This is potentially a big day on two fronts where the courts are bearing down on Donald Trump and threatening to hold him to account.
One front is civil. Today is the deadline for Trump to put up $464 million in order to appeal the fraud conviction against his company.
The other front is criminal. The judge in the Stormy Daniels election obstruction case has scheduled a hearing today to resolve issues arising from the last-minute disclosure of documents that caused a delay of at least a month. That trial was originally supposed to begin this morning.
If Trump doesn’t come up with the money and an appellate court refuses to waive or postpone the requirement to post a bond, New York state Attorney General Letitia James can start seizing his assets.
And if the judge agrees there is no reason to postpone the criminal trial much longer given what turned out to be a small number of new documents that were relevant to the case, we could see Trump stand trial on the first of four sets of criminal charges as soon as next month.
The question I’m sure a lot of people are asking is: How is he going to get out of it this time? Will Trump escape accountability again? It’s understandable to think he will because he has proved to be a master at wielding the protections afforded defendants as a weapon against the system itself.
For his entire life, Trump has been adept at getting out of situations like this through a combination of aggressive lawyering and transactionally-motivated favoritism. He has successfully delayed his three other criminal trials with a huge assist from the US Supreme Court and Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida.
But the delay strategy in the fraud case is complicated by the requirement that he pay the judgment before he can appeal, and what initially looked like cause for a big delay in the criminal case—with the introduction of tens of thousands of new documents and the possibility of sanctions against the prosecution for their late discovery—now looks to be, in the words of the DA, “a transparent attempt [by Trump] to shift the focus away from his own criminal conduct by pursuing remedies to which he is not entitled.”
This means Trump is now closer than he has ever been to being held accountable for his actions in a meaningful way.
Close, of course, is not certainty. He could still escape responsibility if the appeals court grants him relief from paying the fine before appeal, or if an entity with something big to gain makes a corrupt last-minute half-billion dollar investment in the promise of a second Trump administration.
And there is always the possibility that Judge Juan Merchan will find valid procedural reasons to delay the Stormy Daniels trial further. But it didn’t appear he was leaning that way last week, when he issued a spate of procedural rulings—mostly against Trump—that suggest he’s planning to start the trial soon. And as of this writing, no one has emerged to bail Trump out.
Will Trump escape accountability again?
So Trump appears to be running out of options on both fronts, and in the civil case almost all his remaining options carry political costs.
If Trump were to become beholden to an eleventh-hour financial savior it would create a potential security risk and open up a new line of attack for Democrats that will dog him for the rest of the campaign. If he were to try to hide behind bankruptcy, he would look weak and defensive while undermining his claim to being a business genius—the foundational claim of his political and personal life. His only good option is an appellate intervention, but that’s not likely and it’s out of his hands.
Here’s a good rundown from CNN of what might happen if Trump is unable to come up with the money today. If you don’t have time to read it, the bottom line is the actions James can take against him range from really bad (seizing bank accounts) to really really bad (seizing businesses and property) to really really really bad (seizing Mar-a-Lago).
Chances are, only the really bad options would happen first. The others are more complicated to carry out.
Still, the anticipated political costs of the New York civil and criminal trials now loom greater than initially anticipated before this moment of decision came into focus. It’s worth remembering that when the campaign began, neither the possibility of a large monetary judgment against Trump nor the New York criminal case were at the top of the list of things that conventional wisdom suggested were directly threatening to Trump’s political prospects.
That’s largely because *only* being an adjudicated tax fraud and *only* paying hush money to influence an election pales in comparison to engaging in the violent overthrow of the government or stealing top secret documents and refusing to return them.
I can understand the point of this comparison. But I never believed it would diminish the political resonance of Trump’s other crimes, because I don’t see it as an either-or situation. There will be a political and emotional price tag for Trump if Letitia James dismantles his holdings, and the prospect of being a convicted felon—regardless of the charges—carries unknown and potentially huge political risk.
Because we have never experienced anything like this as a country—and because Trump has never been this close to accountability—we have no way to know how the civil and criminal matters that unfold today will play out in the election. But it is hard to believe they will do no damage.
Remember, Trump is running as an authoritarian figure, and the greatest threat to authoritarians is the perception of weakness. Trump’s political persona depends on perpetually winning. We don’t know what it will do to him or his campaign to be rebuked in such a meaningful way.
But we may be on the doorstep of finding out.