Donald Trump — now a mere mortal and criminal defendant — faces justice: Act 1

In ancient Greek mythology, it is a fatal flaw, most often the personality flaw of hubris — an overweening belief in one’s invulnerability, infallibility, and near-godlike status — that causes an otherwise heroic figure to crash and burn. Okay, let’s leave out any flavour of faux, manufactured heroism on the part of Donald Trump, but, regardless, his trajectory may now have started on its descent. Maybe.

“Yes, yes,” you might well say, “we’ve heard that story before.” But until now, virtually all of his stumbles and travails resulted from self-inflicted, appalling business decisions — who loses money running casinos? — or outrageous political gaffes and insults to public decorum. (It is also true he has left a vast congregation of contractors and subcontractors still holding unpaid invoices, as well as others broken into submission through a vigorous litigiousness that ultimately has worn out such claimants.)

Nevertheless, much of his gigantic public presence has been created precisely out of his now grown-up but still bad-boy-fraternity behaviour, which has often centred around a social life with C-list celebrities in New York City’s layer of shysters and the city’s demimonde. It seems he has lived by a code that espoused the view that all publicity was ultimately good publicity, unless, similar to WC Fields’ hoary old quip, it involved small children or dogs. (Trump has long expressed a view that he hates dogs — they drool on you.) But not this time, perhaps.

This time may, finally, be different. This time he is confronting a multiarmed assault from all three layers — local, state and federal — of the nation’s judicial system, cases arising in large part from his belief he was simply beyond the laws that pertain to the rest of us. Tuesday’s events took place in a Manhattan criminal court as he surrendered to law officers, was fingerprinted, filled out the appropriate forms, and (together with his squad of attorneys) heard 34 separate charges laid against him by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg. Trump, of course, pleaded “not guilty” to all of them.

If a mugshot was taken, it has not been released, although in truth, his face is one of the most famous on the planet and even if he made a run for it, he would be easy to spot, with or without his trusty tan in a tube.

Alone as his processing took place, a visibly downcast Donald Trump — the self-defined macher and master of the universe, exchanger of love letters with North Korean dictator Kim Jung-un and cheerleader for ICC criminally accused Russian leader Vladimir Putin, the often accused-of-being-a-gonif but not brought low, and an overeager golf course builder — was actually forced to open doors for himself to enter the processing area. Moreover, he was pushed this way and that with virtually no regard for his former exalted and self-inflated status. Just another would-be con.

Despite his often-expressed love of the police (except when they are defending the Capitol Building from a mob he inspired) Trump probably is not all that popular even with the court officers in Manhattan, and none of them seemed to be showing much deference towards him. He is, after all, a criminal defendant, just like so many others that have been processed in that same building over the decades.

Hush money payoffs

Other dark clouds