Shred the Rulebook and There are no Rules

It has been, as the New York Post’s giant ‘wood’ summed up Robert de Weirdo’s tough guy routine in Foley Square outside the Trump trial, so much ‘Raging Bullsh*t’. In olden days, type so large had to be mounted on stout oak blocks to stymie distortion under the pressure of the platen, hence the printer’s lingo. But no font however big and twisted can represent what the past weeks have witnessed. All the high-minded planks and aspirations of American justice, all its flowery “for all” incantations, remain on the books but its execution has been squeezed and crushed far beyond mere distortion.

Donald Trump, guilty as charged on all 34 criminal counts.

Now they can put him away for decades, four years per charge if acting judge — do notice the ‘acting’, because there’s a story behind it — is so inclined.The sentencing is to be on July 11. Golly gosh! Gee whiz! Holy smoke! What a coincidence! That’s just a week before the GOP convention kicks off in Milwaukee. Are Republicans to nominate and Americans to back a contender who is, as the White House immediately began branding him,  ‘the convicted felon’. Trump could be placed under house arrest, made to wear an ankle monitor or both. He might be forbidden to leave the state without permission, just as he was ordered to attend every day of the trial, and thereby kept off the campaign trail. This right now is Merchan’s moment to pay back the insults Trump flung at him, not to mention the embarrassment of it having been exposed that his daughter, a Democrat operative, has raised and profited personally from the $90 million in donations she used the trial to solicit. Vengeance and justice are supposed to be two different things but the latter went missing well before the first juror was sworn in, and now we can expect Merchan to invoke the former. He’s that sort of guy.

What have they got on Merchan, you have to wonder? What are they paying him, what promised reward could produce such an infamous performance? What secret scandal might force a man to so thoroughly compromise the public face of his good name? Surely a judge with regard for his reputation could not have conducted a trial as he has done this one. Esteem is supposed to come with the black robe because, if the courts and their judgments are to be credible, public confidence can never accept a party-line corruptocrat wielding the gavel. That sort of crooked justice happens in dark and benighted regions, and America, or so it tells itself, isn’t Burma or Malaysia or some Putinesque parody with show trials and predetermined verdicts. Apart from another New York judge, Joseph Force Crater, who vanished in the night as a 1932 corruption probe loomed, America’s best known bent jurist would have to be Cotton Mather, the fanatic parson who presided over the Salem witch trials. Now Mather has some stiff competition.

The first thing to know about Merchan is that, rather than being plucked at random from the pool of available judges, which is the way it’s supposed to work, he was specifically selected and assigned to preside over the trial just concluded, plus looming prosecutions of Trump confidante Steve Bannon and the defendant’s corporate entity, the Trump Organization. As Congresswoman Elise Stefanik put it in letter demanding the New York judiciary’s watchdog open an immediate investigation:

If justices were indeed being randomly assigned in the Criminal Term, the probability of two specific criminal cases being assigned to the same justice is quite low, and the probability of three specific criminal cases being assigned to the same justice is infinitesimally small. And yet, we see Acting Justice Merchan on all three cases.

The simple answer to why Acting Justice Merchan has been assigned to these cases would seem to be that whoever made the assignment intentionally selected Acting Justice Merchan to handle them to increase the chance that Donald Trump, the Trump Organization, and Steven Bannon would ultimately be convicted.

By one legal scholar’s estimate — apologies, I was driving north from Dixie to Connecticut and didn’t catch the academic’s name — there are at least ten solid grounds for the verdict to be overturned, starting with witnesses not called, or, in the case of the country’s leading election law specialist, a former head of the Federal Election Commission no less, stopped by Merchan from testifying .

Ah, but there’s the rub. Contesting a New York verdict means appealing first to a lower court of review, then a higher one and, penultimately, to the state’s Supreme Court. After that, should the original decision not have been reversed, it’s off to the US Supreme Court. Put simply, it could be four, five, even six years before such a case as Trump’s escapes the Empire State’s judiciary, of which Merchan and his ethics are a dictionary illustration.

