Study the facial expression in that photo. What do you see?
I’ll go first. It’s the face of a lifelong fraudster who’s furiously humiliated that his carefully concocted fake facade, his “successful” “multibillionaire” brand, is crumbling like a pile of wet particleboard.
Trump showed up yesterday for the opening round of yet another trial – in this one, a New York judge will decide how much of his ill-gotten money should be given up, and whether his crown jewel properties should be scattered to the winds – and naturally he fumed at length on the courthouse steps, blustering his usual bullshit for the media cameras. But his carnival barker act is trumped by the action inside the courtroom, where he’s powerless to halt the process of baring his fraudulence.
Much of yesterday’s press coverage was predictably vacuous, focusing on his demagogic rants (colorful lies make for good headlines) and speculating that this civil fraud trial will further strengthen him with the saps and idol-worshippers who infest the Republican base. And OK, it’s probably true that MAGAts will love him back even more, because (1) the trial is in New York, a city MAGAts hate, (2) the state attorney general is a Black woman, nuff said, (3) their hero hustled banks and insurers, nobody likes banks and insurers anyway, and (4) the financial details are too boring and complicated for the average MAGA mind.
But the rest of us, citizens of mainstream America, know that Trump is in deep doo-doo. Despite all the verbal clouds of dust he kicked up on the courthouse steps – touting his (fake) business brilliance, demanding that somebody “go after” the Black attorney general, demanding that the judge should be “disbarred” – the irrevocable fact is that, in the broadest sense, Trump has already lost the case.
You wouldn’t know this from listening to him, and you wouldn’t know this from reading today’s New York Times trial story (unless you made it to the 19th paragraph), but the fact is, Judge Arthur Engoron already ruled, last week, that Trump persistently defrauded banks and insurers, that by grossly inflating the value of his assets in exchange for juicy loans and lower premiums he has lived in “a fantasy world, not the real world,” that the laws barring such behavior do not “insulate liars from liability,” and much more. Engoron studied the numbers, which were self-evidently fraudulent. The trial is mostly an exercise in determining what serious financial penalties Trump should pay.
So that’s strike one.
Trump railed on the steps that the “rogue judge” should not be in charge, that instead there should be a jury, that it’s “unfair” he doesn’t have a jury. (If he did have a jury, he’d be railing that a jury in blue New York is inherently unfair.) But the punch line is hilarious: His own legal Z-team failed to file the documents requesting a trial by jury.
Strike two.
And of course he fumed that this whole case is part of a vast Joe Biden conspiracy to foil his ’24 presidential bid – “election interference,” yadda yadda – but apparently he’s a tad too addled to check the calendar. Attorney General Letitia James launched her investigation way back in 2019, when Trump’s longtime lawyer-fixer Michael Cohen first spilled the beans, testifying under oath to Congress that Trump repeatedly engaged in fraud by inflating the value of his properties.
Strike three.
But the con never stops. Last week Trump insisted that Mar-a-Lago was worth as much as $1.8 billion (this morning, he said $1.5 billion), and that the judge had screwed him by ruling that Mar-a-Lago was worth no more than $28 million. Now it turns out that the $28-million figure comes from the Palm Beach County appraiser…and that Trump’s own company agreed with it. Looks like Trump framed himself.
That’s strike four, the umpteenth example of how whatever Trump says is something he pulls from his capacious tush. Just like he did way back in 1984, when Trump phoned a Forbes magazine reporter, impersonated an aide that did not exist, and falsely claimed, in the guise of “John Barron,” that he was a billionaire who belonged on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans. (A Forbes 400 editor had already determined that Trump belonged nowhere near the list.)
So the current reckoning is a long time coming. Nothing could be a greater blow to his eggshell narcissistic ego than to be outed as a fake in the world of finance. Nothing could possibly trigger his fury more than a trial that’s this personal – although a jury conviction in one of his upcoming criminal trials might prompt him to realize there are worse things than the loss of lucre.