Donald Trump just got more bad news from Judge Chutkan

Back when Donald Trump was being criminally indicted, we heard a lot of doomsday hype about how he was just going to push his trials until after the 2024 election, as if this was a power that he somehow had. But we keep seeing that things don’t really work that way in the real world. Trump now has multiple criminal trials set to take place well before the election.

Trump is still filing frivolous appeals in the feeble hope of delaying his trials, but he’s finding out that this is really just a way for his lawyers to rack up more billable hours without actually helping his cause.

For instance, after Trump asked Judge Tanya Chutkan to delay the deadline for hearing his pretrial motions all the way to February 2024, it presumably took the judge a few minutes to stop laughing before she told Trump that he could only have a few weeks to get it all out of the way. She was never going to give him the February 2024 extension, because that would have delayed the trial from its March 2024 start date. Instead she gave him a few weeks because that won’t impact the trial’s start date.

Even in Trump’s most questionable trial, the one being handled by faux-judge Aileen Cannon, even she hasn’t actually delayed that trial’s start date by a single day. She’s said some things to suggest she might be open to moving the trial to summer of 2024, but she’s given no indication that she has any intention of letting Trump magically delay that trial to 2025. Nor would the court of appeals allow Cannon to baselessly delay a trial for that long.

Meanwhile Trump’s trial with Judge Chutkan is set for March 2024, and his Fulton County trial could happen even sooner. Donald Trump does not have a magic “delay” wand. That’s just not a thing, no matter how many times we hear it referred to on cable news, or how many billable hours Trump’s team wastes trying to make that fantasy into a reality.