A strange new dimension for Donald the defendant

It wouldn’t happen to Putin. It wouldn’t happen to Xi. It wouldn’t happen to Kim Jong Un. The three leaders most admired by Donald Trump — he drools over them like a dog — have arranged their lives and the lives of others in such a way, that in no plausible scenario would they be required to endure what awaits him this week in a Manhattan courtroom.

There he will be made to sit every day for the duration of this election interference case, otherwise known as the “Stormy Daniels affair”, the first ever criminal jury trial in which a former president is the defendant.

For the recent civil cases he could come and go as he pleased — indeed on one occasion during his fraud case he just stood up and walked out of the room, as if he was overseeing these proceedings and he’d suddenly remembered he had more important business elsewhere.

But for someone who seeks at all times to project the energy of the “strongman” — whose brand is impunity — to be sitting there every day, facing some sort of accountability for his alleged crimes, is a terrible look. Mortifying, really.

Not only is he losing face at the proverbial Dictators’ Club, it is a situation which will put intolerable strain on his way of being in the world. Even in his own home, Mar-a-Lago, he routinely requires a standing ovation when he enters the room. Now, in a grotty courtroom in Manhattan, he will be made to listen to hours of testimony from people, some of whom don’t like him at all, but who are probably telling the truth about him.

Naturally, that large part of the media which is pathologically dedicated to the task of amplifying Trump’s bullshit for him, will be speaking sadly of how unwise it is, to turn him into a “martyr”. They’ll be saying how you just can’t be putting a presidential candidate on trial, even when his innumerable alleged crimes include trying to overturn the last election.

No, they’ll say, you can’t do that without giving a tremendous boost to his campaign.

Well, if all this is supposed to be doing Trump such a big favour, you’d wonder why he has tried and failed at least 10 times to delay this case — filing every conceivable motion, taking them up to an appellate court, spending shedloads of money (other people’s money, but still...) on lawyers to extricate himself from this and all those other cases which are supposed to be such a boon for him.

Even as you are reading this, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he is going for just one more Hail Mary pass that will win the ballgame for him — or at least stop it for a while. For him, it must be as unimaginable as it is for anyone else that he would face an actual trial like any other defendant.

Remember, the man recently described by a bewildered Larry

David as the greatest conman

America ever produced, is still walking the streets and actually running for president almost four years after fomenting a coup on live television. How would he not believe that the law simply doesn’t apply to him?

No, if somehow he is delivered to that courtroom tomorrow morning to face trial, he will be in some strange new dimension and in truth nobody knows how it will unfold from there.

Now the same people who insist that this will just feed Trump’s narrative of victimhood — as if it needed feeding — are saying this is not the right case to be taking against him. That it’s not big enough, like the January 6 case, or treasonous enough, like the classified documents case.

But frankly, the best case against a man who is essentially a mob boss is probably the one that you can actually bring to court as soon as possible. And anyway, this Stormy Daniels business is serious enough to have already sent one man to jail — the lawyer or “fixer” Michael Cohen, who will now be testifying against Trump.

Cohen was sentenced to three years for his contribution to the cause and was also disbarred. Though it always seemed to be a particularly mad outcome, even in this maddest of legal and political environments, that the fixer could go to jail — but the guy on whose behalf he did the fixing could walk away from it all.

And we shouldn’t really be calling it the Stormy Daniels affair or the hush money case. Yes, it involves the redoubtable sex worker Stormy and $130,000 of hush money, but it is ultimately an election interference case.

It was just after the “grab ’em by the pussy” episode — and at that point, Stormy’s silence about some sexual activity with Trump just after Melania had given birth to their son in 2006, was considered crucial.

The deal was done just before the election of 2016, to keep the Trump show on the road.

So this case goes to many aspects of the Trump experience — sleaze on an industrial scale, cheating on everything and everyone. It’s the story of his life.

Eejitry will devour itself, but it’ll eat anything

Isense we are about to be engulfed in great waves of eejitry. The recent referendums, about which many people simply couldn’t be arsed, were seized upon by fanatics of varying hues as some tremendous statement against wokeness. And in the departure of Leo Varadkar, the anti-woke brigade are seeing a kind of symbolic shift in their favour.

