Trump's core strategy is to spread chaos and confusion — duh! Is it working?

It's never easy, or necessarily possible, to figure out who's winning in Donald Trump's tangles with the law. That's because the rule of law is based on the principle that everyone follows the rules — which may be ungainly, flawed, unfairly and unevenly enforced and all the rest of it, but in theory apply to all parties equally — and the rule of Trump is based on the principle that there are no rules, or at least that he gets to pick and choose which rules to follow, which to ignore and which to reverse-engineer to suit his own interests.

Consider this week — well, consider any given week of the last few hundred, honestly. But in this particular week, Trump appeared to worsen his legal troubles by way of an unasked-for confession in what was supposed to be a friendly interview with onetime Fox News star Megyn Kelly (how does one describe her now?), and also launched a vigorous counterattack against not one but two of the judges slated to preside over major Trump-centric court cases.

Of course it's exceedingly unlikely that Trump will get both U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan (who is overseeing Jack Smith's federal case against Trump) and New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron (in charge of the New York civil trial that could destroy Trump's business empire) disqualified or ousted or subjected to whatever gothic punishments the ex-president's mind may devise. But in both directions Trump is following a strategy — although that's really not the right word — that has served him well innumerable times in the past: Divert the media's attention by saying outrageous things that make him look dangerous or unhinged but are probably unprosecutable, while also deploying teams of unlikely-to-be-paid attorneys to sniff out and exploit every possible legal loophole that can delay the hour of reckoning by another few days (or months, or years). 

According to some legal observers, Trump turned up the heat beneath his own cauldron of hot water in his interview with Megyn Kelly this week, repeatedly claiming that he was "allowed to take" classified documents from the White House and that through some mystical process "they become unclassified" once he touches them or beholds them or stashes them in a decommissioned bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. 

Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance described the ex-president's remarks as a "good confession," and national security lawyer Bradley Moss predicted that Kelly's interview with Trump would be "played at trial by the government."

Meanwhile, according to a Daily Beast report, Trump scored a minor technical coup in New York on Thursday, convincing an appellate court to hit the pause button on state Attorney General Letitia James' civil case while it considers Trump's extraordinary last-minute lawsuit against Justice Engoron, which accuses him of violating an appellate court's earlier ruling on the scope of fraud allegations against the Trump business empire. It's a technical or procedural question, not a deeply substantive one, but that's not the point. The idea here, of course, is simply to delay, to create confusion and if possible to lend more credence to the deeply-held MAGA belief that Trump is being persecuted or prosecuted for being the leader of a political movement, rather than for an entire career of likely or probable criminal actions.

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While Trump appears to have a mathematical chance of throwing that New York case into disarray, his superficially similar effort to force Judge Chutkan to recuse herself from the federal case in Washington is singularly unlikely to go anywhere. Jack Smith's office responded to the Trump defense team's request on Thursday by saying that the ex-president "has relied on suggestion and innuendo to insinuate something sinister in the court simply doing its job." As usual, Smith's legal prose is remarkably concise and precise — especially compared to Fani Willis' fulsome, almost novelistic overreach — but one might reply: Yes, and?

Insinuating sinister motivations from the normal operations of his legal and political adversaries, as the thinnest possible veneer for his own motivations, is of course the Trumpian method in a nutshell. The important question is not whether any of his claims have merit; even Trump doesn't actually care about that. It's about whether this strategy of chaos and confusion will work for him one more time, as it has so many times in the past.