The show trial of Donald Trump is closing

Guest Post by Alex Berenson

The closing arguments have ended. The Manhattan trial of Donald Trump for the alleged felony of misclassifying business records (!) has reached the jury.

Now the rest of us wait, for an outcome that seems preordained.

After Michael Cohen’s disastrous cross-examination, I wondered if one or two jurors might refuse to convict Trump, leading to a hung jury. Remember, these charges come out of a $130,000 “hush money” payment Cohen made to the porn star Stormy Daniels in October 2016. Trump then reimbursed Cohen for the payment.

In reality the case depends on a raft of dubious propositions, including:

Companies shouldn’t classify payments to a lawyer as legal services;

Candidates illegally “influence” elections if they try to hide negative information;

Trump had no non-campaign-related reasons to keep Daniels from telling her story;

New York state can bring a prosecution that turns on federal election laws.

But even accepting all those theories, the only direct evidence that Trump told Cohen to pay Daniels off before the election comes from Cohen himself. Cohen is a convicted felon who has admitted to lying under oath and wanting to see Trump convicted. Further, a defense witness directly contradicted his testimony.

Yet in the last two weeks, acting Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who is overseeing the case, has put not just a thumb but his whole hand on the scale in favor of the prosecution.

He kept Trump’s lawyers from offering a witness who could testify about the intricacies of campaign finance law central to the case. He also threatened to strike the testimony of the defense witness who contradicted Cohen because he felt the witness had disrespected him. (Unbelievable but true.) And in closing arguments, Merchan repeatedly overruled defense objections to prosecutors making assertions unsupported by evidence they had presented.

Jonathan Turley, a lawyer who leans conservative but is generally respected even on the left, detailed Marchan’s increasingly open bias in his Twitter feed and this article; he’s now calling the trial a “canned hunt.”

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Further Manhattan prosecutors have explicitly framed the trial as a referendum on Trump’s 2016 win. They have implied, without any evidence, the payment to keep Daniels quiet might have been the reason Trump beat Hillary Clinton. They’ve done so before a jury in Manhattan, where voters favored Clinton by almost 9-1 in 2016, even more heavily than they supported Joe Biden.

Thus the jury likely contains at least a handful of jurors who would vote to convict Trump no matter what, merely to punish him for beating Clinton. Now, with Merchan buttressing the prosecution, will any juror ask reasonable questions about the credibility of Cohen’s testimony?

I suspect the answer is no.

Yet the verdict on the trial is already in.

Trump’s lead in the polls over Biden has increased since it began. His lead in betting markets has widened even faster. Bettors now give him, for the first time, a better than even chance of winning the 2024 election. Biden has only a 35 percent chance, with minor candidates totaling about 12 percent.

Stunningly, at the start of 2023, betting markets said Trump had only a 1-in-6 shot of winning in 2024. (At the time, Ron DeSantis was the leader.) Nothing did more to improve Trump’s chances than being criminally indicted, and this trial in particular is clearly an abuse of legal process.

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(Book him!)

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So, when the verdict finally arrives, most of the country will likely simply shrug at it. But the damage this trial has done to the bedrock American principle that prosecutors should not use their massive power to punish their political opponents will remain.

No one’s going to jail for that, though.

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