For Trump haters, the Stormy Daniels trial is a fantasy come true.
An orgasmic treat of Donald in his boxers, being spanked on the bottom by a porno actress.
The former president trapped in court like a caged lion, forced to listen to all the humiliating detail instead of being out on the campaign trail entertaining the orcs.
Their matinee-idol judge, Juan Merchan, with his fetching gray cowlick, threatening to throw Trump in jail if he doesn’t stop shaking his head.
Swoon.
And, somewhere, they hope, Melania shedding a tear under her Gucci sunglasses.
Whoopi Goldberg looked as if she was having an out-of-body rapture on ABC’s “The View” this week, when the conversation turned to whether Merchan should throw Trump in jail for contempt.
“To prove a point, put him in the clink!” co-host Sunny Hostin chortled.
“Why not? Put him in the clink!”
Whoopi fairly levitated in her chair with excitement: “Ooh, ooh, ooh! I don’t want this to sound like I’m doing wishful thinking. But which prison would be best?”
Cue uproarious laughter around the table. “Rikers!” cried Sunny.
“I’m OK if he goes to Alcatraz,” said Whoopi. “What about Guantanamo Bay?”
Sinister laughter
The ladies were rocking with laughter by this stage: “Oh, that would be close to Mar-a-Lago. Melania can come and visit,” whooped Ana Navarro.
There is something quite sick and sad about this level of obsession with Trump and a sort of lascivious desire for him to be brought low.
It seems more like the passion of a spurned lover than a normal reaction to a political figure in court.
The impression is compounded by their spitefulness toward Melania Trump, who you would think deserves some sisterly consideration.
It’s the same with Joy Reid and Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell and “Morning Joe,” who anchored endless prudish coverage of the minutiae of Stormy’s testimony that could have been ripped from the opening scene of one of her low-rent porno flicks.
Maybe this is the closest some media figures get to sex.
But out in the real world, the courtroom soap opera is an aggravation.
Banal titillation barely worthy of a “Real Housewives” episode that has somehow been elevated to the gravitas of a felony trial in Manhattan Supreme Court.
We have heard it all before.
It happened eight years ago.
Dems already wheeled out the scandal in 2016 and it didn’t work then.
Why would it work eight years later, and why now, six months before the election?
Nobody in their right mind thinks that this is what New York’s scarce prosecutorial resources should be spent on when there are people languishing in jail for lack of court time.
DA Alvin Bragg should be spending his time prosecuting cop-bashers and Jew-hating agitators.
On pure optics, the trial looks crooked, and Trump looks strong.
He comes across as serious and angry but in control.
What’s more, he takes the opportunity each morning, between railing against the “Corrupt and Highly Conflicted Judge” on social media, to deliver his take on the political issue of the day to the enormous press pack hanging on his every word.
For instance, on Wednesday, he weighed in on anti-Jewish agitators: “Our government ought to find out who they are, where they’re from and treat them the same way as they do the J-6 hostages.”
Don turns the tables
Acting Judge Merchan doesn’t have a hope in the game of contempt chicken he’s playing with Trump.
If he makes good on his promise to throw the former president in jail for shaking his head or muttering “bulls–t” under his breath, he’ll be handing Trump an electoral gift.
“GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH!” thundered Trump on social media, after the 10th contempt finding.
Only Trump could turn the adversity of 88 felony charges playing out simultaneously across two state courts and two federal districts in the middle of an election campaign into a rolled-gold opportunity for free wall-to-wall media coverage.
Regardless of the details, the dirty lawfare campaign against Trump is backfiring spectacularly.
The message Democrats are inadvertently sending to the voting public is that this guy is so strong that we have to cheat to beat him and, oops, it’s not working.
The more they throw at Trump without knocking him down, the less credible they look and the stronger he appears.
Then you look at the polls and you see the lawfare is not hurting Trump.
Even people who don’t like him can recognize that a justice system so rigged that it can be weaponized against your political opponent is a threat to all of us.
On a visceral level, it stinks.
In contrast to Trump, President Biden looks weaker now than at any point in his presidency.
It’s not just his physical frailty and cognitive deficits, although those are terrible.
The fact he now needs a phalanx of staffers to walk between him and the cameras to hide the feeble way he shuffles across the grass to Marine One is telling.
The fact he can no longer use the Big Boy steps of Air Force One because he keeps tripping.
Operation Hidin’ Biden is a bit trickier without a pandemic to use as an excuse.
When he heads to his Delaware beach house this weekend, will he have staff holding towels around him to hide an old man conked out on a beach chair?
Joe aura of weakness
Even worse than his age-related deficiencies in creating an aura of weakness around Biden is his indecisiveness.
There was his vacillating on Israel, his delay in addressing the student protests and condemning antisemitism, his hypocritical “very fine people on both sides”-style rhetoric.
He projects weakness when he hides away from serious questions at a serious time and does softball interviews with fawning has-beens like Howard Stern.
His campaign may be waking up to the peril of a president as coward, since he agreed to a rare interview with CNN Wednesday night.
The Biden campaign’s attempt to bully friendly media outlets behind the scenes has backfired, too, judging by an interview with Semafor last weekend in which the executive editor of The New York Times sent a couple of kamikaze drones into the Biden camp.
Joe Kahn said that he is ignoring pressure to “become an instrument of the Biden campaign” and “turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda.”
It’s weak of a campaign to expect the media to do the heavy lifting for their candidate.
If you are so incompetent that you spend a year pushing a rancid slogan, “Bidenomics,” which serves only to equate your candidate with inflation and lower living standards, you can’t expect the Fourth Estate to get you out of the hole.
The election will be about a lot of things, but at a gut level it will be about weak versus strong.
Biden can shout and shake his fist all he likes. It doesn’t make him look strong. It makes him look like Grampa Simpson.
