Dullness on day one of Trump’s ‘hush money’ trial

Is it Dozy Don now? Social media is already pulsating over reports that Donald Trump appears to have fallen asleep on the first day of his criminal trial. “His head keeps dropping down and his mouth goes slack,” says the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman. Oh boy. “72 hours until all hell breaks loose!” declared Mr. Trump in a fundraising email sent out on Friday. “Rabid Democrats are poised to make millions while I’m stuck defending myself in court.” But it turns out that hell is fairly soporific.

You can’t blame poor old Trump. How is any seventy-seven-year-old man expected to sit through such a boring trial, even if it concerns him, and not nod off? We haven’t even got through the juror selection process, and already it’s been several hours. Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche and the prosecutor Joshua Steinglass have been busy trading procedural points with the judge, Justice Juan M. Merchan.

The most interesting moment of the trial so far seems to have been Donald Trump chuckling at his own hilariousness when Steinglass read out a tweet encouraging people not to use his former lawyer Michael Cohen (for more on him, read Paul Wood’s excellent profile from 2020 here).

Other than that, it’s been… zzzzzz.

Yes, this is all historic, momentous, unprecedented; pick your adjective. A former US president, the current favorite to be re-elected in November, in the dock on a criminal trial in Manhattan. There’s never been an election year like it.

Yes, the case relates to porn stars, dodgy lawyers, hush money. But there is nothing sexy about tax misdemeanors and legal blather.

Alvin Bragg’s criminal indictment is pretty much what all Trump’s dog-loyal talking heads say it is: accounting irregularities, clumped together and spun into an absurd number of criminal counts by an obviously hyper-partisan special prosecutor.

Democrats like to say that Trump’s trials are proof that nobody, not even a former occupant of the White House, is above the law. But nobody should be beneath it, either — and that certainly does seem the case with Donald Trump, hounded as he is on an enormous number of legal fronts not so much for what he’s done but because of who he is.

Today, Trump’s prosecutors had two minor victories as Justice Merchan refused to recuse himself — as Trump has asked — and the judge also ruled that Karen McDougal, another woman who alleges she had an affair with Trump, can testify.

On the other hand, Trump’s defense also persuaded the judge that prosecutors can’t play the famously crude Access Hollywood “grab ’em by the…” tapes. Merchan also said he won’t allow evidence that suggests Melania Trump was pregnant when her husband conducted an affair.

Matters are bound to become somewhat more exciting from here — largely because so far the trial couldn’t get much duller.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.