The troubling reason Trump’s trial is so boring | Will Bunch Newsletter

No moment captured the conundrums that America faces better than Saturday night’s annual White House Correspondents Dinner. President Joe Biden got a roasting, but also gave a stirring defense of journalism and the role it can, and must, play in explaining the threat from a growing authoritarian movement in this country. Yet Biden’s words rung hollow, knowing that U.S.-supplied bombs have helped to kill roughly 100 journalists in Gaza, and that his White House won’t condemn a campus crackdown on free speech. How do we thread the needle of seeking a just peace for Gaza while preventing a Donald Trump dictatorship? I wish I knew the answer.

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In his monologue during Saturday night’s White House Correspondents Dinner, the Saturday Night Live comic Colin Jost made a joke about New York City tabloids that only a journalist could laugh at. “[A]s a Staten Islander,” Jost said, “I still get all my news from the New York Post: The only paper where the front page always has the same 200-point font, whether the headline is ‘World War III to Start Tomorrow’ or ‘Central Park Owl Dead in Building Collision.’”

Hey, too soon! Some of us are still mourning the loss of Flaco the owl. But Jost’s newspaper humor did remind me a lot of the way TV news networks that aren’t named Fox are covering the so-called hush-money trial of former and wannabe next president Donald Trump in a Manhattan courtroom. Fully mobilized, CNN and especially MSNBC — which became a Trump-fried version of Court TV months ago — are covering the first felony trial of a former U.S. president with all the gusto of World War III, even if much of the testimony so far has landed like a dead bird.

I’m not saying things are going well for Trump, who looks 20 pounds lighter yet 15 years older in the New York courtroom. Prosecutors working for Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg are methodically making their open-and-shut case that Trump falsified business records to conceal his 2016 payoff to adult film star Stormy Daniels, and that he did so to help win the 2016 presidential election. And it turns out (surprise, surprise!) that Trump as a criminal defendant — struggling to stay awake at 10 a.m. — looks weak and ineffectual, which is not great when your career aspiration is “strongman.”

Maybe something shocking awaits down the pike, as the trial inches forward with nearly as many days off as days on. But so far it seems like a TV viewer would have better luck stumbling across a rerun of a 1950s Perry Mason episode than finding an aha!, Perry Mason-style gotcha moment in the Trump courtroom. There is only one thing that MSNBC cannot and will not say in its all-hands-on-deck coverage, and it’s this:

The Trump trial is boring.

Last week’s main witness, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, did offer a mildly entertaining tour through the bizarro world of supermarket tabloids. But you didn’t think that Pecker was going to reveal that Sen. Ted Cruz’s dad actually did help assassinate JFK, did you? His most critical testimony about the Enquirer’s pattern of killing salacious stories about Trump, like his 10-month affair with Playboy model Karen McDougal, confirmed the details of a story that ran in the Wall Street Journal in November 2016, nearly eight years ago.

Pecker was followed on the stand by Trump’s longtime ex-personal assistant Rhona Graff, which caused palpable excitement among the cable news crowd, because Trump insiders apparently say that Graff “knows where the bodies are buried.” (Isn’t that the second hole at Bedminster?) Needless to say, no corpses were unearthed. Instead, Graff added to the plodding chain of evidence that she’d entered phone numbers for McDougal and Daniels in Trump’s contact list. Then came a banker — not even Trump’s banker, but the banker for Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen — before the Trial of the Century closed for the week.

Of course, boring might just be the thing that takes down Trump. A former assistant DA for Manhattan, Rebecca Roiphe, published a New York Times op-ed that might be the best explanation of the first of four potential criminal trials against Trump. “Yet this case is not really about election interference, nor is it a politically motivated attempt to criminalize a benign personal deal,” she wrote. “Boring as it may sound, it is a case about business integrity.” She notes that the case against Trump is similar to other cut-and-dried financial charges brought in Manhattan.

That’s the thing about Trump’s case and his $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels. We all should be shocked — not by the facts of the case, or at least not anymore — but by the fact that we’ve known about Trump’s obvious crime for eight years, and yet nothing was done about it. Now someone is trying to do something about it, and it may be too late.

Trump should be facing federal campaign-finance charges, and the indictment should have been filed on Jan. 21, 2021, if not sooner. Trump’s lawyer Cohen pleaded guilty in August 2018 to a scheme to violate campaign-finance laws in paying Daniels to keep quiet about her affair with Trump. Federal prosecutors made it clear that Trump — identified in court documents as “Individual 1″ — took part in the criminal conspiracy. But the Justice Department has a long-standing practice of not indicting a sitting president. What’s more, the former U.S. Attorney for Manhattan, the Trump-appointed Geoffrey Berman, admitted in his book that his boss, then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr, pressured him not to pursue the case beyond Cohen.

That left it to Bragg — who replaced the Trump-friendly DA Cyrus Vance — to methodically take months to investigate and decide that there was indeed a state case involving Trump’s hush-money payment. Those 34 felony indictments came in April 2023, nearly seven years after the alleged crime occurred. This raises obvious questions for Trump’s lawyers to exploit. How can he be charged with a felony when he wasn’t charged by the Justice Department for the alleged underlying crimes? And why did it take so long for the Manhattan DA to bring his case?

