Televise the Trump trials, and expose the blowhard fraud

Here's the thing about Donald Trump: He's not a real mobster, just a mouthy blowhard who plays one on TV. A trustfund preppie surrounded by bodyguards all his life — bodyguards and lawyers, not gangsters and hit men. It's a good bet the big man himself has never so much as had a fistfight. Never even played a contact sport. He's a country club bully and notorious golf cheat.

So when he tries to intimidate people — judges, prosecutors, witnesses, whomever — it's always over the telephone or in ALL CAPS social media posts in the middle of the night, weaselworded to preserve deniability.

“IF YOU GO AFTER ME,

I'M COMING AFTER YOU!” he tweeted the other night after carefully behaving himself in Judge Tanya Chutkan's courtroom. Basically meaning he'll run his mouth in the hope of inspiring some weak-minded MAGA fool to do something foolish.

“Let's you and him fight.” That's how Trump rolls. Remember back on Jan. 6 when he urged the mob to march down to the U.S. Capitol to “fight like hell, because if you don't fight like hell, you won't have a country anymore”? He also promised he'd be marching with them. But, of course, he was a no-show; he watched the riot for hours on TV while aides begged him to act.

Trump's idea of a fight is a scripted professional wrestling event.

Come the trial in Judge Chutkan's court, it will be more of the same. Because he doesn't dare face cross-examination, Trump won't be testifying and will need to restrain himself lest the no-nonsense jurist lock him up for contempt. No courtroom outbursts and no mugging for the cameras.

No stupid red MAGA hat. Which is pretty much why this trial — arguably the most consequential criminal trial in U.S. history — must be televised nationwide (hell, worldwide), so that Trump's deluded supporters can witness his humbling. I agree with Court TV founder Steven Brill, who argues in a New York Times op-ed that “Americans Will Believe the Trump Verdict Only if They Can See It.”

Although federal court rules currently forbid cameras, those rules are not graven in stone. The Founding Fathers clearly meant for jury trials to be public. That's why courtrooms have large galleries — just not large enough, in this instance, when the potential audience numbers in the millions. It'll be a legal Super Bowl.

“The last thing our country and the world needs,” Brill writes, “is for this trial to become the ultimate divisive spin game, in which each side roots for its team online and on the cable news networks as if cheering from the bleachers.”

The process of changing the no-TV rule begins with Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who should definitely recognize the potential harm to the judicial system's prestige, and ultimately its legitimacy, if Trump's trial were to devolve into a contest among cable news spin doctors.

Already, Trump apologists argue that he has a First Amendment right to say anything he pretends to believe about who won the 2020 presidential election. But that's not what he's charged with. Trump can (and surely will, albeit not under oath) say anything he likes about that.

Special counsel Jack Smith has compiled scores of examples of Trump being credibly informed that his allegations of fraud had been investigated and dismissed. Almost without exception, the witnesses will be Republican elected officials — Trump supporters, most of them, who, like Vice President Mike Pence, put country above party.

No, not everybody will be persuaded. Many in the MAGA cult are clearly beyond reason. But if nothing else, the sheer tedium of a weekslong federal trial will wear down all but the most deluded.

As for Boss Trump's mobster act intimidating witnesses, that's not happening. Tough sentences handed down against

Jan. 6 rioters have also had a calming effect. Nobody's eager to do prison time for a loudmouth politician in a baggy suit.

Americans have every right to witness this spectacle live.

Many in the MAGA cult are clearly beyond reason. But if nothing else, the sheer tedium of a federal trial will wear down all but the most deluded.