One of the amazing political achievements of Republicans in this election cycle has been their ability, at least so far, to send Donald Trump’s last year in office down the memory hole. Voters are supposed to remember the good economy of January 2020, with its combination of low unemployment and low inflation, while forgetting about the plague year that followed.
Since Trump’s romp in the Super Tuesday primaries, however, the ex-president and his surrogates have begun trying to pull off an even more impressive act of revisionism: portraying his entire presidency — even 2020, that awful first pandemic year — as pure magnificence. On Wednesday, Representative Elise Stefanik, the chair of the House Republican Conference, tried echoing Ronald Reagan: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
And Trump himself, in his Tuesday night victory speech, reflected wistfully on his time in office as one in which “our country was coming together.”
The thing is: the guy doesn’t want to do the job. He doesn’t read security briefings, doesn’t pay attention in meetings. He had a unified congress in the first two years and barely got anything done. No long-term planning, just sugar-high tax cuts. He just enjoys the title and authority that comes with it. To him, it’s just a competition to beat the Democrats.
I don’t think it is even The Democrats
It is Obama for ribbing him (after all the accusations of being an illegal immigrant…). Hilary for being a woman. And Biden for clearly and definitively beating the shit out of him in every single interaction (watching trump “back down” during their debate when Biden thought he heard an attack on Beau is beautiful).
Actually, he’s trying to stay out of prison now.
And avoid having to pay judgements. He doesn’t want to pay a single penny toward the various suits he’s losing, he wants to keep them eternally in progress if he can by submitting bods and then appealing.
Look at the Carroll judgements. Not that this is any kind of definitive evidence, but he just defamed E. Jean Carroll again even as he is waiting for bond approval from that judge after losing the second trial. Here it is a bit more clearly worded from the NYTimes:
Lol, that’s what his strategy to avoid post-litigation payout forever is: keep offending, losing, bonding out and appealing. Lather, rinse, repeat, make his heirs pay up if there’s anything left.
(archive link to NYT article)
Every new case is a new case, it has no effect on the timeline for decided cases. Of course, I don’t expect Trump to understand that.
It can, if his lawyers plead it and the judge is accommodating. His lawyers have absolutely motioned in the past for a specific judge’s planned schedule to be changed to accommodate another judge’s planned schedule, and that to not do so would present an undue hardship. He generally gets these delays, on the whole.