Story
Trump Pleads Not Guilty in Georgia and Seeks to Narrow the Case
Trump filed a not-guilty plea in Fulton County on Aug. 31, 2023, and his lawyers also asked to sever his case from some co-defendants in the election-interference prosecution.
Edition · August 31, 2023
Trump’s Georgia Plea, and the Same Old Donny Defiance
On August 31, 2023, the Georgia election case kept tightening around Trump even as he tried to keep the optics clean and the legal exposure contained.
The strongest Trump-world screwup on August 31, 2023 was his Georgia election-interference move: Donald Trump pleaded not guilty by filing papers instead of showing up in person, then tried to split his case away from some co-defendants. It was a classic Trump blend of legal denial and tactical gamesmanship, but the underlying problem was not theatrical; it was the fact that a major state racketeering case was now formally sitting on his head. The day did not produce a new indictment or ruling, but it did crystallize how much effort Trump had to spend just managing the damage from an indictment that refused to go away.
Closing take
The mask-and-hawk lawyers version of this story is that Trump avoided a public spectacle. The actual story is that he was still behaving like a defendant trying to escape the blast radius of a case built around his own effort to overturn an election.
Ranked by how bad the fuckup was
5 stars means maximum fallout. 1 star means a smaller self-own.