Donald Trump just lost in appeals court

There’s this popular notion that Donald Trump can just appeal his way out of legal trouble. “Running out the clock,” they call it. While it’s true that some appeals do take some time, they’re still finite tools. And often they don’t delay things at all.

For instance, even as Trump keeps getting squeezed more tightly by the gag order in his current criminal trial (he’s now one false word away from jail time), his attorneys have been appealing the gag order to the New York appeals court.

Today the appeals court upheld the gag order and rejected Trump’s attempt at getting it overturned. As we can all see, Trump’s appeal didn’t delay his current trial by even a single day, or impact it in any way.

As I’ve pointed out before, the time for a defendant to successfully use delay tactics is long before the trial happens. Once a trial is close to beginning, and once it’s underway, such delay tactics don’t actually do anything. Yet Trump is wasting his time and focus on them anyway.