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Judge Keeps Trump’s Manhattan Hush-Money Case in State Court
A federal judge on July 19, 2023, denied Donald Trump’s bid to move the Manhattan hush-money prosecution out of New York state court, sending the case back to state court for now.
Edition · July 19, 2023
The Daily Fuckup: July 19, 2023
A day of legal losses and tightening noose: Trump’s hush-money case stayed in state court, and the special counsel’s Jan. 6 case kept moving toward a courtroom showdown.
On July 19, 2023, Trump-world took a couple of hard legal hits that underscored how much the former president’s 2024 comeback effort was being dragged around by his own past. A federal judge refused to rescue Trump from the Manhattan hush-money case, keeping it in state court and leaving him on a collision course with a criminal trial in the middle of primary season. The same day, the federal Jan. 6 case continued to harden into a serious threat, with the machinery of the prosecution visibly accelerating. It was not a catastrophic day in the abstract, but it was another reminder that Trump’s legal calendar was becoming the campaign’s real calendar.
Closing take
The pattern here was already obvious by mid-July: Trump was trying to run a presidential campaign while his old baggage kept winning the scheduling battle. July 19 was one more day when the courts, not the stump speech, set the agenda. That is never a great look for a candidate who sells himself as the only man strong enough to restore order.
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