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In following the trial — something I often wish I could resist doing — it helps to remember that the trial is not being directly televised. What we hear is coming from observers who were in the room and who may or may not be interpreting it the way you or I would. And a lot of it is coming from folks on a newsroom set who are repeating and perhaps paraphrasing what folks at the courthouse are telling them. And there's a whole mess of mind-reading going on.

So as I'm watching, I'm thinking that…and also how uncomfortable Jake Tapper looks as he keeps having to quote the term "orange turd" that was spoken in the courtroom.

This morning, Stormy Daniels was being cross-examined and if the reports are correct, Trump's lawyers were trying to push the fact that Ms. Daniels has made a lot of money off her alleged encounter with Trump. I guess that's supposed to suggest she has a solid motive to lie but I would think that if she was lying for money, she would make a lot more by making the encounter sound a lot less consensual than she seems to be doing. She does seem to have made the point that Donald Trump is out to make money every possible way he can.

If I understand correctly, the Defense position is that the sexual encounter absolutely did not happen and also that it was absolutely consensual. Meanwhile, CNN seems obsessed with telling us when Trump is whispering to his lawyers. I have no idea why that information is supposed to be of interest to us.

They're on now to less — shall we say "colorful?" — witnesses. I'm going to try to not follow this case, at least until they put Michael Cohen on the stand. That's the exchange I wish they would televise.

It was easy today to not pay a whole lot of attention to the Trump Trial as Stormy Daniels testified. Every time I turned on the news to hear the newscasters repeat what was being said in that courtroom, I said to myself, "The jury has to listen to that but I don't" and turned it off.

The witness on the stand just before her was an executive from the publishing firm that issued Donald Trump's books. He had to testify that they were indeed books written by (or at least approved by) Donald Trump because Trump and his legal team refused to stipulate that this was so.

Yes, it's hard to look away. Donald seems to be simultaneously complaining that the trial is going too fast and that it's taking forever. To the extent the latter is the case, a lot of that is because his side is refusing to concede anything, no matter how trivial. If the prosecution wants to show a video of Trump saying something in a speech, the Trump side won't agree to stipulate that the clip is legitimate and that Trump said what he said on the tape.

The prosecution has to bring in a witness to swear under oath that the clip is real. Some of the lawyers analyzing the trial for the media are saying it would shave a week or two off this trial if Trump's team would just concede little undeniable things like that.

Some of those analyst-type attorneys are saying that the prosecution doesn't need to call Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels to testify because everything they could add to the record has been or will be said by other witnesses. But other pundit-lawyers are saying the prosecution should call them because Trump wants his lawyers to savage them on the stand and that will just make the jury think a lot less of Donald.

Or they say it will drive home the point that Trump, in accord with his "never concede anything, just attack, attack, attack" policy is a liar. Does anyone still believe he never knew either, let alone both of those ladies?

"Never concede anything, just attack, attack, attack" probably worked well for Trump in other battles in other venues but it doesn't seem to work when he's a defendant in a court of law. In some kinds of disputes, it enabled him to control the dynamics of the battle and to make others play on his turf according to his rules. That doesn't work so well in a courtroom with rules and a judge.

The New York Times says Trump is furious that his lawyers — Todd Blanche, especially — aren't aggressive enough. Sounds like he wants less legal procedure and more name-calling. The prosecution showed some old clips of Trump calling Michael Cohen a great, trustworthy lawyer. You get the feeling that as Counselor Blanche watched those clips, he was thinking, "Hey, that's what my client was saying about me a few weeks ago"?

I'm not spending a whole lot of my life watching or thinking about Donald Trump but when I do, it's with more curiosity these days than anything else. He's starting to remind me the fleeing car in one of those police chases where you see the auto disintegrating — tires shredding, bumpers falling off — and you're just watching to see how long it's going to be before he crashes or gives up. His speeches are getting more incoherent, filled as some of them are with mystery words and demands that everyone feel sorry for the poor, abused zillionaire who's being treated worse than any of the great martyrs of history.

