What if Donald Trump just walked out of the Manhattan show trial?

The Stormy Daniels "testimony" and Michael Cohen's buffoonish TikTok videos make clear the fix is in; what if Trump just refused to participate? No Republican governor would extradite him.

The lurid antics at Donald Trump’s show trial in Manhattan reached a new low yesterday, as the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels testified about the details of her 2006 sexual encounter with Trump.

It’s anyone’s guess how Daniels’s “missionary position” testimony relates to the felony charges Trump faces over misclassified internal accounting records from 2017.

But her words - along with the revelation that star prosecution witness Michael Cohen is now livestreaming criticism of Trump on TikTok for money - are the latest sign that a supposedly serious criminal trial has descended into farce.

The question is what, if anything, Trump can do about it.

(Before you ask, no, I have not yet decided to vote for Trump. But I realized to my shock this morning I am considering doing so, mainly because I am so disgusted with with this case.)

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(Fighting for the truth, without fear or favor… stand with me.)

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Let’s be clear on a couple points: first, nominally independent local prosecutors in New York brought this indictment, but the Biden Administration has blessed it.

How else to read the fact that the case’s lead prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, moved from the third-ranking post at Biden’s Justice Department in December 2022 to join it? If the Biden Administration had had qualms about criminally prosecuting its leading rival on tissue-thin charges, it would have told Colangelo he was destroying his career by helping the case - and he would have heard the message.

Second, this indictment would never have been brought had Donald Trump not beaten Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The prosecution’s central theory is that Trump conspired to beat Clinton by paying Stormy Daniels not to reveal his affair (even though no one disputes Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen actually paid Daniels and then supposedly asked Trump for reimbursement after the election), and that that conspiracy somehow causes the misdemeanor charges of “falsifying business records” to instead become felony counts.

Never mind that it is not clear New York state’s laws on election conspiracies can or should apply to presidential elections; never mind that the reimbursement happened after the election and thus cannot have affected it; never mind that Trump had also tried to keep Daniels’s story secret in 2011, long before he was running for President, raising the question of his motivations. In framing the case this way, the prosecution has explicitly tied Trump’s 2016 victory to the charges.

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Two weeks ago, as the trial began, I suggested Trump might want to take the tack of other victims of politically motivated prosecutions and refuse to defend himself:

Maybe Donald Trump needs to make clear that he will no longer participate in it in the most basic way possible - by giving up any effort in his own defense.

Maybe he needs to fire his lawyers and sit mute and quiet and alone at the defense table until he is convicted, and then dare the judge to sentence him to prison as a first-time 77-year-old nonviolent offender for a business records violation.

This tack is unrealistic, of course, if not outright impossible.

It would go against Trump’s instincts, which are to shout and fight at every opportunity. I am not even sure if the judge would allow him to dismiss his counsel mid-case. And presumably his lawyers would tell him he’s crazy to do so, that he needs to create a record for appeal.

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Since then, though, the case has become even more of a farce.

Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing it, has fined Trump and threatened him with for violating a “gag order” that largely prevents him from discussing it. Meanwhile, Cohen, the prosecution’s chief witness, is openly attacking Trump on social media and profiting from doing so.

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Further, yesterday prosecutors encouraged Stephanie Clifford, nee Stormy Daniels, to testify in graphic detail about the sexual encounter she claims with Trump in 2006.

Daniels agrees the encounter was consensual, and Trump is not on trial for rape - or even for paying Daniels not to discuss the encounter (which would not be illegal, since paying hush money is not a crime). We don’t prosecute adults for affairs either, not in the United States in 2024.

Why exactly was Daniels allowed to testify at length about this 18-year-old experience? The only possible reason is to smear and embarrass Trump.

So I am starting to wonder if Trump should take the nuclear option: get on a plane to Florida and refuse to participate any further in this nonsense.

The elite media, which has kept a straight face as it has covered the case, would surely thunder about Trump’s disrespect for the rule of law. But in so doing it might convince some people to take a closer look at the insanity of the charges themselves.

Ron DeSantis certainly wouldn’t agree to extradite Trump, and I doubt any other Republican governor would either. So he could continue to campaign in any state with a Republican governor. His biggest problem might be that seven swing states - Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin - have Democratic governors.

But even if Merchan finds Trump in contempt of court and sentences him to jail, or to prison after a guilty verdict, would a Democratic governor really risk arresting and extraditing Trump to New York as he was at a Presidential rally in, say, Pennsylvania? How would such an arrest even work in reality, if Trump refused to turn himself in? Would the Secret Service allow it? What would the headlines be?

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Trump is a non-violent offender with no prior criminal history - who is also the leading opposition candidate for President. Would the Democrats risk imprisoning him against his will before Election Day? (Afterwards he will either be President-elect, or they won’t care anymore.)

I don’t think Trump will roll the dice this way. I’m not sure what would happen if he did.

But the mere fact this option is real shows how far down the rabbit hole we have already gone.