Carny-in-Chief Donald Trump announced that he will not be testifying at his New York fraud trial on Monday As recently as yesterday morning, Trump was trumpeting his upcoming appearance on the stand in New York City, but at 3:30 PM on Sunday afternoon, he pulled the rip-cord and bailed.

He did it, naturally, on his money-burning social media platform, Truth Social, hence my turning over my birth date and email address to the team of incompetent fools Trump has running the place. His rant ran to two –count’em, two – posts, and was done in ALL CAPS of course. I won’t run the whole thing to save you from choking on its lies and misbegotten egotism, but here’s just a sample from “Page 1”:

STATEMENT OF 45th PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP! AS EVERYONE KNOWS, I HAVE VERY SUCCESSFULLY & CONCLUSIVELY TESTIFIED IN THE CORRUPT, BIDEN DIRECTED, NEW YORK STATE ATTORNEY GENERAL’S RIGGED TRIAL AGAINST ME. WORLD RENOWNED EXPERTS, HIGHLY RESPECTED BANK & INSURANCE EXECUTIVES, REAL ESTATE PROFESSIONALS, AS WELL AS OTHERS, BOTH HONEST & CREDIBLE, HAVE STATED, CLEARLY & UNEQUIVOCALLY, THAT I, & MY VERY SUCCESSFUL COMPANY, DID NOTHING WRONG! MY FINANCIAL STATEMENTS WERE CONSERVATIVE, LIQUID, & “EXTRAORDINARY.” A TOP PROFESSOR FROM NYU STERN SAID, “IF MR. TRUMP WERE MY STUDENT, HE WOULD GET AN ‘A’ ON HIS FINANCIAL STATEMENTS.”

So, some five decades after graduating from college and Wharton School of Business, our benighted former president finally got an “A.” Wow.

“Page 2” is more of the same, complete with a claim that his residence/club/resort Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida is worth way more than the $18,000,000 value put on it by the prosecution, in fact, “50 TO 100 TIMES THAT AMOUNT,” and of course the usual nonsense about the charges against him being “A COMPLETE & TOTAL ELECTION INFERFERENCE (BIDEN CAMPAIGN) WITCH HUNT.”

Okaaaaaay Donnie, now go over there and sit in the chair under the ketchup stains on the wall and take a sip of your Diet Coke, and you’ll feel better.

Legal experts have been open-mouthed in astonishment for days at the possibility that Trump would be permitted by his alleged legal team to take the stand in the fraud trial. The talk on cable news got so bothersome to Trump’s team of lawyers that they put Alina Habba on Fox News on Friday. Here is how Habba went about reassuring everyone that all is peachy keen with the Trump legal team’s plan to allow the Big Man to be questioned in cross examination by lawyers for the State of New York.

“I would never discourage the former president from testifying, because quite honestly, our plan up until now was to have him testify, he always wanted to testify and he should testify,” Habba said. “When he has nothing to hide, it’s the best thing you could do is put this great witness on that is going to stand up and tell you the truth.”

Seriously? You’re going to depend on your client’s well-known fondness for the truth? After all, “truth” is the first word in the title of his failing social media company. So please go on:

“They’ve closed their case, we are now putting on our case, and they cannot prove that we did anything wrong,” she told Fox News host Martha MacCallum. “Quite the contrary, all they’ve proven is that President Trump is worth a lot more than his financial condition. And if he wanted to inflate it, he would have put his brand alone — which is worth billions and billions and billions of dollars. But he didn’t because there was no fraud.”

Apart from the unfinished sentences, syntactical whoop-dee-doops and non sequiturs, good job, Alina! You got through three whole sentences and came as close as anyone could hope in your attempt to make sense of your client’s awful legal situation.

In Trump’s big day on the stand in his fraud trial, which all of a sudden is not going to happen, his freedom was not at stake and all that stands to happen when the trial is over and he loses is to be fined an amount he can appeal until he’s in the grave and let his kids take care of, and possibly lose his license to do business in New York State. So, the stakes are, shall we say, a tad large but not existential.

Even so, Trump skedaddled.

As well he should have. The New York Attorney General, whom Trump called “LETICIA 'PEEKABOO' JAMES” in his screed this afternoon, noted that Trump had already been found to have “committed years of financial fraud and unjustly enriched himself and his family.”

“No matter how much he tries to distract from reality, the facts don’t lie.”

Ooooof. There’s your answer for all those chicken feathers in the air at Mar-a-Lago tonight.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

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