In 60 surreal New York minutes, Donald Trump staved off a personal and financial disaster but moved perilously closer to historic ignominy.
It didn’t start out too bad for the ex-president on Monday.
He won a legal triumph when an appeals court more than halved the value of a half-billion-dollar bond pledge needed to stop prosecutors from seizing some of his properties – or what he revealingly dubbed as his “babies” on social media.
It could get a lot better on Tuesday when Trump’s net worth could rocket by $3 billion when a merged entity that folded in his media company goes public.
Yet the moment that history is likely to remember most clearly unfolded in a Manhattan courtroom where Trump sat seething as a judge thwarted his latest delaying tactics and set a date for his hush money trial.
Barring some unforeseen event, Trump will on April 15 become the first ex-commander in chief to go on trial, injecting a stunning intangible into November’s election and shattering yet another presidential precedent. The coming trial will provide an acid test of his strategy of seeking to discredit what he insists is a corrupt legal system and to leverage his political movement against his opponents.
But despite all Trump’s efforts to slow down simultaneously running legal clocks, there’s now a real possibility one of the candidates on the presidential ballot could be a convicted felon. Of course, it’s also possible that Trump could be acquitted in this criminal case. He’s facing 34 charges of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments made before the 2016 election to cover up an alleged affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels. (Trump has pleaded not guilty and denied the affair.)
Trump’s conflicting emotions – relief…
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