Opinion | There’s a Reason Most People Aren’t Following the Trump Trial

Christopher Hitchens once described participation in the absurd debate over who actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays as “an unfailing sign of advanced intellectual and mental prostration.” It would be unsporting to apply this characterization of literary conspiracy theorists to the enthusiastic followers of Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York, but only, I think, because the verdict in the latter case is still an open question.

For the uninitiated (a category to which a great majority of voters belong), the most immediately striking feature of both Shakespeare denialism and the Trump trial is impenetrability: endless rolls of decontextualized names and dates; speculative chronologies; inconsequential or irrelevant details invested with a lurid significance; complex, novel theories of evidence that are somehow applicable only to one individual.

How many people, even those who purport to be following the case against Mr. Trump, can summarize the premise on which the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, has based his claim that various alleged low-level bookkeeping offenses somehow congeal into a felony, much less explain why Mr. Trump is the only person of note whose ostensible accounting errors are treated like this? You might as well buttonhole audience members at Shakespeare in the Park and ask them to explain the hidden political affinities, legal allusions and cryptographic clues that point to Francis Bacon as the real author of “As You Like It.”

But there is a more important reason that so many Americans have taken so little interest in this criminal proceeding. People recognize, at least implicitly, that the trial is in effect an attempt to settle an issue that courts are poorly suited to decide: namely, whether Mr. Trump should again be elected president of the United States. That, as they say, is a question for another day, specifically Nov. 5.

The most obvious antecedents for the current prosecution of Mr. Trump date from his time in the White House: the two impeachments; the wide-ranging investigation of Russian “collusion” that consumed roughly half of his term; the speculation about violations of the Logan Act and the emoluments clause; and the suggestion that he be removed from office under the dubious terms of the 25th Amendment. Whatever their merits, these efforts were all, in their animating spirit, partisan attempts to negate the outcome of the 2016 presidential election — or, failing that, to circumscribe Mr. Trump’s ability to exercise the authority of the office he had (as his opponents saw it) illegitimately obtained.

Any criminal conviction that results from Mr. Bragg’s indictment would not disqualify Mr. Trump from seeking office. But it cannot have been absent from the prosecution’s calculations that a conviction might not help his cause.