Quick take: Yesterday's hearings gave Trump his legal defense. "The Delusional Defense."

 I have been telling you, year after year, that no matter what crimes Trump commits, he will never be convicted of anything.  At the federal level, he will never be indicted, and if he is indicted in Georgia, it will be nothing more than a campaign stunt, leading to an inevitable acquittal.  His probability of criminal conviction is absolute zero.  It has always been, and remains absolute zero.  What happened yesterday?  Further testimony.  And to a man, they all said that even behind closed doors, Trump insisted that he really won, and that the election was illegitimate.

All a criminal defense attorney would have to demonstrate is that Trump "believed" that he was trying to correct a corrupted election.  Now, as I remind you, it makes little sense to describe Trump as "believing" anything, since he does not accept the premise of empirical reality, but that is not the kind of thing you take into the courtroom.  Instead, the question of corrupt intent would be assessed by his state of mind, in which one has to assess his mind as though it were not bizarrely, horribly diseased.  Hence, we are not in the realm of that strange, misunderstood, rare and misapplied thing called, "the insanity defense," but rather, "the delusional defense."  We conventionally define a lie as a statement that is a) false, b) known to be false, and c) intended to deceive.  Hence, stupidity and delusion actually are defenses against the charge of "lying," based on the "known" condition.  That is what makes parsing a Trump falsehood occasionally difficult.  He is dishonest, but he is also stupid, crazy, narcissistic, and many other things to boot, so what is at the core of any falsehood?  Answering that question is often challenging.  Yet at the core of any charge against Trump would be the problem of demonstrating that he knew he lost.

And he was incapable of "knowing" that, for reasons that I continue to reiterate.  Moreover, the fact that he insisted, behind closed doors, that he won, and that the election was "corrupt," would provide him with all the criminal defense he would need.

"The Delusional Defense."

Obviously, that means he needs to be back in the White House, in control of the most powerful government in the history of humanity.

We.  Are.  Fucked.

And because it's Friday, here's some jazz.  Laszlo Gardony, the title track from Behind Open Doors.