This doesn’t happen in a vacuum. In the middle of Trump’s trial, another lawyer for the embattled president was standing before the U.S. Supreme Court to make the shocking argument that nothing that a president does under the veneer of an official act can be prosecuted, essentially turning a commander-in-chief into a full-blown dictator. And some of the Supreme Court justices, including a couple appointed by Trump himself, sounded ready to buy it.

In the Manhattan case, if Trump walks away scot-free — and he might — if won’t be because of the truth of what happened, but because of the corruption of Barr and others who put their finger on the scale of justice five years ago and made the best case against the 45th president go away. The Supreme Court arguments have put an intellectual face on the debate over whether a crime done by the president is illegal, but what’s happening in New York shows the hard reality that our presidents have already been above the law for years.

The banality of the daily testimony in the Trump case isn’t what makes it interesting, or even important. But the verdict in the case will tell us whether America has a democracy, and a justice system, that is worth saving. And that part it not boring. It should scare you to death.

Question: Why so little coverage of student protests on [main stream media] MSM?? — Dr. Claudia Swan (@raretiesof) via X/Twitter

Answer: I got a couple of variations on this question, and it’s certainly something I’ve pondered myself. In fairness, CNN has shifted into higher gear in the last day or so, maybe realizing that riot cops throwing students to the ground is more compelling video than a Trump trial that bars cameras from the courtroom. MSNBC is a different story. The so-called liberal cable news channel (how a network that airs “Morning Joe” Scarborough’s angry rants against kids today is considered left-wing baffles me) suffers from a lack of reporters in the field. But let’s be honest, MSNBC has also nurtured an audience that’s there for anti-Donald Trump coverage, and nothing else. Older Democrats are starkly divided over who to root for in the campus unrest, and they worry any chaos is not good for President Joe Biden. There are days when one almost wishes for a left-wing equivalent of Newsmax.

In response to last week’s fairly prescient question about campus arrests, many of you agreed with me that sending riot cops into mostly peaceful college protests is a dangerous overreaction. “No need to use cops this way,” wrote Lynne Medley. “I would rather see them walking the beat in our city. The students are on the right side of history.” But David Haas, seeing a physical threat in some of the protesters’ actions, warned against falling “into the trap of using ‘violation of free speech’ as a convenient, but inaccurate, gloss over a lot of critical issues.”

📮This week’s question: Polls clearly show that Biden is struggling with young voters, even as pundits disagree whether the problem is unhappiness with his pro-Israel policies, or closer-to-home causes like inflation. What’s your advice for Biden on how to win back young voters? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Young voters” in the subject line.

The explosion in recent days of campus protests over Israel’s ongoing attacks on civilians in Gaza, and in support of the Palestinian cause, have reminded me a lot of the old saying about upstart movements — that first they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win. Violent police crackdowns at red-state universities like the University of Texas at Austin and Atlanta’s Emory University suggest we are largely in “then they fight you” mode, but our TV pundit class has also added a whole new category: then they come up with insane theories that blame the protests on anything else besides the fact that children are being blown up in Gaza.

On his popular Max show Real Time With Bill Maher, the leering comedian put on his Hugh Hefner robe to go out and scold the kids to get off his lawn, tag-teaming with NYU semipublic intellectual Scott Galloway. The two put their inane spin on this: College students are erecting tents to protest the war because they aren’t (insert crude, non-newspaper friendly terms for “having sex”). Galloway loves this idea so much he actually repeated it on CNN the next morning. “Protesting is the new sex,” he insisted. “You get a dopa hit from gathering together in fighting off a perceived enemy [and] I think they’re on the hunt for what I’d call a fake mortal enemy.”

This evidence-free theory from the Playboy-era liberals wasn’t the only desperate attempt from the pundit class to explain the coast-to-coast campus protests with pop psychology. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria blames the tone of the protests, if not the encampments themselves, on research showing that “college students today are lonelier, less resilient, and more disengaged than their predecessors,” and this has led to incivility. Others have said that Gaza activism is an aftershock from the school COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020-21, or believe none of this would be happening were it not for TikTok.

It’s interesting that campus unrest, and the adult disbelief over why this is happening, has largely drowned out the latest news from the Middle East, where a newborn baby removed from the womb of a mother killed by an Israeli airstrike died after five days, a report showed engineers from an IDF squad take credit for blowing up hundreds of homes, and it’s been suggested the International Court of Justice may issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Here’s my pop psychology theory for why so many young people are protesting: The videos they watch on TikTok show the reality of a brutal war killing thousands of women and children, and they do not like it. The idea that college students are adults and that forming political opinions and taking action is a feature, not a bug, of their academic life should have been settled in 1972 when we gave 18-year-olds the right to vote. It feels like today’s protesters are “the adults” in the face of childish punditry desperate to change the subject. Or maybe Bill Maher and Scott Galloway just aren’t getting enough sex.

There has been a lot of talk in recent days about the events of May 4, 1970, when Ohio’s governor called the National Guard onto a Kent State campus rocked by protests over an expanding U.S. war in Southeast Asia, and the guardsmen fired live rounds at students, killing four and wounding nine. Scenes like rooftop snipers at Indiana University and Ohio State, and new threats to send National Guardsmen onto strife-riven campuses, are introducing the Kent State story to a new generation. Although the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic canceled 50th anniversary commemorations I’d hoped to attend, I did publish an in-depth column on what it all meant on April 30, 2020. Check it out: “On the 50th anniversary, America’s still not fully recovered from the wounds of Kent State.”

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