RUTHFULLY YOURS

If anything has been established in the courtroom the past couple of weeks, it’s that Alvin Bragg doesn’t have much of a legal case. But he doesn’t need one.

The legalities matter here only insomuch as they provide a veneer over an audacious political trick that has kept a major-party presidential candidate off the campaign trail for several days a week, and may — within days — give his enemies a political cudgel to use against him until November.

What’s the Latin for “specious legal case in service of frankly political ends”?

It’s true that if Trump gets off on a hung jury, it will play as a major victory and vindication for the Republican candidate, yet he still won’t be able to get back the time or resources he’s wasted fighting this case.

Even the most hard-bitten, cynical political operative would have been hard-pressed to imagine a way to keep an opponent off the campaign trail entirely. Rummaging through an opponent’s garbage, stealing his debate-prep materials, distorting his record in lavishly funded negative ads — all that looks amateurish compared with abusing the criminal-justice system for political ends the way Alvin Bragg has.

This case is John Grisham meets Roger Stone.

The cliché is that a candidate’s time is a campaign’s most precious resource, and Trump’s has been largely sucked away in a Manhattan courthouse over the last month and a half.

It’s true that Trump has made the best use he can of the bully pulpit that the trial affords him with his statements to the press outside the courtroom. But often they are about the trial itself, and the optics — with Trump penned in by metal dividers — aren’t ideal.

Everything in politics is timing, and the Bragg trial achieves its value by being a 2024 event.

In 2023, it would have been too early — surely, this kind of trial would have helped Trump in the Republican primary even more than the indictments, and a conviction would have been old news by now.

And 2025 would be too late; the election will be over by then, and Trump will be either back in the White House or a (presumably) politically defanged private citizen, making prosecuting him not as practical or alluring.

For Trump, too, 2024 puts everything at a premium. It’d be one thing if he weren’t running for president and Bragg was keeping him off the golf course and away from business ventures. That would still be bad given the absurdity of this case, but Trump could always golf later.

That a conviction will be vulnerable to getting overturned on appeal doesn’t help Trump any.

As long as Democrats have their “convicted felon” label on Trump for the duration of 2024, it doesn’t matter that there may eventually be a superseding “reversed on appeal” label in 2025 or 2026, when this election will have been long decided.

We don’t know what political effect Trump’s being dubbed a “convicted felon” will have. I’d guess little or none. The trial hasn’t exactly captured the public imagination thus far. It’s not the trial of the century; in fact, it’s barely been the trial of this year or month.

All things considered, though, if you’re the Trump team, you’d rather not find out what the consequences of a guilty verdict are. Certainly, Trump’s adversaries will make ample use of his new status as convicted felon, and journalists will ask every Republican they can find how they can possibly justify supporting a convicted Trump.

And so Alvin Bragg will have served his purpose and can go back to the serious business of not prosecuting street crime.