The suspense continues on the possible start of the criminal trials once morest the ex-president, but the most serious trials are likely to wait a long time.
In the United States, a poor guy who sells a few ounces of marijuana can be arrested, charged, tried and convicted within hours.
For a billionaire politician who commits crimes serially and in broad daylight, it’s not quite the same. Will we end up seeing Donald Trump in the dock?
Bad start
The caution of prosecutors is understandable. Criminally indicting a former president – and current presidential candidate to boot – would set a heavy precedent.
Cases at issue include a bribe payment to a porn actress, attempted voter fraud in Georgia, stolen documents illegally stored at Mar-a-Lago, and incitement to the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
The case that is likely to lead to the first indictment seems the least damaging to Trump. Even though Trump’s ex-lawyer went to jail for helping pay Stormy Daniels, a state-initiated lawsuit might end in a tailspin.
First, it is a federal crime that federal prosecutors preferred to ignore; that’s a bad sign. Then, it is a relatively minor crime whose political impact promises to be limited. After all, even the most zealous evangelists have remained loyal to Trump despite his adulterous affair with a porn starlet.
Bury the lawsuits
The other case where an indictment seems imminent is that of Georgia. We’ve all heard Trump threaten the Secretary of State to “find” 11,780 votes. The law is clear and the facts are irrefutable, but the matter might fall flat.
While Trump’s lawyers are doing everything to delay the proceedings, the (Republican) state legislature has introduced a bill that would allow it to arbitrarily fire a prosecutor deemed “ineffective”. No one is fooled. This law aims above all to fire the Democratic prosecutor in charge of Trump’s trial.
Anyone else would have been tried and sentenced by now, but justice works differently when the accused is the leader of a cult whose members control the process.
The blow of the clock
The other cases have an even greater reach and the evidence is just as compelling, but the complexity of the proceedings allows Trump’s lawyers to stretch out the proceedings, like a football team letting the clock tick at the end of a game.
The documents case got a little more complicated and less politically damaging when Biden and Pence were also caught at fault. As for the January 6 case, where hundreds of people have already been indicted for following Trump’s orders, the evidence is so complex that the chances of a trial being completed before November 2024 are slim.
Meanwhile, Republicans and their media allies continue to bleach the Jan. 6 episode to the point where Trump has a good chance of winning the Republican nomination in 2024.
Donald Trump said in 2016 that he might commit a crime in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and his supporters would continue to support him. For one of the rare times, he may well have been telling the truth.
