[This is the week that the former president’s epic legal
misadventures begin. It’s hard to imagine his coming out unscathed.]
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REJOICE, AMERICA: THESE TRIALS SHOULD BRING DONALD TRUMP TO RUI  
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Michael Tomasky
October 2, 2023
The New Republic
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_ This is the week that the former president’s epic legal
misadventures begin. It’s hard to imagine his coming out unscathed.
_

, Andrew Kelly/Getty Images

 

So, here’s a preview of coming attractions. _Trump: The Lawsuits_
debuts this week. Monday, in fact, in the Manhattan civil courtroom of
Judge Arthur Engoron
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judge of the Supreme Court 1st Judicial District in New York. This is
the first of seven—count ’em, _seven_—trials Donald Trump is
scheduled to face between now and Election Day. Let’s take stock of
all the litigation to come.

Liberals are wired to see disaster in everything. We’re not supposed
to discuss matters like this in the tone I’m about to use. But I
submit that in this case, a little optimism is warranted, because I
think it’s quite possible that by next November 5, Trump could not
only be a damaged candidate because of these cases, but his careers
(political _and_ business), and indeed his life, could be in tatters.

Let’s start with this week’s case. New York Attorney General
Letitia James has charged that Trump and his family repeatedly
inflated the value of their properties from 2014 to 2021. Perhaps most
flagrantly—and certainly most vainly and grossly from the
perspective of insecure phallic metaphor—he used to brag that his
apartment in Trump Tower was nearly 30,000 square feet. That is to
say: three times its actual size
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James seeks $250 million in penalties.

Last Tuesday, Judge Engoron issued an excoriating ruling
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against Trump, agreeing with James that Trump did what she says he
did. He stripped the Trump Organization of several of its New York
business certificates. He also ordered each of Trump’s attorneys to
pay a $7,500 sanction fee to the court—and while that is not a lot
of money, it is an almost unheard-of step.

Now Engoron presides over the trial. And since he, not a jury, will
decide things, a bad outcome for the former president seems almost
baked into the cake—unless somehow Trump’s legal team comes up
with a wholly new, and noncrazy, defense. There’s a reasonable
chance that Trump will be ordered to fork over something close to the
$250 million James seeks. He can afford it (or so he says), and of
course he’ll appeal. But he’ll have been forced to drink a
humiliating cup of truth over a scam he’s been pulling for years.
There will be weeks of headlines about how he might lose Trump Tower.
Swing voters will notice, and not sympathetically.

So that’s the first case. Case number two starts later this month in
Atlanta. There was a major development here last week when one of the
defendants, Scott Hall, pleaded guilty
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He has agreed to testify about some dubious-looking electoral mischief
in Coffee County, where the former head of the elections division and
the former county GOP chair are alleged to have given Trump associates
voter data. Whether any of that reached up to Trump himself—I guess
we’ll find out.

In Fulton County, two of Trump’s 18 co-defendants in the Georgia
voter fraud case will go on trial October 23. Prosecutors in Georgia
estimate
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this trial will last about four months and include 150 witnesses. That
will extend into the primary season. These trials will be in front of
juries, so maybe Trump’s jury will include a MAGA-head nullifier.
But the fact that we have Trump on tape telling Brad Raffensperger to
go find him enough votes to change the result would seem to make this
one pretty open-and-shut too.

Skip ahead to next January 15—and think about the lovely timing of
these: spread out over the primary season, with even perhaps more than
one proceeding going on at once—when E. Jean Carroll’s civil
defamation suit is supposed to start. This one too looks grim for Le
Grand Orange. Back in early September, a New York federal judge ruled
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that Carroll will not have to prove a second time that Trump defamed
her. The case, the judge said, is only about the extent of the damages
Trump will have to pay. So, in essence, he’s already lost that one,
just as he has seemingly in essence already lost this week’s civil
case; the only outstanding question is how humiliating the finding
will be.