What I really don't get are the tweets…or I guess they're now called "truths" in the same reverse nomenclature that gave us a bald Stooge named Curly. You would think that even the stupidest person in the world — and I never thought Trump was that — would have some menial who would proofread them before sending. Or some built-in time delay where he writes them and has to wait two hours to post them so he or someone can ask, "Is it a good idea to send this?"

Someone with all the legal problems he has would (you'd think) have some lawyer check out his tweets/truths before transmission so they could advise him when applicable, "Hey, this one could conceivably be used against you in a court of law." Because some of them will be. And some of them, like when he gets a name wrong or confuses Jimmy Kimmel with Al Pacino just make him look sloppy and reckless. Is the man really so outta control that he doesn't care about such things? I've never thought he was honest but I thought he was smarter than this.

I'm fascinated by how the phrase "fake electors" is even being used by those who are claiming no laws were broken. This is from the Fox News website…

Fake electors met in Wisconsin and six other battleground states where Trump was defeated in 2020, attempting to cast ballots for the former president even though he lost. Republicans who participated in Wisconsin said they were trying to preserve Trump's legal standing in case courts overturned his defeat.

How could someone be a "fake elector" without breaking some law? You could be an "alternate elector," I suppose though in this case, there doesn't seem to have been any formal, official way of becoming one. Each of the seven states designated a slate of real electors. A "fake elector" is by definition "fake."

I probably won't watch the G.O.P. Debate tonight and I certainly won't watch Tucker Carlson's exclusive interview with You-Know-Who. It will be hard though to avoid endless replays of the juicier moments from either.

I'm assuming Chris Christie will not miss an opportunity to challenge the other candidates for the Republican nomination to be clear on where they stand with Trump. Will they support him through all indictments and convictions? If so, why are the running against him? I would expect a lot of statements from Christie that start with the phrase, "I'm the only person on this stage who…"

You know, Chris Christie would be a great candidate if only he weren't Chris Christie.

The last few days, it seemed like Trump was trying to get some judge to throw him in jail so he'd have an excuse for not showing up for the Republican debate. In truth, he seems to have agreed to do some sort of show with Tucker Carlson opposite the debate. Me, I think he'd be better off in jail but it's a close call.

William Saletan summarizes some of the revelations of the Georgia Indictment. My, there sure was a lot of lying going on.

Donald Trump and his attorneys have lost a staggering number of challenges and motions and attempts to change the dynamics and/or timing of all the trials they're facing. Still, I have friends who are going to panic if/when Trump and his motley crew of office temp lawyers win one battle even if it's like one out of a hundred.

I may not watch the debate. I have a feeling it's going to look like one of those old Dean Martin Roasts if all the jokes were written by Alex Jones. It's too bad Greg Garrison — who produced and directed Dean's show — is gone. We could have him direct the debate and put in lots of obvious edits and every so often, cut to the stock footage of LaWanda Page and Charlie Callas laughing uncontrollably. I have the feeling Ron DeSantis is studying the DVDs of those roasts and is copying down all the Orson Welles insults to use on Chris Christie.

And someone will do a line like, "Ron DeSantis beating Joe Biden? Are you kidding? Ron had his ass handed to him by Mickey Mouse!"

Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone is probably working hard now on a video that will explain the Georgia Indictments in the way that he explains things. If you can't wait, here's an article that seems to do a pretty good job of it.

Some folks who've written me seem to think I was trying to say that Rudy Giuliani was a good man who went bad. No. I was trying to say that Rudy Giuliani was a man with a good reputation, warranted or not, who pissed it all away in the service of a bad man who went badder. Here's a piece about how Trump is refusing to pay all of Giuliani's crippling legal bills. Hope you think it was worth it, Rudy.

As this article notes, lots of different political observers are offering theories as to the identity of the unnamed sixth conspirator in the Georgia case. The indictment describes this person as "a political consultant who helped implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding" and that description could fit a lot of people. It could, as the article notes, be Ginni Thomas…and wouldn't that have interesting ramifications? I, of course, have no clues; just wondering why none of the guessers are mentioning the name of Roger Stone — no relation (that I know of) to Devin.

