This is the second week of former president Donald Trump’s historic criminal trial in Manhattan for allegedly engaging in a hush-money scheme to conceal his sexual encounter with adult film actress Stormy Daniels. (Legal scholar Norman Eisen has more accurately described this trial as about the crime of election interference).
Far faster than most experts expected, 12 jurors and six alternates were selected last week. Trump’s criminal trials are almost guaranteed to be a spectacle given his bombastic temperament, egomania and megalomania, mastery of stagecraft and propaganda, and a disagreeable personality that borders on the sociopathic, if not psychopathic.
