Beyond a reasonable doubt is only part of it.
During my reporting career I spent many months in courtrooms—local and federal. As baseball legend Yogi Berra once said, “You can observe a lot by watching.”
One thing I observed in all that time in courtrooms, is this: it all comes down to the jury.
Whether Donald Trump finally gets charged with one or several of his many crimes comes down to whether prosecutors feel confident they can convince a jury to convict.
(Trump during the 2016 campaign)“I could stand in the middle of 5Th Avenue and shoot somebody and I would not lose any voters, okay? It’s like incredible.”
Whether a jury would convict him is THE most important question in the many Trump criminal investigations.
It doesn’t matter how much evidence the prosecution has.
It doesn’t matter how many witnesses they have.
Does the jury have the courage to make history and convict a former President of the United States?
It Only Takes One
In a criminal case the jury has to reach a unanimous verdict. All it takes is one Trump cult member lying during voir dire, claiming they can be fair and impartial. Voir dire is lawyer talk for when both sides and sometimes the judge question prospective jurors.
One Trumper refusing to convict would mean a hung jury—a victory of sorts for Trump. The case would have to be tried all over again with a new jury.
Donald Trump told over 30 thousand documented lies during his presidency.
For Trump and the Trumpers, lying is as natural as breathing. Donald Trump has been lying his entire life. His cult doesn’t care that he’s a liar.
His cult is like the Jim Jones cult that died in 1978 from mass suicide. They drank tubs of poisoned Kool-Aid.
Trumpers live in a fantasy world where whites and the white culture of the 1950s are going to rule America someday. It’s a world of lies, rumors and conspiracy fables. It is beyond easy to imagine a Trump Kool-Aid drinker lying to get on the jury and gum things up for the emperor wannabe.
The Trump cult of bigots, racists and religious blasphemers operates in a parallel fantasy universe when compared to the factual reality most of us occupy. It veers to the Right and occupies a state of unreality in which lies, delusions, fantasies, conspiracies and rumors replace facts, truth, data and evidence.
Always a Victim
If he winds up on trial, Donald Trump is certain to make a play for sympathy. He’s a master at playing the victim. He tells his cult repeatedly that any investigation of his crimes is not prosecution—it’s persecution.
Trump’s fondness for playing martyr is why so many so-called Christians love him. They fancy themselves as victims also.
If the victim card doesn’t work for Trump, he always has the threat of upheaval and violence. Trump’s psychopathic ego is so immense he thinks he can threaten the United States Justice Department. Trump hints his cult will erupt in coast-to-coast riots if the government dares to charge him with crimes.
John Dean was the White House lawyer who played a key role in the downfall of President Richard Nixon. In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Dean says Trump is far worse than Nixon: ”Trump is of a different cut than Nixon. I think, in fact Amy, he’s going to make Nixon look like a choir boy before it’s all over.”
Lessons in How to be a Mobster
It’s useful to think of Donald Trump as a Mafia godfather, even though such imagery plays into his self-pitying view of himself as a perpetual victim.
Trump learned how to be an organized crime racketeer from the late Roy Cohn, a disgraced and disbarred attorney.
Cohn first gained infamy as a key aide to the late Senator Joe McCarthy. It was McCarthy who led the 1950s Communist witch hunt which ruined countless lives.
Cohn represented some of the most notorious Mafia dons in New York, including the late John Gotti.
Cohn taught Trump how to insulate himself from the dirt of his crimes.
He taught him to never leave a paper trail.
Use the phones of others to issue orders that could lead to indictment and
Give crime orders by implication and inference, never use explicit words.
It was all about insulating Trump from proof of criminal intent and involvement in direct criminal action.
Trump has engaged in a life of crime—sometimes organized, oftentimes not—for years. Trump surrounds himself with ring-kissers and ass-kissers.
David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer-prize-winning former New York Times financial investigative reporter, pursued Trump’s shady business empire for years. He explained on the Dean Obeidallah radio show in 2018 why Donald Trump can be called a gangster:
“Donald is a mob boss. He’s not head of a family that kills people. He’s the head of a family that steals with a pen. It’s a white-collar crime family. His father ran a white-collar crime family, his father’s business partner was a mob front named Willie Tomasello. His grandfather was a pimp…”
A Unique American War Criminal
Veteran reporter Carl Bernstein of Woodward & Bernstein fame in the Watergate scandal says we need to view Donald Trump as not just another criminal. The Mar-a-Lago classified documents investigation, the attempted coup against our government on January 6th 2021 and the negligent arrogance which let hundreds of thousands of Americans die in the pandemic puts Trump in a unique category:
“He is America’s, our own American war criminal, of a kind we’ve never experienced before…It’s not political. Trump is not just political. He transcends the political and we need to start looking at his crimes in that context.”
If Trump is convicted—of something—the biggest impact will be on his fragile ego. He will be a loser—AGAIN. But he won’t do jail time because he will appeal the conviction to appellate judges he appointed. The Democrats let it happen. They had their thumbs up their bums and kept their mouths shut while Trump packed the federal judiciary with 234 radical judges. 234. Can you imagine the 6-3 Republican majority on the Supreme Court upholding Trump’s conviction? Me either.
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