With the defense beginning its presentation of evidence today, will the peculiar civil fraud trial against former president Donald Trump, his adult sons, and the Trump Organization take a new turn?

No.

The defense has about as much chance of making headway by calling its own witnesses as it did in moving to dismiss the case last week — none. That is because, as I recapped, Judge Arthur Engoron ruled even before the trial started that the defendants are liable for engaging in a persistent pattern of fraud.

Persistent fraud is the first and most important cause of action in the case. New York State attorney general Letitia James brought it under a monstrous statute that makes it possible to establish fraud with no proof of fraudulent intent, much less fraudulent effect. There are six other causes of action on which Engoron did not rule pre-trial. That, ostensibly, is why this trial, now well into its second month, is taking place. But the trial has settled into a farcical “Who’s on first?” loop, along the lines of the following:

Judge Engoron: I find you guilty of fraud. Now let’s proceed with the trial.

Trump defense: We will show that there was no fraud.

Engoron: No, you won’t. I’ve already ruled that you’re guilty of fraud. Only question now is how much.

Defense: But we believe there is no fraud. If the central question in the trial is how much, the answer is zero.

Engoron: It can’t be zero.

Defense: Why can’t it be zero? We have a case, we have witnesses.

Engoron: Because I’ve already found you guilty.

Defense: So what’s the point of the trial?

Engoron: To figure out how guilty.

Defense: But we’re not guilty.

Engoron: I already said you are guilty. Now, let’s proceed with the trial . . .

The defense will begin its presentation by calling Donald Trump Jr., one of the defendants, as a witness. Don Jr. already testified, two weeks ago, when he was called as a witness by the state.

Technically speaking, each side in litigation is entitled to present its own version of events, uninterrupted by the other side’s opposing version. That is, if I, as plaintiff’s counsel, call a witness to build my case, the defense is permitted to cross-examine him regarding the facts I’ve elicited, but the defense is not permitted — under the guise of cross-examination — to turn him into a defense witness for purposes of establishing facts it believes may be helpful to its case; for that, the defense must wait its turn. When the plaintiff has rested its case, the witness may then be re-called, in the defense case.

Obviously, this can waste a lot of time (just as, come to think of it, holding a trial when the outcome is not in doubt wastes a lot of time). Nevertheless, trial procedure permits it. That, however, is mainly to avoid jury confusion: The plaintiff is entitled to unfold its case to the jury as it sees fit, in the manner it deems most persuasive; the plaintiff should not be derailed in the telling of its story by the defense’s telling of its story.

But all that presupposes a jury trial. James’s civil fraud case against Trump is not being tried to a jury: It is a bench trial. The judge, who already knows what the parties’ competing claims are, is the finder of fact who will render the verdict (beyond the verdict he rendered even before the trial started). Because it is to be expected that judges, unlike nonlawyer jurors, will be able to sort out which aspects of a witness’s testimony are being posited by the plaintiff and which by the defendant, it should be unnecessary to call a witness more than once.

Engoron is not doing it that way. The defense case, then, is likely to feature multiple witnesses who’ve testified during the state’s case. These include former president Trump. (I suspect that if we had a better trial judge, who was not so clearly enjoying his 15 minutes of limelight, this trial would not take two to three months to complete.)

Even if we indulged the fiction that Engoron has not already made up his mind about the outcome, it would be difficult to see how Don Jr.’s testimony would help the defense much. He has already testified, during the state’s case, that the top executives in the Trump Organization relied heavily on the company’s then-accountants (the U.S. division of the Mazars Group) to complete the statements of financial condition (SFCs) that are the heart of the state’s case. It is in the SFCs that asset values were allegedly inflated during the period from 2011 through 2021. Whether or not you take Don Jr. at his word, his version of events is that he had little awareness of how the SFC values were arrived at. Given that, what more could he really add to the defense’s position at this point?

If the judge had not already made up his mind, what I believe could move the needle in Trump’s favor would be testimony from his counterparties — the banks and insurance companies that willingly transacted with him, reviewing his SFCs but also doing their own assessment of his assets, as is customary. But I’m not holding my breath, for the reasons I laid out last week:

All other things being equal, since the state has not been able to establish that there were any victims of the alleged fraud, one would think Trump’s defense would parade in a bunch of bank and insurance executives to testify that they were glad to have done business with Trump, he was a good customer who paid on time, and they were very comfortable with his asset valuations.

But if you’re a top executive at a financial institution that is heavily regulated by New York State, and you see how the state has gone after Trump hammer and tong in a transparently partisan vendetta, do you want to get on the “wrong” side of that? When you see that an elected-Democratic attorney general, aided and abetted by an elected-Democratic judge, is hellbent on putting Trump out of business and taking a quarter-billion dollars from him in a case where there are no victims, what makes you think they wouldn’t come after you if you cross them?

It has been estimated that the defense case will last through the end of this month. If that happens, it will only be because former president Trump sees some political advantage — in the context of the 2024 presidential campaign — in trying to highlight the partisan vindictiveness of the case: brought by an elected progressive Democrat who campaigned for office vowing to nail him on something, and who followed up by trying to destroy his business, and seize $250 million of his earnings, through an unprecedented invocation of New York business fraud law, which has yielded a fraud lawsuit with no fraud victims.