The ‘Donald Trump Show’ sure has a lot of new episodes, doesn’t it? | Opinion

In Tallahassee, the Legislature just whizzed past the midpoint of its 60-day regular session. Lawmakers will get back to work Tuesday after taking a break for Passover and Easter.

Most of the session’s first 30 days were spent rubber-stamping Gov. Ron DeSantis’ agenda, including controversial measures restricting abortions, expanding school vouchers and loosening restrictions on gun owners.

Before they left town for their break, however, like other TV viewers around Florida’s Capitol and across America’s fruited plains, they witnessed an occurrence as rare as a decrease in the cost of rent or property insurance.

What happened? All the broadcast and cable networks across the entire ideological spectrum were finally in agreement on something: Tuesday’s arraignment of a former U.S. President on felony charges was … unprecedented!

After that, however, they immediately diverged into their predictable analyses. On the left, the arraignment was proof that, “Nobody is above the law.” On the right, Trump’s being arraigned was an example of “political persecution.”

Back at Mar-a-Lago, after flights and motorcades with TV coverage reminiscent of O.J. Simpson’s slow-speed chase, Trump spoke to a national TV audience and to supporters in a room where the echo-prone acoustics amplified the things that seem to please him the most: applause, cheers and the sound of his own voice.

At the end of the day, legal analysts sorting through the commentary of pundits and pols offered some credible conclusions. First, this case is likely to drag on into 2024 and even past Election Day. As they pointed out, however, this would not prevent Trump from running for president.

Second, the legal analysts opined that prosecutor, District Attorney Alvin Bragg, may well be on shaky ground leading to a mistrial or an acquittal. During his election campaign, he essentially promised to go after Trump, even though two previous prosecutors had decided against moving forward with the case.

What seems likely is that those prosecutors — both Democrats — were aware of the old maxim occasionally cited during Florida’s policy debates in the citrus-growing era: “The juice is not worth the squeeze.”

That Bragg proceeded anyway — and elevated the charges from misdemeanors to felonies — lends some credibility to critics’ accusations of a political motive. Granted, in his post-arraignment press conference, Bragg said that his team of investigators had uncovered new evidence.

Unfortunately for the prosecution, the fact that much of the case’s evidence against Trump still relies on the testimony of convicted perjurer Michael Cohen raises doubts of how it will stand up in court, where the evidentiary standards are much higher than in a grand jury proceeding.

Indeed, defense attorneys have a saying that, “Any prosecutor worth his salt could persuade a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.” Persuading a trial jury to convict is quite another matter, even in deep-blue New York City.

Moreover, Bragg’s assertion that prosecuting the former president is but one example of his office’s determination to get tough on crime rings hollow, given the lenient treatment of people arrested for violent crimes, then released bail-free into New York neighborhoods complaining of a tsunami of lawlessness.

Putting the Manhattan melodrama aside, the legal analysts’ third observation may well be the most relevant to how this scenario plays out. They all seemed to agree that two other pending cases are likely to place Trump in more legal peril than the Manhattan case does.

In Georgia, there’s still the matter of his recorded phone call asking Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find him enough votes to win that state’s electoral votes. Does this rise to the level of election tampering? That remains to be seen and may eventually wind up before a trial jury in deep-blue Atlanta.

Finally, in Washington and Florida, there’s the federal case in the hands of Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, who’s looking into Trump’s role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, as well as lies related to his unauthorized possession of scores of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

In other words, this past Tuesday’s polarizing media coverage is likely to continue indefinitely. An open question is whether such coverage exacerbates America’s political divisions or merely reflects the facts on the ground in a nation of red states and blue states where the litmus test of politics has been the voters’ view of that ultimate divider: Donald J. Trump.

This story was originally published April 8, 2023 at 9:43 AM.