Trump's legal strategy 'is not a defense — it's a cry for help': analysis

Former President Donald Trump has argued that he can't really be guilty of defrauding the United States because he sincerely believed that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

But MSNBC columnist Michael A. Cohen -- who is of no relation to the Michael Cohen who used to work as Trump's personal attorney -- argues that this essentially amounts to an insanity defense on the former president's part.

Given that Trump continued making false claims about election fraud that his own Department of Justice and his own campaign had debunked, Cohen argues that say he held a sincere belief in 2020 outcome-determinative voter fraud is akin to Trump confessing an inability to understand reality.

"I don’t doubt that Trump believed he won the 2020 election or that he repeated the lie so many times that it became his reality, but that’s not a defense — it’s a cry for help," writes Cohen. "And in Trump’s case, arguing that he believed he won suggests that he also lives in a fantasy world."

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Cohen also argues that Trump's behavior after the election follows a pattern that has emerged every time the former president became engulfed in scandal.

"Trump’s making nonsensical arguments follows a familiar pattern in his attempts to get out of trouble," he writes. "Who can forget his allegedly “perfect” phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which led to his first impeachment? After his indictment in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, Trump claimed he had a right to possess certain government documents after having left office (he didn’t), that he had sole discretion in deciding which of his papers to turn over to the government (nope) and that Hillary Clinton and Biden did even worse things with classified documents than he did (they didn’t)."

Read the whole column here.