Was there ever any doubt Donald Trump would somehow escape the clutches of his nasty, yet so incompetent enemies?  Martha Raddatz can start tearing up again, and MSNBC hosts can dejectedly trudge away from their camera positions outside Trump Tower or Trump National Golf Course.  There will be no sheriff’s deputies coming with padlocks.

Mr. Trump got his appeal bond reduced, and he can cover the smaller amount.  Oh, and for good measure, he picks up another $3 billion in stocks next week as his Truth Social platform goes public.

The rest of us just sit here in slack-jawed wonder to imagine what this guy will do next.  I haven’t seen somebody pull out so many aces from his sleeve since the Great Cardini.

Letitia James will pound the table that “this changes nothing” — Trump still owes all the money from the verdict — but she is wrong.  Trump will have about two years now to go through all the New York appeals, and then probably the SCOTUS as well, to cut that judgment down to size.  I don’t think the New York appeals court would be giving Trump a break here if they didn’t think that much of Judge Engoron’s decision is weak or downright ridiculous.

The big-shot insurance executives were pretty confident Trump would overturn, or at least greatly reduce, the judgments against him.  CNBC even reported last week that Chubb Group was considering fronting Trump the whole half-billion for the second appeal bond, before they got lots of political static, probably including from New York State’s insurance regulators.

No matter.  Now it’s on to the Stormy Daniels/“hush money trial” next month.  The main witness against Trump will be Michael Cohen, a repulsive liar and former lawyer for Trump, who was convicted of crimes unrelated to anything he did for the Trump family.  It was Cohen who set up the whole nondisclosure payment scheme to Daniels in 2016, which, like it or not, was not illegal.  It’s quite possible, in a twelve-juror NYC criminal trial, that at least one or two “good men and true” will see through Alvin Bragg’s pathetic case.

Even if Trump were convicted on this nonsense, after Fani Willis and her escapades, most voters, at least the non-rabid partisans, must be reaching the breaking point, where all the lawfare looks absurdly unfair and they tune it out.

In any kind of fair fight in November, between the unsinkable Donald Trump and the cadaverous Joe Biden, my money is on Trump.  Let’s just hope he has a few more tricks up his sleeve for the second term.

Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, Ky.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.