Perhaps by now we’re immune to absolutely everything, but I still think it’s shocking to have a former president and current candidate testifying under oath in front of a trial judge who has already outed him as a serial grifter with fake net worth and a gift for defrauding banks.
The good news, in yesterday’s historic trial session, is that the defendant screwed himself with his big mouth. In a courtroom, unlike at his rallies, facts do matter. Did he have a direct role in submitting inflated financial statements to the banks in exchange for massive loans he didn’t deserve? Why yes indeed! He testified: “I would look at them, I would see them, and I would maybe on occasion have some suggestions.”
That remark dovetailed nicely with Judge Arthur Engoron’s September ruling – in phase one of the New York attorney general’s case – that Trump’s financial statements have been infested with fraud, that Trump lives in “a fantasy world, not the real world,” that the financial statements “make abundantly clear that Mr. Trump was fully responsible for the information contained within,” and that the laws governing such statements do not “insulate liars from liability.” All that’s left to assess are the penalties Trump should pay, up to and perhaps including the loss of his most precious properties. In this civil fraud case, he is toast.
But now comes the bad news.
Bear in mind this quote from Kafka: “Evil is whatever distracts.”
Trump’s Plan B is to pee all over the proceedings, to attack the judicial system that’s working to hold him accountable, to assail the prosecutor as “a hack,” to play to the audience outside the courtroom (specifically, his besotted saps), because when you’ve already lost a monumental case like this, the only apparent alternative is to make life a living hell for those who have the audacity to bring him to justice. Basically, to annihilate truth and burn down whatever institutions stand in his way – no matter what damage is done to our democratic way of life.
Playing the victim is his go-to reflex. On the witness stand yesterday he whined about the judge: “He called me a fraud and he doesn’t know anything about me!” (The judge knows how to read bogus financial statements.) He seethed, “The fraud is on the court, not me.” He denounced the entire proceedings as “a sham,” which reminded me of the courtroom scene in Woody Allen’s film Bananas, when defendant Fielding Mellish decried, “This trial is a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of two mockeries of a sham!”
Former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut observed yesterday, “Blowing smoke is simply in the nature of a narcissist. (Trump) seems to be without any sound legal strategy, but rather only a political one: Keep sending the base a message of defiance, win the 2024 election, and let his incoming Justice Department end any prosecution.”
Hence the most urgent question of all:
How is it possible that this proven financial fraudster with wildly inflated net worth, a con artist who (according to a trial expert last week) has bilked banks to the tune of $168 million, and who’s saddled with 91 felony counts in four criminal cases, is even remotely competitive in the ’24 presidential race?
We know that MAGA zealots wear his accused criminality as a badge of honor. Peter Wehner, a former aide to three Republican presidents, wrote yesterday: “Many of those on the right, dependent on the web of lies and the nihilism, have twisted themselves into knots in order to justify their behavior not just to others but also to themselves. It’s too painful for them to acknowledge the destructive movement that they have become part of…So they have persuaded themselves that there is no other option but to support a Trump-led Republican Party, even one that is lawless and depraved.”
OK, but they’re a minority slice of the electorate. What excuse does the casual “swing” voter have in entertaining, even for a millisecond, the possibility of a Trump restoration? One apparent reason is that Trump hates the authority figures of all kinds and thus gives license to others who hate authority figures of all kinds. But I’ll nominate a second reason: Spectacle trumps substance. Just look at what happened yesterday. Trump’s word vomit on the witness stand drew far more media coverage than President Biden’s big event in Delaware.
Just in case you missed it (as undoubtedly you did), Biden announced the release of $16 billion for 25 passenger train improvement projects on the Northeast rail corridor, the nation’s busiest. The money comes from the bipartisan infrastructure law he signed two years ago. The projects will materially benefit the 820,000 people who travel the corridor each day, whereas Trump’s inflated net worth con jobs have been tailored to puff up him alone. But if a fatal share of the electorate is truly predisposed to falling for a criminal carnival barker all over again, then we will get the America we deserve.