NY State Prosecutors Calling Three Adult Trump Children To The Witness Stand, Where They Have A Tought Choice: Admit Extensive Corruption or Face Perjury Charges

Next Monday, Daddy T takes the stand for his perjury-a-thon!

Nov 01, 2023

These are the upcoming witnesses that prosecutors have called to testify in Donald Trump’s New York fraud case:

Wednesday, November 1, 2023: Donald Trump, Jr.
Thursday, November 2, 2023: Eric Trump
Monday, November 6, 2023: Donald Trump
Wednesday, November 8, 2023: Ivanka Trump

It is a shame that this trial is not being broadcast in some manner. Numerous journalists will likely be live-tweeting from the court. (Note that this proceeding is being held to determine how many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars the Trump Organization will have to pay for its many crimes. (Will Trump be forced to sell his bedbug-infested properties, including his foreign-spy-infested golf motel, to raise enough cash?) Trump has already been found guilty of fraud in this case. In fact, the judge ruled that there was so much overwhelming evidence that the Trump Org. was absolutely corrupt to its core that a trial was unnecessary.)

Trump has whined about Ivanka being forced to testify, but to my knowledge he has not uttered one public peep about either of his two eldest sons testifying. Neal Katyal, former U.S. deputy solicitor general, uttered the Freudian Slip of the Year:

If Trump is in attendance during any of his children’s testimony, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte believes the chances are high he suffers “an epic public meltdown at one of them”. In her Standing Room Only newsletter, Marcotte argues that over the next few days, many more people will pay attention to this trial, which has been regarded as the most minor of the four Trump criminal trials.

A lot of folks haven’t really picked up on how guilty Trump is, and how out of control the fraud his company perpetuated for years is. But taking this out of the realm of accountants testifying to the kids changes the dynamic. It helps remind people that Trump’s company was basically a front for a criminal operation and like the mafiosos he admires, he drafted his entire family into the gang.

Marcotte notes Trump’s “poor emotional regulation skills” and pictures him sitting at the defense counsel’s table,

glowering as usual, while his kids speak. He imagines he’s a gangster, and thinks his presence is effective at intimidating witnesses. So far, that hasn’t been true at all. His disruptive antics just sour the judge against him and make life easier for the prosecutors.
His actual children, the boys at least, do seem to be intimidated by their father still. But I don’t know that it matters. . . . Not sure what having their psychopathic father glaring at them would do to make that situation any different, except to reinforce to the judge that this is a man who uses violence and lies to get his way.

Since Trump and his organization have already been found guilty of the 34 fraud charges, Junior, Eric, and Ivanka — as high-level employees of that organization — have a clear choice: tell the truth about their father’s decades of near-limitless corruption or risk perjury charges. (Or they can plead the fifth, the inference of which will be that Trump is guilty but they would rather not confess out loud. Perhaps Trump is most worried about Ivanka testifying because it’s been reported she’s unlikely to sacrifice herself for his sake.)

(Also, for Wednesday: How high will Junior (aka Cocaine Bear) be?)

Meanwhile, Trump’s alleged (lol) dementia may be getting worse. He has often appeared drenched in sweat, glistening like a glazed ham, he didn’t know where he was over the weekend, and he had trouble speaking simple words (like referring to “Hamas” as “hummus”), and when he was understood (relatively speaking), it was a choatic word salad. This is making it difficult for Trump to play one of his greatest hits: Biden is a confused and senile dolt . . . when he isn’t being a functioning president, running a worldwide criminal syndicate, and also coordinating all four trials against Trump, that is.

Meanwhile, Trump’s attorneys aren’t getting any smarter. Alina Habba, the member of the Trump brain trust who forgot to check a box on a form requesting a jury trial and has undermined or contradicted his defense (or outright admitted he’s guilty) at other times, says Trump cannot be put in jail for violating one of the gag orders he’s under because “he’s protected by the Secret Service. Period.” The Newsmax “bobble head glam boy” agreed with her. (Law Tip: Never consider cup size when deciding which attorney to hire (but likely never pay).)