Case number four is a juicy one, and it has received the least
attention so far of the septet. This is a class-action suit
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accusing Trump and children of fraud by convincing customers to invest
in get-rich-quick schemes while accepting “large, secret payments”
from the companies they were pitching. One plaintiff, a hospice
caregiver in California, paid $499 to register for a course and says
she spent thousands attending seminars to earn a whopping $38. This is
the kind of matter Trump has a history of settling—remember, he paid
$25 million to avoid facing the music over Trump University. But if
this one goes to trial, imagine the stories we’ll hear. Here’s
hoping the plaintiffs refuse to settle so that the voting public can
hear every detail of what cheap, sleazy people these are.

Number five, set for March 4, is the Big Kahuna: the January 6
insurrection trial, before Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, D.C.
Trump unsuccessfully sought a two-year delay on this one. There are
reportedly up to 250 potential witnesses in this case, and a
prosecutor, Jack Smith, who clearly means business. This is the one
where any number of big fish could flip on Trump. (Why do you think he
held that fundraiser for Rudy Giuliani?)

Again, while one should never be too confident about guessing a
trial’s outcome, we already have a lot of evidence telling us that
Trump was loving the violence of that day and wanted his own vice
president to hang. Yes, there’s that line from his speech urging
people to be peaceful. But there’s plenty of evidence that
contradicts the idea that he harbored anything but ill intent.

The sixth case, which is scheduled to start the same month as the
insurrection case, on March 25, is the Stormy Daniels hush-money case.
Now, this matter is generally considered the weakest of the group
because a payment like the one Trump allegedly made isn’t a felony
unless there’s an underlying felony crime. Manhattan District
Attorney Alvin Bragg has laid out a rationale along those lines,
having to do with violation of campaign finance laws. It looks pretty
straightforward to me, but as _The New Republic_’s_ _Matt Ford
explained
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Bragg has done some creative legal embroidery to get this case to
trial. He’ll have to convince a jury, in essence, that Trump paid
Daniels off for the specific purpose of influencing the election. That
he did so seems obvious common sense to you and me; I mean, why else
would he have paid her? But common sense doesn’t always win in a
courtroom, where statutes reign supreme. Still, in a jurisdiction
where the defendant isn’t exactly beloved, there seems a chance that
common sense can actually defeat obscurantist legal language.

Finally, the seventh case is the classified documents case, set for
late next May. That case will be heard in a Trump-friendly
jurisdiction before a judge he appointed to the bench. On those two
points, Trump has lucked out. However, the voluminous evidence against
him, in the form of photos of boxes of classified documents, along
with that tape of Trump admitting
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that he lacks the power as an ex-president to declassify documents, is
rather less fortunate.

Trump will be playing the role of semi-professional defendant
throughout the primary season and in the run-up to the GOP convention,
scheduled for July 15 in Milwaukee. Is it that hard to imagine that
Republican delegates may end up convening to nominate a candidate who
has just been dealt one, or two, or three convictions? Trump is
additionally at risk of having to pay up to three staggeringly
expensive financial penalties—in the current case, the Carroll suit,
and the class-action suit. I find these scenarios very easy to
imagine. In fact, I daresay that some crime-and-punishment cocktail
along those lines seems more likely to be served than not.

If I’m right, here’s what will happen. He’ll scream, his people
will turn violent, and it will all be ugly and painful and difficult
to live through. But one thing that probably won’t happen? His
return to the White House. This is why I’ve always said that come
January 2025, there are not just two, but three, places Donald Trump
might be living: the White House; Mar-a-Lago; or a dacha on the Black
Sea, 30,000 square feet, easily the biggest and most beautiful dacha
anybody’s ever seen. Or, of course, a federal prison cell. In a suit
to match his face.

Michael Tomasky [[link removed]]
@mtomasky [[link removed]]

Michael Tomasky is the editor of _The New Republic._

* Donald Trump's Trials;
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