Trump’s legal strategy of delay, delay, delay delivers win and a loss

In decades as a New York property developer, landlord and public figure, Donald Trump’s legal strategy had three prongs: Delay, then delay and delay again. That approach met its match Monday morning in the form of Judge Juan M. Merchan (pictured) who is overseeing Trump’s trial on charges related to hush money payments to a adult star.

He brushed aside Trump’s defense lawyers, who said they needed more time to prepare and accused prosecutors of deliberately keeping them in the dark, and ordered the trial to start April 15. ‘That you don’t have a case right now is really disconcerting because the allegation that the defense makes in all of your papers is incredibly serious. Unbelievably serious,’ Merchan said in his Manhattan courtroom. ‘You’re accusing the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the people involved in this case of prosecutorial misconduct and of trying to make me complicit in it. And you don’t have a single cite to support that position.’

For any political figure, the exchange would have been an extraordinary way to start a week that should have seen them out campaigning for the White House. For Trump, it was just one of two cases playing out in New York. 

A state appeals court up the road delivered him a victory of sorts. It gave him financial breathing room in a $454 million civil fraud case, allowing him to avoid losing assets if he can post a smaller $175 million bond within 10 days. And he still had time to compare himself to Jesus on social media. All before lunch.

The net result is that he won one delay but lost another. The hush money case will go ahead in three weeks time. It may turn out to be the only one of four criminal cases that begins before the election. Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law professor, said on X: ‘A big win for justice, a huge loss for Trump’s strategy of delay, delay, delay.’ Trump’s lawyers had asked for a delay of at least 90 days over what they said were ‘violations’ by prosecutors in turning over documents.

The former president is charged with hiding $130,000 paid to Stormy Daniels (pictured) for her silence, part of an effort to prevent voters learning about their alleged affair during his 2016 presidential campaign. 

 Trump has made no secret of the strategy. ‘We want delays,’ he said as he arrived for a hearing last month. Both his federal prosecutions—the documents case in Florida and a 2020 election case in Washington, D.C.—have disappeared into the future, possibly after the November election.

Fani Willis, the prosecutor in Georgia’s election fraud case, is intent on a start date during the summer. But no schedule has yet been set and she has been buffeted by revelations of a romantic relationship with lead prosecutor Nathan Wade, who was forced to resign from the team. Trump’s team is planning yet another appeal in that case, this time seeking again to disqualify Willis from the case. For the past few days, his biggest headache has been a civil fraud case and posting a vast bond to stave off the $454 million judgment before New York’s attorney general started seizing his businesses and properties.

On Monday, his appeal succeeded. An appellate court gave him 10 days to post a smaller bond of $175 million. Afterwards Trump said he would quickly come up with that money, even before news emerged that his stake in the company behind his Truth Social platform had soared to more than $6 billion after a merger was approved last week. ‘So a lot of things happened today,’ he said in an uncharacteristically understated comment to reporters gathered at his 40 Wall Street property, one of the addresses at risk if he couldn’t come up with the funds. But he quickly turned his fire on the prosecutors pursuing him through the courts, accusing them of election interference. ‘They’re dying to get this thing started. The judge cannot go faster. He wants to get it started so badly,’ he said. But he added that the effort was backfiring. ‘It can also make me more popular because the people know it’s a scam,’ he said. ‘It’s a Biden trial.’

He may not be wrong. Even without hitting the conventional campaign trail, Trump cleaned up with what strategists refer to as ‘earned media,’ dominating headlines for the day without paying a penny for airtime. And of all the trials, the New York fraud case—which could be done by the end of May—is the least damaging to his election hopes, according to pollster James Johnson, of J.L. Partners. ‘Voters see the New York case as the most politically motivated,’ he said. ‘And voters especially independents, generally feel that this is a distraction and a pursuit of Trump, and that Trump should be able to fairly fight the election, and the prosecutor should be focused on other issues, including what they see as increasing violent crime.’ The result, he said, was plenty of exposure for Trump with a slight positive bump for the former president with voters.

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