On Sunday, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan reinstated a partial gag order on Trump after he took advantage of a pause in the order to attack Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff and a potential witness against him. Chutkin stated that Trump’s Meadows post would have been in violation of her order had she not paused it. About one hour after the gag order was back on, Trump clearly violated it by calling former Attorney General Bill Barr (another witness in the case) “Dumb, Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy, a RINO WHO COULDN’T DO THE JOB”.

Trump also attacked the judge in a post-midnight rant, calling her “a TRUE TRUMP HATER” and stating: “Her Hatred of President DONALD J. TRUMP is so great that she has been diagnosed with a major, and incurable, case of TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME!!!”

Former Trump White House lawyer (not the legendary and infamously cantankerous Detroit Tigers outfielder) Ty Cobb says putting Trump in jail is the only way to get him to stop what has been near-daily attacks. Cobb believes Trump will be ordered to “spend a night or a weekend in jail. I think it’s gonna take that. I think it’ll take that to stop him.”

Trump is also leaning more and more on the Hitler playbook of Adolf Hitler, ramoping up his violent rhetoric and antisemitism. As Chauncey DeVega writes:

Adolf Hitler and the Nazi propagandists and foot soldiers repeatedly used similar lies about being “backstabbed” and “betrayed”</a> by “Jews” and “communists” and “socialists” and other supposedly nefarious forces as a way of building and keeping support for their fascist movement and the Holocaust. Trump and the other Republican fascists and members of the white right and “conservative” movement are increasingly apocalyptic in their language and imagery, where putting Trump back in the White House by “winning” the 2024 election by means legal and quasilegal — or through violence and the Red Caesar scenario — is a literal matter of life and death for (White) America. To great effect, the Nazis also deployed similar rhetoric and imagery.
As a range of national security and law enforcement experts have warned, such a narrative frame encourages right-wing political violence and terrorism against “the enemy” because such behavior is understood to be defensive and therefore justified.
In all, Trump’s channeling of Hitler’s and other fascists’ logic and view of society and democracy is expansive and growing.
In a speech last Monday to his MAGA cultists in New Hampshire, Trump told them to not even worry about voting in the 2024 Election: “You don’t have to vote, don’t worry about voting. The voting, we got plenty of votes.”
Instead of voting, Trump told his supporters to “watch” (which in the larger context of the ex-president’s behavior and fascist threats means to intimidate) those Americans (i.e. black and brown people) who support President Biden and the Democrats. Here, Trump is preemptively delegitimizing and nullifying the results of the 2024 Election (if he loses) as a pretext for engaging in violence against President Biden and the Democrats and the MAGA movement’s other perceived enemies. . . .
In his fundraising emails, speeches, interviews and other communications, Trump is continuing to embrace his identity as a fascist-MAGA-Jesus-martyr who is supposedly willing to go to prison and even die for his followers and the movement. This too is a common rhetorical device that was used by Hitler and other fascist and fake populist leaders — and cult leaders. . . .
The mainstream media continues to mostly downplay, ignore, and outright deny the existential dangers of Trump’s white supremacy and antisemitism — which is to de facto normalize such evil behavior — for a variety of reasons including the incorrect assumption that such information is no longer “newsworthy” and “everyone already knows about it”. . . .
Trump’s egomania, malignant narcissism and cult leader-victim identity reached another crescendo last Monday when he claimed during a speech to the MAGA cultists in New Hampshire that he is being persecuted like the late Nelson Mandela. . . .
“I don’t mind being Nelson Mandela because I’m doing it for a reason,” Trump told an amped-up crowd of supporters at a sports complex in Derry, New Hampshire. “We’ve got to save our country from these fascists, these lunatics that we’re dealing with. They’re horrible people and they’re destroying our country.”

In November 2016, Trump said he had “the greatest temperament that anybody has” because of course he did. He would say the same thing today. You can judge for yourself with this sampling from the last 48 hours: