WASHINGTON—The roof is falling in on former Republican White House denizen Donald Trump, judicially. Politically, he’s using it to solidify his stranglehold on the Republican Party.
But even his followers might want to take a second look at the costs of doing so.
Four top Trump aides—the latest was former communications director Michael Navarro—have gone to jail for Trump-related crimes. And with nary a peep from Trump. And he’s lashed out at another, former fixer Michael Cohen, for turning state’s evidence.
And more than 800 of the Trumpites who invaded the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in his coup d’etat attempt to keep himself in the presidency, have gone to jail, some facing years in the pen. He’s vowed to pardon all those “patriots” if he returns to the White House. His past record should raise doubts about that pledge.
Meanwhile, here’s where the Trump trials stand:
Ex-Oval Office occupant Trump has a documented—indeed videotaped—reputation as a serial sex offender. In one conviction, magazine writer E. Jean Carroll has already won two judgments, with combined fines of $88.5 million for defaming her—after a Manhattan jury, in the first verdict, decided he had groped her in an elevator years before.
And Cohen went to jail for laundering a $125,000 Trump-signed check, through Cohen’s checking account, to pay off former sex film star Stormy Daniels to shut up about a prior affair with Trump.
The second piece of the falling roof and the one that hurts Trump’s ego the most, will come in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan this week. Judge Arthur Engoron will decide how much Trump will pay in a massive financial fraud case New York Attorney General Letitia “Tish” James brought. The minimum is $250 million. James now seeks $375 million.
The fraud case also means the company, Trump’s real estate empire, will be broken up and sold off, for a lot less than the inflated and fake values he used to get loans to assemble it. His golf clubs will go. His Westchester estate and Manhattan condo will go. His apartment-retail tower just north of the Chicago River will go. And so on.
Engoron will also decide whether Trump and his kids—-who allegedly, but not really, ran the firm while Trump inhabited the White House—will be barred from doing business in New York for five years.
And news reports surfaced in late January that Trump may have committed personal income tax fraud, $48.3 million worth.
The third case directly impacts the presidential race. Trump is headed towards the Republican nomination and a rematch with the Democrat who legitimately defeated him, incumbent Joe Biden, this fall. But Colorado and Maine have already knocked Trump off their ballots for violating the U.S. Constitution’s 14th amendment. An Illinois election panel is set to decide whether to evict him, too.
Trump took both Colorado and Maine to the U.S. Supreme Court, which includes three Trump-named justices. Oral arguments are scheduled for February 8. The leading case comes from Colorado, where six voters, including Republicans, argue that because Trump incited, aided, and abetted the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol Trumpite insurrection, invasion, and coup d’etat attempt, the Constitution bars him from holding any federal, state or local public office—including the presidency.
“Insurrection against the Constitution has been mercifully rare,” their brief told the justices. “Trump refused to accept defeat. Instead, Trump summoned and incited an angry crowd to attack the Capitol and disrupt the certification of his electoral defeat.”
Citing his tweeted incitements, including the notorious one in December to white nationalist groups “Be There! It will be wild!” the Coloradans told the justices “on Jan. 6, Trump lit the fuse,” with a fiery speech ordering them to march on Congress and “stop the steal”—the certification of Biden’s election.
“Knowing the risk of violence and that the crowd was angry and armed, Trump incited violence both explicitly and implicitly during his speech at the Ellipse.
“As president, Trump swore to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution,” the Colorado voters told the justices. “Instead of peacefully ceding power, Trump intentionally organized and incited a violent mob to attack the United States Capitol in a desperate effort to prevent the counting of electoral votes cast against him.”
Trump lawyers make absurd argument
Trump’s lawyers counter that because the amendment doesn’t specifically mention the president, the president is exempt from that constitutional ban—a ban whose framers, in 1868, meant for it to include a president: The Confederacy’s Jeff Davis.
The fate of the third trial, the four-count criminal trial in D.C. of Trump for depriving voters of their constitutional rights to a free and fair election by inciting the insurrection, is—right now—up to judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C.
Justice Department Special Counsel is arguing strongly that Trump can’t wrap himself in presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, as he claims. Basically, Smith says, that immunity covers legal—not illegal—actions in office. And Trump was inciting the insurrection as a politician, not as a president.
If the Court of Appeals gives Smith the go-ahead for trial #3, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan will get it going. Judge Chutkan already pointed out in another case that “the president is not a king.” The original starting date was March 4, one day before “Super Tuesday,” the slate of primaries, most of them in the deeply Trumpite South, to ultimately decide the GOP nomination. The delay in the higher court will push that back.
Trial #4 is the most wide-ranging: A multi-count, multi-defendant racketeering, and conspiracy case in Georgia against Trump and 15 other defendants for conspiracy to steal the Peach State’s electoral votes, along with those in other swing states.
More than 30 of the counts in Fulton County (Atlanta) District Attorney Fani Willis’s case cite Trump. And unlike the two federal trials—in D.C. and Florida—involving Trump, he can’t order the U.S. Justice Department to drop them.
Willis has gotten several of the conspirators to plead guilty and sing. And since it’s a criminal trial, this is the one that, if he’s convicted, is most likely to send him to jail.
Willis now forecasts her trial will not start before August, putting it right smack in the homestretch of the 2024 election campaign.
Trial #5, and federal trial #2, in Florida, covers Trump’s purloined secret papers which he spirited out of the White House to Mar-a-Lago, and later flourished before people without security clearances, including an Australian magnate. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, is slow-walking it.
That leaves the fate of the top Trump aides he’s thrown under the bus: Former Communications Director Peter Navarro, sentenced to four months in prison for defying congressional subpoenas from the January 6 investigating committee, former key Trump aide Steve Bannon, sentenced to a year for the same offense, but appealing it. He also faces trial in March for a fake scheme to raise money to build Trump’s racist Mexican Wall.
Former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was actually almost sentenced for unreported communications with the Russian ambassador when Trump AG Bill Barr reversed course and dropped the case.
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