The Surprising Strategy Trump Could Use to Win His Manhattan Trial

For all of Donald Trump’s bluster, he faces an uphill battle to avoid conviction in his Manhattan criminal trial beginning Monday.

The fact is most criminal defendants who go to trial end up being convicted. Trump himself is also incredibly unpopular in Manhattan, and his courtroom antics in recent months have probably not endeared him to many prospective jurors in the borough. Worse still for the former president, Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s criminal trial, significantly narrowed Trump’s potential lines of defense in a series of pretrial rulings on legal and evidentiary issues.But Trump and his lawyers still have two robust defense strategies — one obvious, one surprising — that they can use in the courtroom to try to rebut prosecutors’ charges that Trump falsified his company’s business records in connection with a hush-money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 election.