The accused Donald Trump

Since last Monday, for a few hours a day, Donald Trump is nothing more than a defendant who has to sit in a Manhattan courtroom to hear the development of the case against him for false accounting and illegal campaign financing. This image will last between six and eight more weeks, at four sessions per week. Sitting in that room, the former president and candidate

of the Republican Party for the November elections is simply a citizen at the mercy of the justice system, subject to the rigidity of judicial procedure like any other. Thus, for the first time, a transcendental moment of obligatory institutional sobriety has been achieved within the hysterical whirlwind that surrounds everything the magnate does and says.

The case stems from the payment to a porn actress, Stormy Daniels, to silence an alleged sexual relationship with Trump a few days before the 2016 elections. The scandal did not materialize judicially until prosecutor Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, launched a historic indictment a year ago and ended the timidity of the justice system when it came to pursuing Trump. There is a consensus among experts about the strength of the case in the aspect of accounting falsification, a specialty of the Manhattan Prosecutor's Office. The main witnesses are against Trump. However, there are doubts that require taking the future of the case with skepticism. Surely, this will be the only criminal trial of the four pending that will be held before the elections.

As of Thursday, the parties had only managed to select 7 of the 12 jury members. Of them, two were later rejected. The slowness responds to the difficulty in finding jurors that both parties consider impartial in a district where Democrats won with 86% in 2020. Despite their insults to the justice system, their public contempt for the judge and the prosecutor, and their clear intention to intimidate witnesses in public statements, Trump is receiving exquisite treatment that has resulted in several partial procedural victories for his defense, to the frustration of his critics. That's how it should be. The trial will be a crucial test to dilute the victimizing discourse of the former president-candidate in this campaign.

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Trump boasts that his judicial problems give him votes, but that is not the case, and the proof is that he has tried by all means not to sit on the bench. Polls reveal that a conviction would be lethal for his aspirations. The slowness of the American judicial bureaucracy has made it seem that Trump would never be held accountable. If that bureaucracy is able to completely abstract itself from the character and the campaign to carry out the trial, perhaps some of the voters will finally be able to see him simply for what he is: a citizen accused of almost 90 crimes.