Trump did not win the judicial lottery this time

By Keith Raffel

Syndicated columnist

By the luck of the draw, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan was assigned to preside over former President Donald Trump's trial for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results. I doubt Judge Chutkan, who is Black and Jamaican-born, would have been Trump's first choice given his history of attacking powerful Black women.

What history? How about a few examples? Trump tweeted that Omarosa Manigault Newman, a Black woman who served as White House director of communications, was a "crazed, crying lowlife" and a "dog," and he maligned veteran Rep. Maxine Waters as a "low IQ individual." He told journalist Abby Phillips that she asks "a lot of stupid questions" and deemed White House correspondent April Ryan "a loser" who is "very nasty."

In 2019, Trump attacked liberal Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar, suggesting that the four weren't born in America by asking, "Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." All four are women of color, with three Black and three American-born.

Professor Michael Eric Dyson, currently at Vanderbilt, has said Trump is playing a familiar racist card with such invective by "trying to keep in place Black women who have stepped outside of their bounds, and who have refused to concede the legitimacy of being a docile being in the face of white power."

Perhaps no one has been the recipient of more vicious attacks from Trump than Vice President Kamala Harris, whose father is a Stanford emeritus professor born in Jamaica. Trump called her a "monster" after the 2020 vice presidential debate and also untruthfully implied that, as the daughter of immigrants, Harris was ineligible to serve as vice president.

But wait, there's more bad news for Trump. Judge Chutkan, who sits in D.C., has also already handled a case where he was a party. In Trump v. Thompson, the ex-president sued to stop the National Archives from providing presidential records to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Chutkan denied Trump's plea, writing in her opinion, "Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President." Her ruling was upheld by the circuit court and the Supreme Court. Moreover, in cases stemming from the events on Jan. 6, she has stood out from her colleagues on the bench for the tough sentences she's handed down to those found guilty of attacking the Capitol.

Trump must have celebrated his good fortune this past June when the Florida case where he is accused of mishandling national defense secrets and obstructing justice was assigned to Judge Aileen Cannon. Last year Judge Cannon took unprecedented steps to pause the ongoing criminal investigation of Trump's activities. (That ruling was overturned unanimously on appeal.) Now, given his record of attacking Black women including the most prominent woman in America with Jamaican roots, Trump cannot be too pleased to have the tough-minded Judge Chutkan assigned to the election denial case.

After reading the indictments in both the Florida and D.C. cases, I'd bet it will be difficult indeed for the two juries to find Trump not guilty of all 44 charges against him. In the end, however, who will preside over the cases matters less than the election results in November 2024. If Trump - or a close ally - should retake the White House, an attorney general who will dismiss charges or drop appeals in both cases is almost a certainty.

Chances are, then, the real jury in the federal cases against Trump will be the Americans casting their ballots in November 2024.

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