Now Every Week Can Be Infrastructure Week

This is how the Trump trials will go

Remember ‘Infrastructure Week’? Donald Trump was going to hold a press conference today, he said, until he canceled it on Thursday, avowing instead that his attorneys will vindicate his election-fraud theory while defending him in Georgia.

Never mind that his election-fraud report contains the ‘findings’ that Sidney Powell, et al manufactured through the very election-tampering crimes that they are charged with committing, and thus serves as further proof of their crimes. Trump is innocent, you see. He’s the victim of a vast left-wing conspiracy.

Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr thinks that Trump is guilty of mishandling classified documents and will be found guilty. However, “I don’t think that that translates into jail time, because I think, you know, if I was attorney general and we were prosecuting, for example, on the documents case, which is a righteous case, I wouldn’t want to see a former president in jail.” Instead, “I think a very substantial penalty would serve the public interest. But putting him in jail has too many collateral bad impacts on the country.” Trump is guilty and he should be convicted, but he should not spend any time in jail, you see, otherwise an angry mob might attack the capitol, or something.

Meanwhile, the people who actually did that on 1/6 are getting longer sentences. No wonder so many Americans feel that there are two tiers of justice. What’s hilarious is that the people actually going to prison think Trump ever gave a damn for them. The irony that Trump wanted Hillary Clinton in prison over emails is no longer funny, just idiotic.

“If the public losses faith in the Justice Department’s ability to operate without bias, then they will lose public support, and that spells nothing but trouble for the future,” former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan recently opined at Fox News.

Public perception is of course being shaped by plentiful coverage and opinion-modeling. The justice system conspires to pursue Trump for alleged crimes in four different courtrooms at once because they are all racist against him.

Copious evidence that Trump took part in “a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities including, but not limited to, false statements and writings, impersonating a public officer, forgery, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, computer theft, computer trespass, computer invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the state, acts involving theft, and perjury,” per the Georgia indictment, is merely the Deep State microaggressing again.

But this is not like Russian collusion. This is not a Steele Dossier coinciding with the real perfidiousness of Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn to distract us with Putin-inspired pareidolia that Trump is a Russian asset. These are concrete charges and William Barr will not get to decide the sentence if/when he is convicted. Put simply, Georgia is the most serious threat to Trump’s freedom since he was elected.

It is possible that Jack Smith, prosecuting the documents case, will want to go first ahead of Fani Willis. By either road, Trump is en route to conviction. Then everyone gets to shout and scream about the sentence. Rogers is entirely correct that this can all go sideways. I do worry that a significant portion of the country will never accept any verdict of guilty and set things on fire if Trump goes to jail. When I wrote about all this last week, I was repeatedly assured by amateur political scientists that Trump will be re-elected to the White House on a great red wave of ANGER!!!

But I don’t think that is the most likely outcome. Instead, I expect the news — all the news — to focus relentlessly on the relentless news beat of Trump’s trials. MSNBC will speak of little else. Fox News will speak of little else. CNN and Newsmax will speak of nought else.

And Trump will speak only of his trials. They are out to get him. They are all liars. They are all stupid. They are all criminals. He alone is innocent. This will consume his every public utterance — unless a judge issues a gag order, which could easily be necessary and would instantly raise another fuss on Truth Social. Or Trump can keep making promises to vindicate himself and then canceling them for new promises.

Until the verdict, every week of a Trump trial will be ‘Infrastructure Week.’

Perhaps I am wrong. I am human, I can be wrong. I’ve been wrong before.

Maybe I am wrong and no one will ever care that Joe Biden used the pseudonym "Robert L. Peters" as well as other names in his correspondence with Hunter.

I was wrong about the Hunter Biden laptop, for example. I never dismissed it altogether as a fake, but I did expect it to contain black propaganda, or else turn out to be just an embarrassment (because Hunter, natch) and a nothingburger.

Heck, just a couple of months ago I was on the nothingburger bandwagon. I still see Democrats — meaning high and low, casual or serious — dismissing the laptop, and investigations into Joe Biden, as politicized, and nothingburgers.

Now the letter from Mike Morell calling the laptop “Russian propaganda” has Judicial Watch suing the CIA. Republicans in congressional committees are closing in on Russian, Chinese, and yes, Ukrainian money that came into the Biden family coffers in exchange for … what, exactly? When people dismiss this issue, I ask this question. No one can ever answer and that says a great deal to me.

Sooner or later, though, the minds of Republican primary voters will snap into focus. Perhaps it will be too late: Trump will be the nominee, he will be in jail, and the party apparatchiks will face a tough choice to please their partisans or follow their principles. (Spoiler: the GOP will never choose principles.)

Trump might just be the only person on earth capable of re-electing Joe Biden. Winnable voters — including people who hate Trump, even if they hate Joe Biden — will not be able to see past the corruption of Trump to discern the corruption of Biden.

With Trump in the way, Democrats will refuse to see any Biden corruption at all. Maybe I am wrong, because I have been wrong before, but I expect the trials of Donald Trump to consume media oxygen and detract from coverage of Biden family business.

Conspiracy theorists will make the same connection to imply a reversal of causation, i.e. to blame a vast left-wing conspiracy. Trump will try to help them by scheduling an Infrastructure Week every so often. Maybe I am wrong but it all feels so predictable.