Trump should have taken an arraignment victory lap. Instead, he disappointed. | Opinion

Tuesday could have been a triumphant day for Donald Trump.

That may sound counterintuitive. Yes, Tuesday was when he became the first former president to be charged with a crime. And yes, he was arrested, fingerprinted and charged with 34 felonies.

But that wasn’t what really mattered.

There had been a lot of speculation about the day. Commentators nationwide offered questions that ranged from trivial to absurd: Would he be handcuffed? What would his mugshot look like? Would he be detained at Riker’s Island?

That didn’t matter either. All that really mattered on Tuesday was what the indictment actually said.

Trump supporters had anticipated that it would be a watered-down misdemeanor business records case grafted to a nebulous campaign finance violation. They decried it as a political witch-hunt, led by an elected Democrat whose campaign for office touted the fact that his office had sued Trump, his family and his businesses “more than a hundred times.”

Trump opponents predicted that there was likely much more substance to the indictment. They hinted at possible new evidence, new witnesses, and perhaps even new charges beyond the “hush-money” payments.

When the indictment was revealed Tuesday afternoon, it became immediately apparent that there was little there, there. No new evidence. No new witnesses. No new charges. Just a yawn-inducing business records case.

Trump had been right. Even his detractors knew it. One conceded what many Trumpers had been suggesting from the beginning: that if the defendant’s name wasn’t Donald John Trump, these charges never would have been brought.

A former Obama official lamented that the indictment was just a “pebble,” and not the boulder some had expected (or hoped for?).

In many ways, Trump had won. Or at least, he could claim victory. Despite having the day start with arrest and fingerprinting, he had been proven right. Trump could now make the case, with some evidence, that this was a witch hunt and that he was the victim of the politicization of the criminal justice system.

And as he jetted back to Florida, many were speculating about the fireworks that would be coming in the victory-lap national address that was promised that evening from Mar-a-Lago.

The speech was a tremendous opportunity for Trump. News networks, which had long ago abandoned covering his rallies, cleared their airwaves. Here, for the first time in years, was an opportunity to speak to people who would never come to his rallies, and who likely didn’t vote for him in 2020. It was a chance to do something he has been failing at badly: building his base going into 2024.

Yet with all of that hype, with all the attention, and with all the momentum on his side, the former President delivered a bland (even “low-energy”!) list of grievances peppered with bizarre references to debt-to-equity ratios on his bank loans and the disclaimer language on his financial disclosure forms.

It was perhaps, his worst speech in recent memory.

Stunningly, it was almost entirely scripted, with only glimpses of Trump’s signature extemporaneous fire. We used to joke in the White House that the person with the hardest job was the guy running the teleprompter at a Trump rally. Not Tuesday night. He could have put the teleprompter on autoplay and headed to the bar.

Indeed, the speech was so tightly scripted, so controlled, that one is left to wonder if it was written by the lawyers, in anticipation of a gag order that never came.

The speculation as to why the speech was such a dud has already started. Was the 76-year-old Trump really worn out, physically, by the day? Was the emotional toll of realizing that he was, in fact, being charged with a crime, weighing on him more than people realized? Is the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump delivered a similarly flat campaign rollout a few months ago, just the wrong place?

One former White House official even suggested it was evidence that Trump’s heart wasn’t really in it anymore, and that he might drop out of the 2024 race.

Despite the circumstances, Donald Trump was where he longed to be on Tuesday night: on a stage with the whole world watching. And he failed to deliver. That, perhaps more than the criminal charges themselves, may be the real story of the day.

This story was originally published April 5, 2023 at 10:01 AM.