TRUMP IS CONVICTING HIMSELF

Just as I was in the middle of writing this post, Rick Wilson came along and proved that Great Minds Do Indeed Think Alike, with his analysis of what the past week demonstrated:

“This week revealed, at scale, one of the most powerful weaknesses in Trump’s many, many legal challenges: he’s running the defense team. As I discussed earlier, he didn’t want America to hear he has no game, is terrible in bed, and broadly holds women in contempt. Too bad.

“Trump can’t let his lawyers just do their work. That’s became very clear this week as the lawyers kept adding things Trump had quite obviously insisted on including to their defense.”

Joyce Vance made the important point that Trump’s insistence that his crackerjack (out of the box) lawyers go after Stormy Daniels to destroy her is irrelevant:

“The jury doesn’t have to believe Stormy Daniels to convict Donald Trump. Even if her story was just that—a made up story, as the defense claims—the crime happened when Trump paid her off and concealed the payments with false business records.”

And the ridicule with which Daniels countered the questions will serve another purpose: convincing the jury Trump had a clear motive for committing the crimes related to the hush-money scheme.

The way Trump has been directing his defense demonstrates the accuracy and truthfulness of the charges he was indicted on. He is obsessed in 2024 - as he was in 2016 - with destroying Daniels’ story because of what she would say about him.

It has nothing to do with him wanting to keep this from his wife, and everything to do with him wanting to keep it from public display, desperately wanting not to be publicly revealed as a guy who “has no game, is terrible in bed...” It’s a reveal that goes to the heart of Trump’s lifelong fraud, that reveals the truth that he is and has been all his life a pathetic loser.

His damaged psyche - the result of a “domineering mother” (I know all about that one) and a “distant constantly critical father” (I know about that one, too; I’m just lucky they didn’t have the ultimate soullessness of the Trump parents) - has meant that for all his life, regardless of the particular topic, he has had his nose pressed against the glass, desperate to be invited in, and knowing in what passes for his heart that it will never happen, that all the people whose acceptance of him he is so desperate to achieve see him for the fraud and failure he is.

At what has to be his specific direction, his lawyers staked their case on Stormy Daniels’ story being a lie. From their opening statement, they promised the jury that none of it was true.

As of the close of court yesterday, the “attack bimbo” not only didn’t deliver on the promise, but ended up with several layers of egg on her face, gratis Stormy Daniels. That result leaves the defense with almost no credibility with the jury as they face the event Nicolle Wallace described today as “Shakespearean (with apologies to Shakespeare)”: the appearance in court of Michael Cohen.

On Monday, the People will call Michael Cohen to the witness stand, where he will tie all the threads together with first-person testimony about his face-to-face dealings with Trump. Cohen will provide the testimony about the information that has been admitted to evidence, the truth of which the government must prove to to demonstrate that Trump knew about the whole deal.

Trump has nearly made the prosecution’s case for them in establishing the motive for the crime. All the effort by the crackerjack Trump lawyers to claim Cohen is lying will be to no purpose, since it will be easy for the prosecution to convince jurors to believe him, despite his considerable baggage, because everything he testifies about will be tied to a piece of evidence. Evidence that the crackerjack Trump lawyers never disputed, since they were taking direction from a moron who fails to understand a criminal trial - something he’s never dealt with before - even more than he fails to understand everything else.

During her redirect examination of Daniels, prosecutor Susan Hoffinger was able to put into the court record the important testimony about the civil case where Trump sued Stormy Daniels for breaking the NDA he had purchased, in which Trump conceded he had reimbursed Michael Cohen for the money Cohen paid out to Daniels.

With that concession in the record, it is now impossible for Trump to deny what he did, since it is his own words in that lawsuit that can be introduced to impeach his claimed innocence.

I agree with Rick Wilson’s conclusion: “Trump running his own legal defense strikes me as dangerous and ineffective as Trump running anything else, be it a gimcrack real estate branding company, a reality TV show, a university, airline, vodka brand, or nation.”

Everything Trump touches, dies.

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