If you're concerned about polling that says Biden and Trump are neck-and-neck in the presidential race, remember how worthless polls are this far ahead of Election Day. And if you insist on following polls, follow this one: As Ben Mathis-Lilley notes of a recent AP poll…

Overall, about both Georgia's vote count and "what happened at the U.S. Capitol," 64 percent of American adults said Trump's conduct was either illegal or unethical. And only 21 percent said he did nothing wrong in relation to Jan. 6, while 15 percent said he did nothing wrong in Georgia. If you boil things down to "what he did was bad" or "what he did was OK," Trump is a loser by margins of 64–21 and 64–15.

Those would be pretty lopsided scores in the United States' beloved sport of American football! And the numbers aren't even that great for Trump among Republicans. A combined 42 percent of Republicans told the AP that Trump's conduct in Georgia was illegal or unethical, while only 31 percent said he'd done nothing wrong. Regarding Jan. 6, 38 percent of Republicans said Trump behaved illegally or unethically, with 46 percent coming down on the side of "nothing wrong."

Trump may well get the G.O.P. nomination just because a whopping majority of Republicans are fierce about seeing someone of their party win and they don't see any other Republican who would have a chance. All they've got is this one guy who couldn't beat Joe Biden the last time around…and that was before that one guy was out on bail in four different matters and facing possible (maybe probable) prison time. Do we really think that one guy can win the presidency back if that much of his own party thinks he's unethical and/or a criminal?

I continue to be stunned by how Rudolph William Louis Giuliani went from being "America's Mayor" and a widely-respected figure to a laughingstock lawyer who's being disbarred one state at a time, an indicted co-conspirator in a major crime, an unindicted (so far) co-conspirator in another major crime, a guy who's likely to lose a huge defamation suit and the target of a huge sexual harassment lawsuit…and I think there are a few more charges and lawsuits beyond all this — or there will be. I feel like I've used this line here before but nobody likes this man. Democrats dislike him because he tried to steal the election for Trump. And Republicans don't like him because he did such a bad job of it.

One of my favorite online writers, Fred Kaplan, writes about the irony of Rudy, the King of RICO prosecutions, becoming the target of a RICO prosecution. Meanwhile, Andrew Kirtzman and David Holley write about how far Giuliani has fallen and Bess Levin writes about Giuliani's financial woes. It may not sound like it but I really find this very sad.

So by now, you've probably heard the recording of Donald J. Trump apparently committing one of the crimes that Donald J. Trump is alleged to have committed. In many corners, this moves the discussion from "Will he be convicted?" to "How much time will he do?"

With expert timing, YouTube's Legal Eagle has a new video up explaining all about sentencing guidelines. It's kinda informative about how those guidelines work but all it'll tell you regarding Trump is that he surely won't be sentenced to the jillion-and-three years that some are suggesting…and that we can't say with any certainty what the actual magical number might be. Here's the video if you want to watch…

And this doesn't even address the question of what other crimes Trump may be charged with and what kind of sentences they could carry. Tomorrow in Atlanta, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger will be interviewed by investigators from special counsel Jack Smith's office.

The presence of Chris Christie in the presidential race has made it all-but-impossible for me to pay as little attention to it as I'd hoped I could. Once upon a time in a land far, far away, one-time governor Christie was on my short list of "Republicans I could imagine myself voting for." He was not on that list for long. Once I saw a little more of him, I realized I liked him for his entertainment value and because, like too many in both parties, he saw the wisdom in occasionally confessing to a mistake or admitting a weakness in his party. Unfortunately, when you brushed all that aside, he was still Chris Christie.

It was interesting to see him getting booed at the Faith and Freedom Conference the other day for criticizing Trump. I got the feeling that the booers didn't disagree with what he said. I got the feeling what they were saying was, "We know all that! But what you don't understand, you moron, is that we want to win!"

That's why they'll ignore the many lies and misdeeds of their guy: Because of all the candidates for the Republican nomination, he's the one who even if he winds up campaigning wearing an ankle bracelet, stands a better chance than Pence, Haley, Ramaswamy, Hutchinson, Scott, DeSantis, Durgum, Suarez, Hurd and especially Mr. Christie. All of them can pledge to ban abortion, cut taxes, police our borders, Make America Great Again, etc. Only one of them looks like he could win.

