THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM WILL NOT SAVE US

I am sure the majority of readers here, like me, have been hoping that the grinding of the judicial mill will result in Donald J. Trump spending the rest of his natural life wearing an orange jump suit in prison, where he has belonged since he was a pre-teen caught throwing rocks at a toddler in a playpen next door to his home in Jamaica, New York.

We have sweated out every twist and turn of the legal machinations, cheered his criminal indictment in New York, his defeat in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case (confirmed yesterday when a judge refused a new trial or to transfer the coming second trial to the federal system on the grounds his actions had nothing to do with his duties as president, and noting that he was in fact found guilty of rape by any modern understanding of the term), his indictment in Florida for the Mar-A-Lago document theft case and his coming indictment a second time in Washington for his conspiracy to mount a coup against the government he ostensibly headed, and yet another coming indictment in Georgia for racketeering in election fraud.

When I read this about Judge Lucy Cannon setting the Mar-A-Lago trial date for next May 20 this morning, I thought to myself - as many of you likely did - that if we had to deal with a “Trump judge” giving him much of the delay he sought, we were lucky the other federal indictment would come in Washington since the judges there wouldn’t fuck around with scheduling and he’d be on trial for the Really Serious Charges by early 2024; surely, that would derail the Trump train.

Finally, all these trials will get him, the public will come to their senses, and we will be rid of this burdensome criminal once and for all, with sunlight and rainbows and the republic saved. The judicial system would short-circuit the election and we would be able to breathe easy.

Not so fast.

TPM’s Josh Marshall thought similarly, until he received a message from an experienced former U.S. attorney, who pointed out that in the federal system, deference is given to the judge in charge of the first scheduled trial, and thus it would be impossible for a judge in Washington to schedule a trial before that trial. Thus, Lucy Cannon would be influential in all the federal legal proceedings, since any delay she came up with to the May 20 date would also push back the D.C. trial, with the trials possibly being further delayed by the fact Trump would by then by the official nominee for president of the GOP, forcing the DOJ to follow their rule of not taking legal action close to an election that might influence that election. Trump would achieve his goal of pushing the trials beyond the election.

The outcome of these trials is inextricably tied to the outcome of the 2024 election.

If Trump wins, it matters not what the verdicts are or when they are obtained; the whole thing goes away within a matter of weeks of him taking office, lost amidst all the work his fellow conspirators are doing as they “hit the deck running” to quickly establish the MAGA dictatorship we have all read about them working to achieve.

If there were verdicts, they would be moral victories we might remember, but they would be gone from public awareness as if they never happened within a year.

If Trump loses, then the verdicts will stand, whatever they are, and he will then be forced to take responsibility for his crimes when he is sentenced. Which likely would not be to a windowless 8x10 on the third sub-basement level of the Florence SuperMax as I have daydreamed of for the past eight years.

As Josh points out in his editor’s update email we subscribers receive, there are two tracks here: judicial and electoral; a Trump victory on the electoral track will inevitably cancel a Trump defeat on the judicial track. This includes the coming trials in Georgia and New York.

The important point to take from this is that Trump’s fate rests ultimately on the outcome of the election.

The judicial process will not short-circuit this fact, no matter how fervently we wish it would.

As with every other crisis faced by Americans since the first shots were fired on Lexington Green in 1775, we - the citizens of the United States - are the authors of our communal fate.

There is no one to save us but we ourselves.

Obsessively following the news about Trump’s judicial woes actually diverts us from the important work before us.

Between now and November 5, 2024, we all - however the opportunity to do so shows up - need to be Doing All We Can to insure that neither Donald Trump nor any possible Republican replacement enters the White House on January 20, 2025.

We have to work as hard as we can, and then harder than that, to insure that Joe Biden serves a second term, with a Democratic majority in both the House and Senate.

THAT is the only outcome that includes within it our ability to save this constitutional democratic republic and not see it fall to a tenth-rate circus clown who fancies himself a would-be Julius Caesar.

Anything else is a waste of time, effort and energy.

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