After years of this schtick, I’d hope you all know that President Donald Trump was never in real legal danger. If there were a chance he could get arrested last week, which was the talk of the town, we would have known. There would have been documents leaked. The indictment would have been plastered all over CNN and MSNBC for days, along with the expected jubilation. The former president ignited a firestorm when he posted on his social media site, Truth Social, that he would be arrested by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, stemming from the hush money arrangement he allegedly made with porn star Stormy Daniels.
Trump’s staff were unaware of such an indictment, and they would have known. The grand jury opted not to convene this week due to the intense media attention. Trump called for protests should he be cuffed, but the man did what he does best: generate media buzz for himself. He got hours of coverage, debate, analysis, and liberal froth from this post, though the reach would have been many times greater if he got back to using Twitter, which I still feel is essential if he wants to increase the odds for 2024 success. At a rally this weekend, Trump said that the case was fake and that Bragg had already dropped it. We’ll see about that; the man clamored for days about how his arrest was coming. Now, he wants to milk it another few days and act like no one knew that no arrest was coming (via NY Post):
Former President Donald Trump claims that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has “dropped” an investigation into him over the “hush money” payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Trump, 76, made the assertion while speaking to reporters on his jet Saturday night after a campaign rally in Waco, Texas, Axios reported.
“I think they’ve already dropped the case,” Trump said. “It’s a fake case. Some fake cases, they have absolutely nothing.”
Trump didn’t say what led him to believe he was off the hook.
A spokesperson for Bragg, a Democrat, declined to comment Sunday on Trump’s remarks but pointed to an unrelated Saturday statement that referred to the Daniels hush money probe as “an ongoing matter.”
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Even liberal legal analyst was bearish on the chance that an indictment would be handed down. The charges Trump faced at the Manhattan DA’s office were misdemeanors, but ones Bragg’s crew was trying to argue were more serious felonies though the statute of limitations had expired. A former Obama official, Van Jones, said that history should judge Donald Trump and that Bragg could step back from charging the former president. In essence, this isn’t the case or the issue to hurl a Hail Mary legal football, and Jones got raked over the coals for this nuanced and reasonable take. The Left wants Donald Trump to go away, and he’s not. Accept that fact if the man has a pulse.
Yet, Trump also botched what could have been an excellent narrative for the GOP regarding the rule of law, prosecutorial overreach, and two separate rules for justice being applied along political lines. That got erased, blown up as soon as he called for protests if he was arrested. It could have been a galvanizing moment among blocs of voters Trump needs to win back who might feel uneasy with the explicit political bias in the Manhattan DA’s office. Trump does have time to win voters back, but he needs to be boring, and I don’t see him adopting that stance, even though he should. He’s a former president; the 2016 playbook is no longer workable.
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