Donald Trump Is Never Going to Jail

Can we stop pretending he will?

Here is a section from a piece about Donald Trump’s legal liabilities and the odds of him going to jail:

Trump now faces a level of legal risk unlike anything in his notoriously checkered past — and well beyond anything faced by any previous president leaving office. To assess the odds that he will end up on trial, and how the proceedings would unfold, I spoke with some of the country’s top prosecutors, defense attorneys, and legal scholars. For the past four years, they have been weighing the case against Trump: the evidence already gathered, the witnesses prepared to testify, the political and constitutional issues involved in prosecuting an ex-president. Once he leaves office, they agree, there is good reason to think Trump will face criminal charges. “It’s going to head toward prosecution, and the litigation is going to be fierce,” says Bennett Gershman, a professor of constitutional law at Pace Law School who served for a decade as a New York State prosecutor.

That reads like it came from something written in the wake of the January 6 Committee referring Trump for criminal prosecution on Tuesday. But it wasn’t. It was written in September 2020, in New York Magazine. That piece, which the above illustration accompanied, laid out, in well-reported detail, how Trump facing…