This time, the nation was on notice. Back in 2016, those of us who supported Donald Trump at least had the excuse of not knowing how sociopathy can present itself, and we at least had the conceit of believing that the presidency was not just a man, but an institution greater than the man, with legal and traditional mechanisms to make sure he’d never go off the rails.
By 2020, after the chaos, the derangement, and the incompetence, we knew a lot better.
This is The Trump Trials by George T. Conway III, a newsletter that chronicles the former president’s legal troubles. Sign up here.
Not all that long ago, I thought that the trial currently being held in The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump would be the last one I’d want to see as the first one tried against the former president. It seemed the least serious of the cases against him. Here’s a man who tried to overthrow American democracy by launching a coup to stay in power.
This is The Trump Trials by George T. Conway III, a newsletter that chronicles the former president’s legal troubles. Sign up here.
The defendant nodded off a couple of times on Monday. And I have to confess, as a spectator in an overflow courtroom watching on closed-circuit television, so did I.
Legal proceedings can be like that. Mundane, even boring. That’s how the first couple of days of the trial in the People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, Indictment No.
This is The Trump Trials by George T. Conway III, a newsletter that chronicles the former president’s legal troubles. Sign up here.
You can’t always get what you want. What Mick Jagger said about life applies with equal, perhaps even greater, force to litigation. Like life, litigation has its ups and downs. It reflects human fears and frailties—because judges, lawyers, and litigants are human. Law is never perfect, and never will be.
Sign up for The Trump Trials by George T. Conway III, a newsletter that chronicles the former president’s legal troubles.
On July 24, 1974, when the Supreme Court issued its decision in United States v. Nixon, ordering President Richard Nixon to produce the Watergate tapes, the president turned to his chief of staff, Alexander Haig, to understand what had just happened. He later recounted the exchange in his memoirs:
“Unanimous?” I guessed.
“Unanimous. There’s no air in it at all,” he said.
Donald Trump is well on his way to becoming history’s greatest litigation loser ever. But in the multifront war of Trump v. Seemingly Everyone Else, he has just prevailed in one small skirmish: The Battle of the Questions Presented.
When I review divided appellate-court decisions, I almost always read the dissenting opinions first. The habit formed back when I was a young law student and lawyer—and Federalist Society member—in the late 1980s, when I would pore (and, I confess, usually coo) over Justice Antonin Scalia’s latest dissents.