That Impeachment Trial!

 So I’m going to do some amateur legal analysis. I’m not a lawyer, but if you are one, feel free to chime in. My own lawyer dad is taking a voluntary social media break. If you’re not a lawyer either, I’m probably going to mock you if your opinion runs contrary to mine. Here we go!

I think that if Trump were a normal crook, he would be found not competent to stand trial. He keeps changing lawyers and defense strategies. The arguments for his acquittal run around several themes. Here’s the three that I’m going to pick on:

1. The trial is unconstitutional.

2. He didn’t actually incite the riot.

3. The election was stolen.

Now let’s say the police find five bodies in your backyard, and you find yourself on trial for five counts of murder. If it’s obvious that you did it, then a good lawyer would try to work out a plea agreement. But you don’t want to spend any time in prison, so you are going to fight this.

You could try saying that the court has no authority to try you. Some defendants do try to make this argument, but I have never heard of a case where it results in acquittal or the charges being dropped. If you are already in front of a judge, it’s a big stretch to say that he doesn’t have authority. Whether it is fair or not, he is the one with the robe and the gavel, and you’re the guy in an off-the-rack suit that your lawyer picked out for you. It’s best to take the proceeding seriously.

You can say that you didn’t kill those people. Every year, millions of Americans avoid being convicted of murder by not actually killing anyone. This is usually a sound defense strategy if it is true, and the burden is on the prosecution to prove that it isn’t true.

You can say that the killings were justified. This is also a good defense if it is true. But it is difficult to convince a jury that the defendant was justified in killing the victims, and that the defendant didn’t actually kill anybody at all. So usually the defense commits to one alibi and sticks with it. To change the alibi during a case damages the defendant’s credibility and makes him look guilty. That isn’t something that a rational defendant wants.

Now let’s swing back around to Trump’s arguments.

Claiming that the trial is unconstitutional might give some pretext for Republican senators to vote for acquittal. This argument is false, but a Senator still needs to say something to his own voters on why he voted the way he did. This isn’t how normal trials with normal juries work, but it is how impeachment trials with Senate juries work.

Trump can totally claim that he didn’t incite the riot. He can also totally claim that he was secretly a Targaryen all this time and he is the one true King of Westeros. You can believe this if you work at it. He did say the election was stolen for two months, he did say Pence would stop the vote certification (he knew this wasn’t true), and he didn’t seem terribly concerned about the riot as it was happening. Still, I suppose you can wedge some reasonable doubt in there if you are inclined to do so.

But his continued claim that the election was stolen only serves to convince people that he is in fact guilty of inciting the riot. We’ve already had all the court cases that we are ever going to have about the 2020 election. That’s it. It’s done. This impeachment case is about something that happened in 2021. If he keeps on trying to rationalize the riot, it makes more folks certain that he actually had a role in starting it.

So, even if he is innocent, he’s doing a horrible, horrible job of convincing the public that he is innocent. At this point, one possible outcome that I could support is if he checked into a residential care facility and got the help that he needs.