Characteristically for the ex-president, Donald Trump was flipping out this Monday as his scheduled criminal trial in New York City approached its start, constituting the ex-White House occupant’s first criminal proceedings.
In a post to Truth Social that he then pinned to the top of his profile, Trump claimed he’d be fighting for hundreds of millions of Americans’ freedom. He was presumably trying to refer to the entire U.S. population, although his number was wrong.
“When I walk into that courtroom, I know I will have the love of 200 million Americans behind me, and I will be FIGHTING for the FREEDOM of 325 MILLION AMERICANS!” Trump told his social media followers on the knock-off site. There are apparently about 335 million Americans, per data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Whoops?
Anyway, the basic gist of what Trump is saying is obviously wrong. This case against him is hinging on detailed and specific allegations of breaking the law that were advanced earlier by a grand jury, not some kind of secretive political plot, eroding the idea — popular on the Right — that Trump’s courtroom hurdles reflect some kind of threat to Americans more broadly. And Trump’s inaccurate claims about his courtroom problems are numerous, considering he’s been trying just in recent days to credit President Joe Biden and the White House with some of this as though it’s an established fact, though there’s no real-world evidence of that involvement.
In reality, Trump’s penchant for complaining to high heaven and deeming himself among the most persecuted individuals in history pales before the brute reality of the law, which doesn’t fold to whining from someone who’s never won the popular vote in a presidential election and now spends so much of his time complaining, whether online or to fans at rallies.
