Donald Trump’s Sleepy, Sleazy Criminal Trial

That Joe Biden appears older and somewhat diminished has been a wellspring of liberal panic. But Trump is diminishing, too, right in front of us. Strapped for cash, and facing an estimated seventy-six million dollars in legal fees, he spent much of the winter courting billionaires at Mar-a-Lago. Having inveighed against White House plans to aid the Ukrainian war effort and to either force a sale of TikTok or ban it, Trump watched as Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House, helped propel both proposals into law. (“GOP lawmakers take Trump’s policy orders with a grain of salt,” a headline in The Hill read.) And though Trump had warned for months that any attempt to try him criminally would induce the wrath of his supporters, by last week, according to the Times, the number of Trump fans outside the courthouse had sunk to the “mid-single digits.”