Mr. Trump made two additional arguments, involving double jeopardy and the First Amendment, that were even weaker than the immunity claim, and Judge Chutkan denied those as well. She was probably tempted to toss out all of them as frivolous, as so many of Mr. Trump’s delaying tactics, dressed up as legal arguments, turn out to be. Instead she erred on the side of caution because no one has ever made such arguments, so there is no legal precedent for assessing their validity.
Of course, the reason no one has made these arguments is that no former president has been criminally charged before. This is classic Trump, freeloading on everyone else’s respect for the law. You can drive 100 m.p.h. down the highway only if you are confident the other cars will stay in their lanes.
The irony is that, even as he seeks to delay and obstruct the justice system, Mr. Trump is bolstering the case for a speedy trial thanks to his repeated threatening outbursts on social media. He has attacked the judge, the prosecutor and others, including those who are likely to testify against him. Statements like those endanger the safety of witnesses and the basic fairness of the trial, and have resulted in a gag order against the former president, but they are routine for a man who has spent a lifetime acting out and daring decent Americans everywhere to do something, anything, to stop him.
“He keeps challenging the system to hold him accountable,” Kristy Parker of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan advocacy group, told me. Most any other defendant who behaved in this way would risk being thrown in jail for violating the conditions of their bail, she said, but “no one wants to see him locked up prior to trial. It’s not going to be good for American society.”
She was referring to the propensity for threats and violence that Mr. Trump’s supporters, egged on by their overlord, have shown in the face of any attempt to hold him to account. At this point, however, many Americans have accepted that risk as part of the price of cleansing the nation of a uniquely malicious political figure. We know the violence is coming, just as we know Mr. Trump will claim that any election he doesn’t win is rigged against him.