There has got to be a major contest going on as Donald Trump’s brain tries to figure whether he will allow his fear of incarceration to outweigh the thought that his lifelong grift might get a badly needed boost if the government were to place him in pretrial detention.
Whatever he actually thinks in this regard, “pushing the envelope”
doesn’t come close to describing how he’s treating the behavioral
boundaries set by Judge Tanya Chutkan. Given the judge’s crystal clear
warnings, Trump might as well be screeching “nyah,
nyah, nyah” like a playground dare every time he mouths off with some
faux-macho intimidation, something past history would suggest he is
hard-wired to do.
At some point, a threat must be exercised or the power of future threats is vapor. If Trump keeps it up, Chutkan will have little choice but to call his bluff and make good on her warnings.
A fed-up Chutkan would seem unlikely to choose house arrest, or as they say in many parts of south Florida, casa por cárcel—literally “house for prison,” which the sprawling Mar-a-Lago cannot be.
If Trump continues to flip off the judicial warnings, then he should be detained and treated just like any other person housed in pretrial lock-up. It’s unlikely they all get unlimited access to the internet megaphone.
As anyone knows who has even cursorily followed the media discussion of the man’s fourth and latest indictment, the logistics of getting this and the other cases before juries are going to be a considerable undertaking. It seems likely special counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 conspiracy charges will go first. He’s indicated in various ways he wants this important trial to get rolling soon, well before the general election. Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers are working to wrangle any delay they can, apparently in hopes that somehow their client will find a way to make the coup work next time, squirm his way back into the White House, and they’ll all get Cabinet posts or something.
I rarely make predictions, but I’ll wager the rent money that this is not going to happen.
I’ll brave one more prediction, expending my quota for the year: If the former occupant of the White House does ultimately get held in pretrial detention, he and his lawyers will be desperate for the trial to start ASAP rather than keep trying to delay it until January 2025.
The sooner the better, I say. That being so, the sooner Trump gets locked up, the better.
No comments:
Post a Comment