Donald Trump is losing on every front at once

On Wednesday, Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected Donald Trump’s request that she recuse herself from his upcoming criminal trial in Washington DC. Trump had zero chance of winning this ruling. Nor will filing it help him on appeal later. Nor did the filing delay Trump’s trial by even a single day; judges set trial dates several months out to begin with, so that there’s plenty of time for these kinds of nonsense filings to come and go without actually delaying anything.

Trump and his attorneys made this filing for nothing, and it turned out how anyone could have predicted. This is simply a matter of a desperate Trump demanding that his attorneys “do something,” and them saying “okay we can make this filing but it won’t accomplish anything,” and Trump saying “do it anyway!” TV pundits like to claim they see a strategy in Trump’s desperation moves, because doing so makes them sound smart, but it always turns out there isn’t one.

You’ll recall that Trump also made desperation filings aimed at delaying his New York civil fraud case. Those filings didn’t delay things by even so much as a single day. In fact Trump’s brazenly corrupt approach to his defense may have helped prompt Judge Arthur Engoron to issue his summary judgment before the trial even begins.

And this all comes even as Judge Chutkan is about to rule on whether to impose a gag order against Trump in the Washington DC case. If this happens, Trump will be severely limited in his ability to plead his case on social media – under penalty of being locked up immediately if he defies the order. Such gag orders are somewhat rare, but Trump has been running his mouth so idiotically that he may well have pushed the judge into issuing one.

Donald Trump is at a point in his downfall where his antics can’t help him, they can only hurt him. Trump may have misbehaved his way into a swifter ruling against him in civil court. Trump may have misbehaved his way into a gag order in criminal court. And none of his nonsense filings are helping him in any way, shape, or form. He’s just running up his legal bills while failing to delay anything.

Trump is at a point where the only way out is a credible legal defense. And since he can’t possibly come up with one of those in any of the legal cases against him, he’s simply losing on all fronts. He’s going to keep losing, too. There’s no other possible outcome. If the Republicans want to nominate what little is left of this guy on his way down, that’s up to them.