As Donald Trump his first criminal trial — for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's hush money case against the ex-president — it's clear that jail time could be in the MAGA hopeful's future.
Former President Barack Obama ex-senior strategist David Axelrod, in a Monday op-ed for The Atlantic, highlights what he believes is Trump's greatest fear — and it's not jail.
He writes:
As Trump sits and watches the criminal trial he hoped to avoid unfold, he must know that a potential reckoning he has spent a lifetime eluding could be coming. He has been reduced to a criminal defendant in a courtroom where someone else has absolute power and the rules very definitely apply. The weariness and vulnerability captured in those courtroom images betray a growing recognition that he could wind up as the thing his old man most reviled.
A convicted criminal?
No, worse. A loser.
READ MORE: Trump 'volcanically angry' about sketch artist and articles about him falling sleep: report
According to Axelrod, the former president's father, Fred Trump, "did impart to his son was an indelible lesson: There are two kinds of people in the world—killers and losers—and like his father, Donald had to be a killer."
The former Obama official continues, "The killers take what they want, however they need to take it. Rules? Norms? Laws? Institutions? They’re for suckers. The only unpardonable sin in Trumpworld is the failure to act in your own self-interest."
The Guardian reported in 2016, ahead of Trump's election:
In fact, every aggressive word Donald Trump ever directed at his father seems to have been about business. When Fred died, Donald Trump gave a cheerful quote for his father’s New York Times obituary, focusing on the way his dad had never wanted to expand into Manhattan. 'It was good for me,' he said. 'You know, being the son of somebody, it could have been competition to me. This way, I got Manhattan all to myself!'
Now, the former president sits in a Manhattan courtroom, and could soon be sitting behind bars.
As Trump and MAGA fans "dismiss the hush-money trial under way as a politically motivated sham," Axelrod writes, "the potential consequences for the embattled former president are very real. And he seems to know it."
READ MORE: 'Old and tired and mad': Trump’s demeanor in court detailed by Rachel Maddow
Axelrod emphasizes, "All of this appears to weigh on Trump as he sits in a courtroom for the first time as a criminal defendant, away from the campaign trail and cameras, in a setting and scenario he cannot control. A man who was bred to believe that the rules don’t apply to him—and who presents himself as peerless—is left to sit silently, by edict of the court, as a jury of his peers decides his fate."
Axelrod's full op-ed is here.
