When Fani Willis took the stand to trade sharp elbows with lawyers defending Donald Trump and his co-defendants, she stood before three audiences.
But Willis only really cares about two of them.
The first is an audience of one: the superior court judge Scott McAfee, who will rule sometime two weeks or so from now on whether Willis, the special prosecutor Nathan Wade and the rest of the Fulton county district attorney’s office will continue to handle the Trump trial, or if instead it will be handed to another attorney chosen by the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia.
If Willis is bumped off the case, it almost certainly means there will be no resolution before the US presidential election in November, in which Trump is almost certainly going to be the Republican nominee for president again.
Willis and her team have been presenting evidence and testimony to rebut questions about financial motivations for pressing the case against Trump by showing how much personal harm Willis and her staff have had to endure in the process. Willis’s father, the venerable civil rights attorney John C Floyd, gave florid testimony today about the death threats and harassment that drove Willis from her home as she prosecuted the case, for example.
McAfee recognizes high-drama courtroom confrontations for what they are: irrelevant to the legal question. He must decide whether the appearance of impropriety and the legal question of alleged unjust enrichment raised by the defense are sufficient to create an appellate court problem if Trump and others are convicted at trial. Has there been misconduct, and is removing Willis the appropriate remedy under the law if there has been misconduct? That’s the legal question.
But it’s not the only issue for Fani Willis, who is up for re-election in 263 days.
Until this moment, Willis looked like an unbeatable shoo-in for re-election. She is, arguably, the highest-profile district attorney in the US today, and she’s as recognizable to a Fulton county voter as the president, the governor or Georgia’s senators. In a game of name recognition … well, people have stopped mispronouncing her first name in Atlanta now.
But the revelation that she had been dating a highly paid office subordinate while working on a trial with the presidency on the line raises questions about her judgment. She may be contemplating a political challenger, who will argue that Willis is not the one to continue the case … assuming it is still in court in November.
Her challenge here was to remind voters why they voted for her in the first place: to aggressively confront crime in Atlanta. Willis beat a 20-year incumbent in 2020 amid sharply rising crime and issues with prosecutions by her predecessor. She won in part by arguing that she would get the job done where her previous boss could not.
Willis has to make her case to the Fulton county voters that she’s still their best choice. That’s where the sharp elbows and Black cultural callbacks on the stand come from: she’s speaking to the second audience – the primarily Black, majority-female, predominantly Democratic Fulton county electorate who is watching all of this unfold and dreading the possibility that the county’s chance to impose justice on the powerful may be slipping through her fingers.
By showing her grief and rage, she humanizes herself before this audience, which is likely to be sympathetic to the horrors of a Black professional’s love life aired like a reality television show before the American public as a Trump defendant’s legal ploy.
It’s telling, perhaps, that Atlanta’s mayor, Andre Dickens, and the former mayor Shirley Franklin were both in attendance at the hearing on Friday morning, ostensibly as a show of political and moral support for Willis.
There is, of course, a third audience: every other person in the free world.
Americans of all political stripes recognize that there’s a lot riding on the outcome of this case. Of all the criminal and civil cases Trump faces today, a conviction in Georgia is the only one for which he is almost certain to do time in prison, because there’s effectively no pardon power to save him. And Trump’s recorded phone call provides powerful evidence for a prosecutor to present to a jury.
Voters across the country have a stake in the outcome here. But the only voters who count for Willis’s purposes are the ones who live in Fulton county. Until that changes, she’s not going to care what the others think.
