Donald Trump is scheduled to go on trial on April 15 in the so-called “hush money” case brought by Alvin Bragg in Manhattan. There will be a local jury, and there is a judge who is pretty openly hostile to Trump.

This has led to a flurry of motions and attempts by Trump to delay the trial, all to now avail. His latest attempt was denied by an appellate court judge today:

One week before Donald J. Trump is set to face a criminal trial in Manhattan, an appeals court judge on Monday rejected his effort to pause the case and move it to a different location.

The judge, Lizbeth Gonzalez, issued the decision Monday afternoon after hearing arguments from Mr. Trump’s lawyers and lawyers from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which has accused the former president of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal.

For weeks, Mr. Trump has sought to delay the trial, the first prosecution of a former U.S. president, and possibly the only one of Mr. Trump’s four criminal cases to make it to trial this year.

Mr. Trump’s attempt to move the case out of Manhattan was not the only delay strategy he deployed on Monday. In a separate proceeding, he indicated that he planned to file an unusual type of lawsuit against the judge overseeing the case, Juan M. Merchan.

Two people with knowledge of the matter said that Mr. Trump’s lawyers on Monday had planned to file the action calling on the appeals court to overturn a gag order that Justice Merchan recently imposed on the former president. The order prevents Mr. Trump from attacking witnesses, prosecutors and the judge’s own family.

Court records showed on Monday that Mr. Trump had begun the process of filing the action against Justice Merchan, though the papers were not immediately made public.

I don’t blame Trump for trying to get the trial delayed, which he attempts to change the location and judge. Trump is being railroaded by a prosecution that never should have been brought.

Andy McCarthy has a good explanation of why Trump is treating this as a political matter – he assumes he’s going to lose at trial:

For what it’s worth, and to repeat the analysis I’ve offered in the above-linked posts, I suspect that Trump is convinced that the odds are very high that he will be convicted in the Manhattan case. Accordingly, he is fighting the case as political combat; every move is about persuading the electorate, not improving his litigating position.

Bragg has taken what at most should have been a misdemeanor (that he’d never have charged against anyone but Trump, and on which the statute of limitations ran years ago) and multiplied that act into 34 felony counts (an abusive practice that Justice Department rules admonish federal prosecutors to avoid). With a jury drawn from Manhattan, and with Merchan presiding, it is difficult to imagine Trump getting acquitted on all 34 business-records-falsification charges (the chances of a hung jury are a bit better, but not much). If he is ever going to get legal relief, as in New York’s civil fraud lawsuit and its astronomical $454 million judgment despite the absence of fraud victims, it is going to come on appeal, long after the 2024 election.

For now, then, Trump’s objective is to convince the voting public that New York’s judicial system, dominated by progressive Democrats, is rigged against him, and that any conviction (or even 34 convictions) should be seen as the weaponization of law enforcement, not as his culpability for crimes.

This whole system sucks. As I said before, Get Out of New York, If You Can.

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