NEWS of the verdict reached Connecticut not long after I did, and we were heading out to dinner — son, daughter-in-law and baby — when the alert came over the car radio. It wasn’t that I expected pitchforks and flaming brands, this being deep Democrat blue Connecticut that could never happen, but some sort of reaction surely? At the pub, though, eavesdropping on bar chatter and neighbouring conversation picked up no hint that what had just happened in Lower Manhattan was a milestone to be talked about, analysed and studied  a century and more from now — if allowed to be talked about at all in whatever it is the US is on the road to becoming. God knows, but this is a terrifying development, and that is said without a scintilla of hype. When one side tears up the rulebook the new rule is that there are no rules. (To see where this all leads, to politics transferred from stump to courtroom and revenge ruling all, read John Hinderaker’s fighting words at Powerline.)

The first ex-president to be convicted and face prison. The undeniable fingerprints of the White House on the levers of justice. The pretense of impartiality indicted by the speed with which 12 typical New Yorkers reached their 34-count verdict, which took them well under eight hours of deliberations, not including the testimony read-backs and Judge Merchan’s slanted instructions. They were presented with a complex, indeed convoluted, train of evidence and witnesses; to imagine it all could be distilled into a single word, ‘guilty’, in such a short spell beggars belief if you don’t know the ways of Gotham.

So picture a jury drawn from a city that votes consistently and overwhelmingly for Democratic presidential candidates — 87% for Biden in 2020, 92% in 2016 for Hillary — and you don’t need to apply much imagination to hear the jury-room conversation. Who needs to understand how a petty misdemeanour, that of mislabelled bookkeeping, could be reanimated long after the statute of limitations expired, inflated to 34 criminal felonies  and tied in ways never explained to purported campaign finance violations? Must one be corroded by cynicism to picture those jurors immediately concluding as the door clicked shut that Donald Trump is guilty of being Donald Trump and that is enough of crime in itself.

Making the decision and the speed with which it was reached all the more peculiar has been the commentary. CNN, no friend of Trump by any means, marked the course of the case with a stable of legal experts’ often scathing remarks about the prosecution’s poor showing, the salacious irrelevance of silk pyjamas and spankings, and the overall weakness of a charge in which the particular election law said to have been abused was never actually revealed. Even MSNBC, tireless promoter of the Russiagate hoax, both impeachment pantomimes, the January 6 panel’s stitch-up and dozens, literally dozens, of harassing and vexations civil actions against Trump, had to concede DA Alvin Bragg’s argument was tenuous at best. Yet, just like that, the jury rules Trump is guilty and sends him down. As Cindy Adams, the octogenarian columnist and gossipeuse puts it, ‘Only in New York, kids. Only in New York.’

PERHAPS the prime-time savants just don’t get out enough. A few weeks ago when the Trump trial was but a pup, I happened to be in another America and in another pub, this one with a barkeep opposed to changing the channel. ‘People, they want the sport,’ he said, which seemed dubious as there were only two other patrons, land whales of the sort to be found wobbling and waddling in ever greater numbers the further inland you penetrate America’s heartland. As to the ‘sport’, it was South American women’s college soccer and less interesting than watching meat rot.

Time and again in that part of the world, where locals tell you with twisted and often gap-toothed self-deprecating grins that you’re in ‘hillbilly country’ — the Virginia backwoods, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, bits of Maryland and Pennsylvania — you’ll see signs of the red-state loyalty that Trump commands, bumper stickers and MAGA hats the least of it.

“Mind if we switch the TV to see how the Trump trial is going?” I asked the diners, who barely stopped inhaling chicken wings to nod their assent. Then, between mouthfuls,  the larger one weighed in with a legal opinion. “He’s going to jail. They won’t let him get out of this.”

And they didn’t.

I don’t know if the hillbilly with hot sauce in his beard will be voting in November, but if does, it will be for convicted criminal Donald J. Trump.