Legal scholar Jonathan Turley called it "the coup de grace instruction" from Judge Juan Merchan to the men and women of Donald Trump's NDA/Campaign Finance/Whatevs trial in New York City when he told jurors on Wednesday that they don't have to reach a unanimous guilty verdict to reach a unanimous guilty verdict.
Wait, wut?
Reporting live on X from the courtroom, Turley posted that Merchan instructed the jury "that there is no need to agree on what occurred. They can disagree on what the crime was among the three choices. Thus, this means that they could split 4-4-4 and he will still treat them as unanimous."
So if a majority of jurors find Trump "not guilty" on all three charges, but they managed to scrape up a combined 12 votes from each charge, Judge Merchan will assemble those into a single unanimous guilty vote — a Frankenverdict, if you will.
Or if your tastes, like mine, run a bit darker...
Some readers might have to look up the Jame Gumb reference, but I won't judge.
My jaw really did (figuratively) drop to the floor at the news, but I was far from the only one. David "Iowahawk" Burge posted that "this kinda feels like some blow-up-in-your-face judicial Calvinball," and called Merchan's instructions "wishful thinking on the level of 'hey let's trap Godzilla with the high voltage lines.'"
SPOILER: Godzilla always busts right through the power lines, which seem to somehow give his atomic fire breath extra charge.
Then again, for a trial where not even the prosecution could point to exactly what the crime was, this latest absurdity is just one more nail in the coffin of American jurisprudence.
So what if there are seven votes for a guilty verdict on one part, four on another, but only one on the third? That still adds up to 12, right? So Trump is guilty? And if the verdict comes back 6 + 6 + 6...
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...18 has got to be 50% worse than the traditional unanimous vote of 12 jurors. That ought to give Judge Mercham the flexibility to raise Trump's maximum sentence from 134 years to 201 years. And the financial penalty would have to be something like eleventy jillion dollars.
I believe that a triple unanimous vote of 36 calls for a summary execution right there on the spot.
More seriously, Paul "King of Memes" Hookem warned, "If they can do this to Trump…just imagine what they will do to us. The war has long begun. Most just don’t know it."
He isn't exaggerating, either. Haven't we seen enough kangaroo court antics in various Jan. 6 trials already?
Even closer to the mark is my old Twitter/X acquaintance, Fusilli Spock:
From the prosecution's charges that amount to a chekist's promise to "show me the man and I'll show you the crime," to Merchan's ludicrous jury instructions, this is a case that will never survive appeal.
But I don't believe it was meant to.
Judge Merchan and the entire Democrat-Media Complex are jackhammering nails into America's coffin just to muddy the waters, to impugn Trump with an imaginary, illegal, unconstitutional felony conviction in plenty of time before Election Day.