!”

The defendant was apparently unaware that New York law requires that the defense give its summation first, followed by the prosecution. To the extent this staple of criminal procedure is evidence of a “witch hunt” against Trump, the witch hunters had the foresight to begin their stalking of Trump by putting it into law decades if not centuries ago.

Arriving at the courthouse the next morning, Trump offered some more legal analysis, as usual citing his devoted courtier Jonathan Turley. “If any three-legged stool is missing, and any leg is missing, the stool absolutely collapses,” Trump said.

But if the stool itself is missing, how do we know if it is missing any legs? He did not elaborate. “I have a gag order,” he explained. “I’m not allowed to speak. It’s a first.” It is the rare man who can claim that he is “not allowed to speak” while speaking on live television.

During the prosecutors’ closing argument, Trump posted more trenchant legal analysis on social media.

“BORING!” said one missive, in its entirety.

“FILIBUSTER!” said another.

Returning to court Wednesday to wait on the jury’s deliberations, Trump offered a grim forecast — “Mother Teresa could not beat these charges” — and a couple more fabrications. He said he had “the leading election expert in the country … ready to testify” but the judge “wouldn’t let him” (Trump’s lawyers chose not to call that witness) and repeated that the trial “was all done by Joe Biden” (it’s a state case).

After spending the previous five weeks complaining that the trial had gone on too long, Trump complained later that day that it had not been long enough. “A lot of key witnessers [sic] were not called,” he lamented. He said there were “a lot of big players” that could have been called who “would have given us the win.” Trump’s lawyers could have called as many witnesses as they wanted but only called two.

Yet one thing Trump said was very much true. “This is five weeks, and five weeks of really, essentially, not campaigning,” he observed. And that is likely to hurt him in the election as much as the 34 felonies he committed.

My editor is a smart journalist with a prominent sadistic streak. After my previous trip to the dilapidated courthouse for Trump’s trial, I likened the experience to prison. Last week he sent me an email: “What if you went to NYC for closing arguments?”

And so I loaded up my industrial-size laptop battery (there’s little power in the building), hotspot (limited connectivity), birding binoculars (to watch Trump on postage stamp-size images broadcast in the overflow room), water and Clif Bars (you get a bad seat if you leave for lunch), multiple clothing layers (for the vast temperature swings in the building), and Purell (for the thick coating of grime everywhere).

Things got even worse toward the end of the trial because of an increase in demand for the limited seats. Media organizations now hire sitters to wait in line at midnight for the next day’s session — or even earlier. By 6 p.m. Tuesday, there were already eight sitters in line for Wednesday’s session. My own sitter lost two hours waiting in the wrong line, so I was 38th of about 100 but still managed to squeeze into the overflow room. There, along with luminaries such as MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, Alex Wagner and Ari Melber; CNN’s Kaitlan Collins; and Fox News’s Turley and Trey Gowdy, I sat — and perspired. “So freakin hot in the overflow room, and it STINKS in here,” complained radio host Andrew Giuliani (Rudy’s son) on X. “I have smelled both pits twice now, and I can confirm that I am not the offender.”

The overflow room let out a collective groan when Trump’s lawyer said he would talk for as long as 2½ hours and the prosecutor said he would take up to 4½. Both men exceeded their estimates. With our binoculars, we could observe Trump on the screen: lumbering to his feet, lumbering back to his seat, closing his eyes, studying the back of his hand, whispering with his lawyer. This was some quality journalism!

The real action was outside. A raging antisemite wearing a ski mask shouted at reporters waiting to enter the building about how “Jews control America.” When a couple of journalists challenged him, he shouted, “You f---ing Jews!” Pro-Trump demonstrators, some bare-chested and wearing face paint and horns, performed street theater. A pickup truck circled with what can only be described as a baby inmate Trump float on it and a sign saying “MOBSTER THIEF LIAR TRAITOR!”

The Biden campaign had wisely stayed away from the courthouse but suffered a lapse during closing arguments, sending Robert De Niro and two police officers who defended the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack to hold a news conference. The actor called Trump a “clown,” a “two-bit playboy” and a “coward” and spoke of his naive supporters who “bought into his bulls--t.”

Hecklers shouted “F--- you!” at De Niro and called the Jan. 6 police officers “traitors.”

The Trump campaign used the appearance to press its bogus claim that Biden is behind the trial. “The fact that they are holding a rally across the street from this very witch hunt,” yelled Donald Trump Jr., “tells us exactly what we all knew all along: that it is a political persecution.”

But in one sense, the Biden campaign’s De Niro stunt may have accomplished something, for it kept the elder Trump distracted. Just before 1 a.m. Wednesday, Trump posted a social media rant about “how small, both mentally and physically, Wacko Former Actor Robert De Niro was” and closed it with: “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio!!!”

It was still on Trump’s mind when he was in court the next day; he called De Niro “a broken-down fool” who “got MAGA’d.”

Trump was distracted again after court Wednesday, watching Fox News and doing the equivalent of shouting at the television. When Fox host Shannon Bream pointed out, accurately, that “the Biden administration’s not responsible for this trial,” Trump fired off a social media rant about Bream being “naive” and “STUPID!” Railed Trump: “Bad day for Shannon!”

As Trump ranted and raved about his trial, somewhere in a battleground state, another Biden office was opening.

Opinion by Dana Milbank

Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics. His new book is “The Destructionists: The 25-Year Crackup of the Republican Party” (Doubleday).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/30/early-trump-verdict-campaign-impact-lost-focus/