According to one political analyst, Donald Trump's rich history of involvement in civil lawsuits has given him a false sense of security as he faces real jail time should he gets a guilty verdict in any one of the 37 federal charges in his indictment.
In a column for Politico, Jack Shafer wrote that the former president has long boasted he knows the ins and outs of the court system after decades of civil lawsuits filed against himself and his Trump Organization.
Because of that, Shafer suggested the former president is in for a rude awakening when he is arraigned in Florida next Tuesday.
Writing that "Trump has been a party to so many legal actions — both suing and being sued," that he feels he has a handle on how to direct his attorneys to proceed, Shafer added that the former president's previous experience has "blinded him to the danger he is in."
Shafer added that civil suits are "the padded playroom in which Trump has cavorted his entire professional life," and he explained that jail time was never on the table with them. But now it is.
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"Criminal cases don’t pit one person or organization against another. They are reserved for crimes against the state or society, and the plaintiff isn’t Joe or Doris or some regulatory body, it’s the big, angry fist of government. When you lose in this venue, you don’t write a check. You’re often sentenced to prison," he explained before adding, "Prosecutors seek justice, not compromise, and they’re relatively immune to the field disturbances that rattle civil litigators. Did Trump’s attorneys not tell him that?"
The analyst added that the newest indictment related to top secret government documents he refused to return could have been the easiest case to avoid by just complying.
"Inside his own bleached skull, Trump must now be imagining that he can run out the criminal clock too, just as he did in so many civil cases," he wrote.
He concluded, "A normal person would not assume they could win all four or five (or however many) criminal cases. A normal person would never put all his eggs in the single basket that says, 'Win the White House, Get Out of Jail Free.' A normal person would never count on DeSantis to deliver. And a normal person would never find himself in this pickle. But Donald Trump is not a normal person."
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