For the last time, Judge Aileen Cannon doesn’t have a magic wand
Donald Trump has requested a delayed trial. So what? Even if Judge Aileen Cannon delays the trial – which is far from a given – Jack Smith can have the 11th Circuit intervene. If that doesn’t work, Smith can bring additional charges in a different venue. There’s no scenario where Trump magically wins. Cannon can’t really help him.
Trump has no power in this, in the sense that all he can do is try simplistic court filings and then watch Jack Smith successfully work around him. Cannon has minimal power, in that she has no control over what Smith does in other jurisdictions.
The only one with any actual power is Jack Smith, because he has all kinds of options for working around Trump’s impotent antics, and if necessary, working around Cannon’s limited antics.
Of course the media (on both sides) will largely continue to portray this as Trump and Cannon having magic wands, and Smith’s options being limited, so you’ll conclude the trial is doomed and you’ll keep staring helplessly at your screen in fear and outrage.
But if you look at the actual scenarios, you see a very different picture. It’s just so obvious why Jack Smith has the upper hand, Cannon is a bit player with limited options, and Trump is completely powerless in all this.
It’s not that Jack Smith has some magic wand. There are no magic wands in any of this, on any side, ever. It’s that he spent all this time painstakingly setting the table so that once we got to this point he’d hold all the cards.
We don’t even know if Judge Cannon will misbehave in this trial. She’s already been swiftly and emphatically overturned by the 11th Circuit in past Trump-related matters. She has to know she’ll just get slapped down again if she tries again. She’ll make whatever choice she’s going to make. But it’s not going to be particularly consequential, because Jack Smith has far more lanes open to him than the one that Cannon occupies. And throughout all this, Trump continues to be stuck on the sidelines.
