Because of court delays, U. S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan has been forced to postpone Donald Trump’s March 4 trial date in Washington, a disappointing development for everyone who wants him to be held accountable for his crimes against our country.
That said, perhaps we don’t need to feel all that disappointed.
Not that trying Trump for his crimes against our country doesn’t matter. It does. It matters a lot, in fact, to hold him accountable for what he did in order to prove to him and his followers that no one is above the law and we are NOT a nation of kings.
As important as his court trials are, though, I suggest they are not the main event. The date for the most important trial Donald Trump faces is actually November 5.
That’s when the nation will serve as the jury to decide his ultimate fate. It’s when he faces a jury of his peers who will decide far more than a verdict on the crimes he has committed against our country,
On that date he will hear the verdict on the kind of man we believe he is, whether or not we believe he is morally unfit to be president again, and I have no doubt that verdict will be guilty.
Some people, of course, believe the opposite is going to happen, that November 5 will be when Trump becomes president again which in turn will allow him to make all his criminal charges go away, freeing him to do whatever he wants to do, including destroying our democracy.
It could happen. I’ve lived long enough to know that just about anything can happen in politics. And I’ve lived long enough to know that what I believe will happen may not, and what I believe will not happen may.
But I think the facts make it abundantly clear that believing Trump will win is a bigger stretch than believing he won’t. Here is why I say that.
If you believe Trump will win this year, you have to believe the majority of Americans are willing to abandon our democracy for a Trumpian autocracy in which he will be accountable to no one.
You have to believe that most of us have decided that the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade wasn’t such a big deal after all, nor is Trump’s claim that he was the one who made it happen.
You have to believe that most of us are willing to give Trump the power to appoint more judges like Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo who suspended the FDA’s approval of Mifepristone based solely on his opposition to abortion and Supreme Court justices like the radical five already there.
You have to believe that most voters don’t care about our nation’s standing in the world, don’t care that Trump made the presidency a joke to other countries, don’t care that he came close to doing irreparable damage to the NATO alliance that is the cornerstone of resistance against Russian aggression in Europe.
If you believe Trump will win in November, you have to believe that the majority of Americans are okay with having a president who has been convicted of rape and in 2016 paid hush money so voters wouldn’t know before the election that he had sex with a porn star while his wife was having a baby.
You have to believe most of us will ignore public statements by several of Trump’s own former cabinet and staff members that he is both incompetent and unfit to be President again.
You have to believe most of us will choose Trump in spite of the fact that during Joe Biden’s presidency we have the best economy in 60 years with low unemployment and low inflation while under Trump we experienced a failed economy that lost more jobs than it created, and added a trillion dollars to our national debt because of an irresponsible tax cut for the wealthy.
You have to focus on Biden’s age while ignoring the fact that Trump is virtually the same age, or on Biden’s mental capacity declining without any actual evidence of it while lately whenever Trump speaks he sounds like a man who is confused and losing touch with reality.
If you believe Trump will win in November, you have to believe that in spite of the fact that the majority of us rejected him in 2016 and 2020, for some inexplicable reason we have changed our minds and decided he’s our guy this year.
Some people do in fact believe all these things will happen and that Trump will be elected again. They even cite polls that show Biden is losing to Trump, you know the same polls that said Trump was ahead of Nikki Haley in New Hampshire by 20 points, but he actually won by less than 10.
But I would argue that there is far more reason to believe Joe Biden will be re-elected than to believe our nation wants another four years of Donald Trump.
That’s why I’m betting on the majority of Americans rendering a guilty verdict to Donald Trump on November 5
If he has been found guilty in any of his court trials before then, and when he is found guilty afterwards, that will all be icing on the cake.
But make no mistake, the election itself is the cake, and everything tells me it’s going to be the best we’ve ever tasted.
linnposts.com 
I’m holding fast to that line
“If you believe Trump will win in November, you have to believe that in spite of the fact that the majority of us rejected him in 2016 and 2020, for some inexplicable reason we have changed our minds and decided he’s our guy this year.”
There is nothing that makes him “more appealing” this time around – if anything he has doubled/tripled/quadrupled the amount of baggage he is carrying from the last election cycle
We can all hold fast together, Tony!
Agree that voters should have the right to choose their next president. We don’t need to destroy democracy in order to save it. Fifteen percent of the voters are either far right or far left and nothing you say will change their votes. They live in a bubble and share their own truths. The election will be decided by the 70% who are disappointed in one or both choices. I think voters will compare how their lives were during the four years of Trump with the four years under Biden.
I don’t like to defend Trump’s character, but he is not a convicted rapist. He has never been indicted of rape in a criminal court. In a New York civil court Ms Carroll gave testimony that Trump raped her in a dressing room in a busy department store. She couldn’t remember the year, or the season. She never reported it and no evidence. New York changed the law so they could prosecute Trump. The jurors did not believe her testimony and threw out the rape charge but did charge him with sexual assault and fined him 5 million. When Trump said he didn’t do it, he was tried for defamation and fined 83.5 million for daring to saw he was innocent. Reminded many Americans of the travesty of the Matt Kavanagh hearings and the despicable way the left used Ms Ford
In defending Trump even though you said you didn’t want to, you made a distinction without a difference by ignoring the facts. I will quote Judge Kaplan to show how and why:
“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape…Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Kaplan also pointed out that New York’s legal definition of “rape” is “far narrower” than the word is understood in “common modern parlance.”
Thank you for this reminder. There are more of us who want the previous president out of the picture than there are who don’t.
That’s what I’m counting on, Harriet. Thank you for saying so!