Voices within the main parties are demanding more of the “common sense” attitudes we are hearing from new outfits such as Independent Ireland — though on RTÉ 1’s Today with Claire Byrne, historian Diarmaid Ferriter reminded us that Fine Gael has been here before.

That some 30 years ago, Jim Mitchell was warning the party that it was “choking on the liberal agenda” — the liberal agenda being the same thing as the woke agenda, and obviously in retrospect the best thing that ever happened in the social and cultural history of this country.

But there has always been a political market out there for those who think that we’re choking on it — and this is not just an Irish thing.

The human story in general tells of the unending struggle to prevail against the Inner Eejit which is within us all, and which is the enemy of enlightenment.

We are a small country and there’s an acceptable level of eejitry beyond which we are in serious trouble — bigger countries such as the UK and the US have within the last decade allowed that Inner Eejit to break out of its cage, with calamitous results.

The “common sense” crowd in England got their Brexit, while their anti-woke brethren in America were installing Trump and with him, a “conservative” Supreme Court majority which overturned Roe v Wade and which is remorselessly taking away these fundamental rights of women. There is a punchline though, because eejitry is eating itself, with pro-choice women expected to turn out in exceptional numbers in the election in November to vote for Biden.

It always does eat itself, in its fatuous fury — yet along the way it devours an awful lot of other things, too. Just like that, great nations are engulfed by it.

And people who used to love those places get the feeling that they don’t want to go there any more.

We don’t want that for ourselves now… do we?

Legend of Joe Kinnear is heard across the globe

Joe Kinnear, who played for Ireland with an English accent long before the liberal agenda of Jack Charlton normalised such things, died last week.

He was an excellent full-back for Spurs and the Republic — yet perhaps his memory will be preserved longest by a line written about him by Harry Harris of the Daily Mirror, when Joe, pictured inset, had somehow found himself in Nepal, managing their national team in the shadow of the Himalayas. The piece began: “Joe Kinnear, from his office overlooking Mount Everest...”

Dublin-born soccer legend Joe Kinnear, who died last week at the age of 77, was a star player with Tottenham Hotspur and also won 26 caps for Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, before going on to manage Wimbledon FC and other teams in a long and varied career.

He was born on December 27, 1946, and his life in soccer began with kicking a ball as a youngster in Crumlin. At the age of eight he moved to England with the family, growing up with his four sisters on a council estate in the market town of Watford, Hertfordshire, north-west of London.

His performance as a captain of school and Hertfordshire teams brought him to the notice of the local semi-professional St Albans City FC and he did well as a defender with

The Saints, as they are called.

As a teenager he joined Tottenham Hotspur in 1963 where he honed his skills playing under the managership of Bill Nicholson. He made the first of over 250 appearances as a defender for the club on April 8, 1966, in a 4–1 home defeat by West Ham United.

Kinnear had a stroke of luck in February 1967 when Spurs right-back Phil Beal broke his arm and had to drop out for the season. This left the door open to Kinnear, who went on at age 19 — the youngest player on the pitch — to play in the 1967 FA Cup Final at Wembley where Tottenham beat Chelsea 2-1. He was widely regarded as the Man of the Match.

His performance earned him a total of £2,500 in bonuses and it was reported afterwards that he immediately gave £500 to his mother; bestowed a total of £120 on his four sisters along with a new outfit for each of them; purchased a TV set and armchair for his granny back in Dublin; bought a Ford Corsair for himself at £600 — and then took the entire family, including his granny, on a six-week holiday back in Ireland.

Commenting on spending what was then a particularly large amount of money, he said: “I couldn’t get rid of it quick enough.”

Other major honours he won in his 10 seasons at White Hart Lane included the League Cup in 1971 and 1973, the UEFA Cup in 1972, and the Charity Shield (now the Community Shield) in 1967.

He first played for the Republic of Ireland in a European Nations Cup game against Turkey on February 22, 1967, taking over as right full-back from Shay Brennan of Manchester United who had suffered an ankle injury.

