He's actually hating this. Don't be fooled.

[Tommy Carcetti]

Yes, much has been made about Donald Trump using his New York indictment and other pending legal troubles as campaign finance fuel.

Yes, his supporters are trying to frame him as some sort of righteous outlaw, some sort of Robin Hood, sticking it to the Man and the dreaded Deep State perpetually trying to bring him down.

Hell, Marge Greene actually compared to Nelson Mandela and Jesus.

Yes, Jesus. No joke.

But let's not fool ourselves about any of this. For all the punditry talk about Donald Trump using this unprecedented indictment to his political advantage, for all the long-winded, all-caps tweets--err, sorry, "Truths"--from the Former Office Occupant, there's one thing that's absolutely undeniable.

He hates this.

He absolutely hates every single thing about this.

Of all the images from Tuesday, one of the most indelible of all was this still photo of Trump in the courtroom:



It's rather astonishing. You see him sitting in this dark, dingy, wood-paneled New York criminal courtroom. He's wearing his trademark red tie but conspicuously absent is that trademark shit-eating smirk of his. Instead, his face remains plain, his eyes signaling considerable discomfort. He's sitting hunched over in the middle of the Defendant's table, surrounded by his no-name, two-bit Defense attorneys and a couple of uniformed officers of the Court.

And in this one picture, we see someone who once held the very highest office in the land, and who was presumably one of the most powerful men on earth, and yet he looks no different than any other pathetic defendant in any other highly publicized criminal trial that we've seen splashed on TV over the decades.

And what's worse is that while, yes, this day is all about him, it's not about his power. Because the guy who once sat at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office for four years is now sitting in an undersized chair at a plain wooden Defendant's table, and he's not the guy in charge in the room. Instead, he's literally facing a judge, a common state court judge at the trial level, and that judge is now the most important and powerful guy in this world instead of him.

And that absolutely has to kill him. The lack of power. The lack of control. For all the bluster, for all the showmanship of his private jet, of his tall Manhattan Tower, of his gilded Mar-a-Lago palace, everything about him here is centered in this fluorescently-lit, cheap wood paneled criminal courtroom.

In short, he now feels like what we have already known him to be for years: a loser.

He knows he's a loser, because he committed the very worst sin that he could ever imagine, and that was that he got caught.

There's no actual remorse for his deeds because there's never been any actual conscience in the man, but there is now a gnawing internal sense of self-pity and self-hatred because he's been forced to account. And that betrays all dignity.

Remember he teased and demeaned John McCain for his perceived sin of being captured in wartime. And while in actuality being a Prisoner of War is absolutely nothing like being a criminal defendant charged with multiple felonies, in Trump's feeble, malignantly narcissitic mind, there is no difference.

He got caught. And now he's a loser.

So yes, he hates this.

He hates every single waking minute of it.

And I, for one, can't be any happier for that fact.