The first stages of the trial of the People of New York State vs. Donald J. Trump have been illuminating in a variety of ways. They have made it absolutely clear that this trial is not the legal non-event Republicans and drinkers of conventional wisdom-flavored Kool Aid said it was.
It is not a case about “paperwork” or “bookkeeping.” It is not a bland little nothingburger of arcane, hard-to-prove white-collar crime. It is not just the “hush money” or the “porn star” sideshow. It is a case about an alleged attempt by a man running for this country’s highest office to systematically defraud voters and use illegal means to gain an advantage in an election.
What is more, it is a case about doing so in an election cycle in which he won the electoral vote by fewer than 80,000 votes. His margin was razor-thin. The lies his friends at the National Enquirer told that were spread by others in the MAGA propaganda machine could well have tipped the balance of the election in his favor.
ADVERTISEMENT
Already we have heard from the former publisher of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, that he and Trump created a system for manufacturing hit jobs on Trump’s opponents and for concealing bad stories about Trump that was undeniably tied to the election. (Pecker testified that holds on “catch and kill” stories about Trump were lifted after the election. This was not business-as-usual in the world of bottom-of-the-barrel journalism. This was bespoke sleaze tailored to Trump’s measurements for campaign 2016 purposes.)
That’s bad. But it’s worse because, of course, it is not Trump’s only effort to use illegitimate means to win an election. Similar crimes are at the heart of the Fulton County, Georgia, case against Trump and the case Jack Smith has brought against Trump in D.C.
It’s also not the only case in which Trump is being accused of illegally defrauding the public. In fact, in the civil fraud trial against him and his company that was concluded in February, Trump was hit with a judgment against him that is in excess of $450 million. And even that is not the only recent case in which Trump was found to have lied at the expense of others, given the not-one-but-two-verdicts against him in the defamation lawsuits brought against him by E. Jean Carroll.
In fact, one of the most damaging aspects of the current case is that day in and day out for the next six to eight weeks the public will be given examples of how Trump lies, surrounds himself with liars, and has in fact made a profession of lying. That almost does not do his business association with lying justice. He is alongside friends and associates like Rupert Murdoch, the late Roger Ailes, Vladimir Putin, the FSB, the Internet Research Agency, the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, and Christopher Ruddy, one of the pioneers of the Misinformation Industrial Complex.
In fact, even students of Trump’s life and career (and perhaps especially students of Trump’s life and career) would be hard-pressed to find any aspect of his past or present that is not founded on lying. He has lied to his wives. (This case is about that in part.) He lies about his girlfriends. He has lied about golf. He lies about his height and his weight. He lies about what he knows—from nukes to bio science.
Trump has lied about his grades. Trump lied to get out of military service. But he hasn’t just lied about his personal life.
Trump has lied for a living and about how he well he did in making a living. The fraud trial exposed the fact that as part of his real estate business he misstated the values of his properties and overstated the value of his brand. He has lied about his business successes. He tried to persuade the world he was a master deal maker when he was anything but. (He lost money in the casino business, for goodness sakes.) He lied over and over again about what he was worth.
His TV persona was a lie. The image he offered to voters as a big business guy was a lie. He even lied that he did not need money from donors to run for office he could pay for it all himself.
Once he claimed the presidency—based on an avalanche of lies—he then really turned up the volume. He lied more than 30,000 times as president. Sure, politicians are known for lying. But this was next-order stuff. This was a pathological lie generator with a long red tie known for hitting golf balls into the woods. And then, the lies started to metastasize. He manufactured the Big Lie—arguing without basis that he had won the 2020 election. He lied about whether he had stolen national secrets, or whether he believed he had a right to them when he had been told over and over, as he had been about the election, that he was in the wrong.
Trump is not a man who lies. Trump is a lie. Trump is a fabrication of the mind of Trump. Trump is a fictional character who has fictional achievements and fictional wealth. He is no more real than the tales of visitors from outer space that are so popular with his partners in prevarication at the National Enquirer. In some respects, it is no surprise he has become the world’s most notorious liar. He has had quite a lot of success lying and then lying about his lies.
The only question for him has been when will the truth come home to roost? When will he be held to account? And all of a sudden it is becoming clearer to all why he has struggled so hard, used every tool at his disposal, to avoid appearing in court where findings of fact trump trumpery and Trumpiness.
That is the power of this trial. It is not just in the possible legal consequences this one case may have for the former president. It is that just as his lies tipped the electoral scales in his favor in 2016, shining a light on the truth may be the difference in 2024. And this trial more than any of the court proceedings of the past or any of the others that are pending but may not take place before the election, has the greatest chance of giving the public an honest look at the former president and revealing him to be what has been all along: the sum of all his frauds.