The game took place in Ankara under challenging circumstances — a heavy fall of snow had removed every blade of grass from the pitch, leaving a slippery surface behind.

The Turks won 2-1 and Kinnear was praised for a goal-line clearance after it had bypassed the keeper.

Kinnear moved to Brighton & Hove Albion for his last season as a player in 1975-76, where he made 16 appearances before retiring in his 30th year.

He then embarked on a new football career as coach and manager, starting off in the Middle East and Asia. He spent five years in the United Arab Emirates where he managed Sharjah FC, founded in 1966, and the Dubai-based Al-Shabab Al Arabi football club (in co-operation with Scottish player and manager Dave Mackay). He also worked in a number of other countries, including Malaysia, as well as spending three months coaching the India national football team and a year coaching Nepal.

Returning to England, he became assistant to Dave Mackay at Doncaster Rovers and was later appointed reserve team manager of Wimbledon FC in 1989, succeeding to the senior managerial job in January 1992.

Under his guidance, The Dons came sixth in the Premier League in the 1993-94 season, ahead of Liverpool, Aston Villa, Everton and Spurs. They also reached the quarter-finals of the League Cup.

Kinnear was voted Premier League Manager of the Month three times during the same period.

He went on to prove that the success of Wimbledon wasn’t a fluke when, in the following year, the team finished ninth in the Premier League.

The Wimbledon players were often labelled the “Crazy Gang” because of the colourful behaviour of some players, including practical jokes played on managers such as Kinnear.

The club was dissolved in 2004 with most supporters switching allegiance to the more-recently formed AFC Wimbledon. In March 1999, ahead of a game with Sheffield Wednesday, Kinnear suffered a heart attack and stepped down three months later.

After recuperating, he returned to football, serving briefly as director of football at Oxford before taking on a similar position at Luton Town, where he eventually became manager.

He moved to Nottingham Forest in February 2004 and replaced Kevin Keegan at Newcastle in 2008.

To put it mildly, Kinnear wasn’t always happy with media coverage of the sporting activities he was involved in, and had some famously robust exchanges with journalists — most notably using colourful language at a press conference on October 2, 2008, an incident which has been recalled widely in recent days.

His spell at Newcastle started well in sporting terms, with matches against Everton and Manchester City both ending in 2-2 draws, followed by a 2-1 win over West Bromwich Albion and a surprise 2-0 victory over Aston Villa which lifted Newcastle out of the relegation zone.

He expressed his unhappiness with the referee at a game against Stoke City where Newcastle had been two goals ahead and it ended in a draw. Newcastle went on to score wins against Portsmouth and his former club Tottenham Hotspur — but a 5-1 defeat at the hands of Liverpool was a major setback.

In February 2009, Kinnear was taken to hospital after feeling ill ahead of a match against West Brom and it was later announced he needed a heart bypass operation. This led to Alan Shearer taking on the job until the end of the season. On June 16, 2013, Kinnear said in a number of telephone interviews that he had been appointed as director of football for Newcastle United. The appointment, involving a three-year contract, was confirmed by the club two days later. On February 3, 2014, Kinnear resigned from the position.

In 2021, Joseph Patrick Kinnear’s wife Bonnie revealed that he had been living with dementia since 2015.

In a statement last Sunday, his loved ones said: “We are sad to announce that Joe passed away peacefully this afternoon, surrounded by his family.” The English Football League described Kinnear as “a man who provided so many memories, both as a player and a manager”.

Luton Town FC said on X (formerly Twitter): “We are saddened to learn that our former manager Joe Kinnear has passed away at the age of 77. Our thoughts are with Joe’s friends and family at this time.”

Newcastle United FC said: “The thoughts of everyone at NUFC are with Joe’s family and friends at this difficult time.”

John Hartson, who played under Kinnear at Wimbledon, posted his tribute: “RIP Gaffer. My thoughts are with Joe’s wife Bonnie and the Kinnear family.”

Kinnear was originally named Joseph Reddy, son of a Guinness brewery worker of the same name and his wife Margaret. When family circumstances changed and Margaret moved to England where she set up home with a new partner, Gerry Kinnear, Joe took his stepfather’s surname.