You can't beat something with nothing. I put that in boldface because I think we too often forget that. Most folks who support Trump are not going to abandon him until they have a viable alternative…and none of the others in the current bag o' candidates fills that need. Eventually, a few indictments from now, someone might if only by default. In the meantime, Christie's Trump-bashing is awfully entertaining and pretty accurate. It's just that a lot of people don't want to hear it because they have no one else to rally behind and, y'know, they want to win.

Fred Kaplan takes a real-world look at You-Know-Who's claim that he could settle the Ukraine War in one day. Well, so could I if I could persuade either side to surrender. Most likely, Trump doesn't even have a plan. He sure didn't make good on his long-ago pledge to design, in under a week as I recall, a new health plan that absolutely everyone would agree was better than Obamacare. I doubt he even spent ten seconds on that one.

I'll try to hold the Trump posts down on this site but if they bother you, do us both a favor and stop reading this blog, at least until he's gone.

And if you want more of that kind of thing than I'll be supplying…oh, have I got a YouTube channel for you. The Meidas Touch Network puts up video after video — several a day, many of them by experienced attorneys — explaining exactly what's going on in Trump's legal downfalls. The ones by Ben Meiselas (civil rights lawyer), Michael Popok (national trial lawyer strategist) and Karen Friedman Agnifilo (former Chief Assistant District Attorney of the Manhattan District Attorney's Office) are especially informative and refreshingly non-hysterical.

Donald Trump's operation is sending me messages again insisting that everything we care about in this world will be gone soon unless Donald Trump is reinstated as POTUS and, of course, he won't be reinstated as POTUS unless all the phony arrests and lawsuits against him are immediately terminated and of course they won't be immediately terminated unless I send him vast amounts of money and take to the streets demanding blah blah blah. I blocked the messages of this sort coming from one address but now they're coming from another…and they're about as credible as the ones I get from the Nigerian royalty who'll put billions in my accounts just as soon as I send them all my banking information.

I'm still not following all the news but what I see makes me think someone could start a 24/7 "Trump's Legal Woes" channel and not lack content for the next few years. The trial over E. Jean Carroll's accusations looks like it'll keep the news channels and the late night monologues full to the point of overflowing for a few weeks. Some reports are saying he's going to have to take the stand…and given his recent inability to sound coherent in interviews, that looks to be some interrogation.

This has been This Week's Post About Trump. See? I'm holding it down to one a week.

This post by Ankush Khardori and one or two others I've read this morning confirm my feelings that the current case against Trump could go either way and that by the time it does go either way, we might be knees deep in the next case against Trump or the one after that or the one after that. The case New York D.A. Bragg has just brought against the Trump that Trump Lovers love to love may be real old, unimportant news by the time it does go either way.

If I were D.J.T., I'd be thrilled at the fund-raising and attention-getting opportunities it's giving me…and a lot more worried about the other stuff. He seems to love every opportunity to blast anyone who isn't blindly on his side as a Trump Hater and that's one of those lies that becomes all the more true every time you say it. Tomorrow, if one of his limos got a ticket for parking in the wrong place, he'd be railing against the Trump-hating, Soros-funded meter maid.

One of the many things I don't like about this guy is how much time I have to spend paying attention to him. He's like one of those televised police chases except that he's on close to 24/7. I shall now do my best to look away for as long as I can.

Yesterday, Donald Trump filed a lawsuit accusing CNN of defamation and he says he's seeking $475 million in punitive damages. This article will tell you how ridiculous this suit is but I wanted to highlight one paragraph from it…

Barb McQuade, a former U.S. attorney and University of Michigan law professor, also chimed in on Twitter saying that the "lawsuit is a naked publicity stunt that Trump knows will be dismissed before discovery. It will never reach deposition stage. He will make more money off of fundraising over this legally baseless lawsuit than he will pay the court in sanctions. Winning!"

More and more, that's what everything Trump does is about: Gin up outrages that will cause his loyal followers to donate money. His whole run for the presidency in the first place may have been nothing more than that. It's kind of like putting on a play you know will flop so you can keep the backers' investment money.

Donald Trump: The Max Bialystock of Politics.