Donald Trump Is the Closest He’s Ever Been to Prison

The default stance of all Donald Trump-adjacent criminal analysis here at new Splinter is this famed tweet that is as good of a summation of Trump’s legacy as you will ever see.

The next time Donald Trump faces serious repercussions for his actions will be the first. America’s two-tiered justice system is designed to let folks like ‘ol Donny wriggle out of jams us normal people would never be allowed to escape. Trump’s entire career interacting with the courts doubles as an indictment of America’s so-called justice system.

He is a transparent criminal who has spent his entire professional life working with the mob in Atlantic City and beyond, and the fact that our justice system cannot even lay a finger on him shows how useless it really is when it comes to punishing the powerful.

But that doesn’t mean we can just outright ignore quotes like this from Judge Juan Merchan overseeing Trump’s trial over paying former porn star Stormy Daniels hush money.

“It appears that the $1,000 fines are not serving as a deterrent; therefore, going forward, this Court will have to consider a jail sanction if recommended… Mr. Trump, it’s important to understand that the last thing I want to do is to put you in jail. You are the former president of the United States and possibly the next president, as well.”

Merchan makes very clear multiple times that he does not want to put Trump in jail, but that it is an option on the table due to Trump’s disruptive behavior in the trial. Merchan issued his tenth gag order to Trump, who has been talking openly about the case and generally doing things that if you and I had done in a similar criminal trial, would have already landed us inside of a jail cell.

Even after a stint in prison entered the realm of possibility, Trump still violated the gag order this morning when he learned that Stormy Daniels would testify today, and he posted then deleted the following rant to his website Truth Social.

“I have just recently been told who the witness is today. This is unprecedented, no time for lawyers to prepare. No judge has ever run a trial in such a biased and partisan way. He is CROOKED & HIGHLY CONFLICTED, even taking away my First Amendment Rights. Now he’s threatening me with JAIL, & THEY HAVE NO CASE – This according to virtually all Legal Scholars & Experts! Why isn’t the Fake News Media reporting his Conflict?”

Intricacies of this trial aside, it is an indictment of the legitimacy of our legal system that Trump can be threatened with jail time for violating a gag order, and the very next day he continued to violate the gag order. There is no way in hell that a kid busted on a low-level drug charge could say stuff like this about the judge and not have the state come down like a ton of bricks on them for it.

Aside from the 2008 Great Financial Crisis where no one responsible for that global crime saw the inside of a courtroom, let alone a jail cell, Trump may be the best example ever proving how our laws simply do not apply to people above a certain net worth and level of prestige.

However, Judge Merchan has put jail on the table if Trump keeps acting the way he did this morning. This is the kind of situation where you can keep saying “ain’t nothin’ gonna happen” and be right until something actually happens. Trump’s rabid and unhinged behavior could force Merchan into a corner where he feels like imprisoning Trump is his only way to regain control over this trial.

I would not bet on it, and as a betting man, I would likely pin the odds that Trump sees the inside of a jail cell somewhere around the same odds that the Chicago White Sox, one of baseball’s worst teams this year, win the World Series (so roughly about 500 to 1). It’s not an impossibility, but longshot does not even begin to describe it.

Still, this is a pretty astounding situation we find ourselves in, that a presidential candidate is being threatened by a judge with jail time because he can’t stop violating a gag order in a trial about hush money he paid to a porn star. Trump has spent his entire life doing shady stuff, but he has never been this close to actually experiencing serious legal repercussions for his actions. We don’t know how close, but I could not find another instance of a judge being this direct with Trump about possible jail time.

Donny wriggling his way out of this jam is still a heavy betting favorite, and today’s provocation and lack of response from the judge shows how much more room Trump has to push things before prison becomes a real option, but the fact that it is even on the table is pretty remarkable.

I for one, would love to see Trump continue to post his way through it, both so he can continue to demonstrate for all to see the bias and depravity of our “justice” system in the hopes that one day we could reform it into a system based around actual justice, and because let’s be real: we all want to see this motherfucker living inside of a jail cell. Even if it’s just for a day.