It’s not like we were looking forward to carrying yet another angry Trump speech at one of his shitty clubs just hours after he showed up in court. But like with every one of his other pre-scheduled cult gatherings, it would’ve been simply more economical for us to run it live rather than having to pluck clips off of Twitter and deciding which one to use only to have another one even more outrageous and/or worthy of derision show up in the feed just a minute later, turning our queue of stories into a long string of hateful bullshit. Even better would be if he died from or better yet been incapacitated by a massive stroke sometime in September or October of 2016 so we didn’t have to cover it at all.

Anyway, there’s no YouTube or Rumble feed for us to run because there’s no speech happening tonight, a glaring omission considering the fat bastard did so after his arraignments in Manhattan in April and then in Miami in June. There’s certainly an argument to be made that this is a matter of scheduling: That Trump’s first two arraignments came earlier in the day and gave him enough of a window to travel up and down the East Coast, while this one was at 4 PM. We wouldn’t really buy that for a number of reasons, not least of which is that DC and New Jersey are like 40 minutes apart by air. Or that he gives a shit if his sycophants at the Bedminster club would have to wait outside in the dark at 9 PM on an August weeknight if he were somehow delayed in returning to New Jersey.

So no, there almost certainly isn’t any such sort of normal, practical reason for the lack of a speech this time, which opens up a hell of a wide gap for us to speculate on why or, more accurately, who talked him out of venting his rage at having to face accountability in a court of law.

The why is easy. Of course we want to know the specifics, but it’s a decently safe bet that within the next 24 hours or so the top conduits like Asawin Suebsaeng at Rolling Stone, Maggie Haberman and/or Jonathan Swan at the Times, Josh Dawsey at the Post, Kaitlan Collins at CNN, Rob Costa at CBS, or whoever at Axios or Politico Playbook et cetera will publish a story that goes something like:

Sources in Donald Trump’s orbit tell reporters that the former president had been fully intent on throwing another post-arraignment rally after his DC courtroom appearance and only through a focused, multi-day effort by his advisers were they able to talk him out of repeating the performances from April after the Manhattan arrest and in June following his Miami arraignment.

This time was different, they told Trump. Unlike the Stormy Daniels hush money charges in Manhattan which they widely see as weak, abstract, and overly technical or the Mar-a-Lago documents case where he can look forward to a favorable judge and deep-red jury pool, the January 6th-related federal case against him evokes an ugly political scar that has yet to fade in the minds of the wide swaths of voters who don’t count themselves among the MAGA faithful, a feeling that was impressed upon the former president again and again over the past three days.

“It’s a third rail. You don’t touch it,” said one source familiar with both the Trump legal and political teams’ thinking, adding “He has to show up in court, obviously, and play to his base with the Truth Social posts. Anything else was just going to add to the media spectacle we had on Thursday.”

Besides the lame “Trump’s orbit” and “Trumpworld” tropes, which the MSM seriously needs to shut the fuck up with and stop using, we hope to see this story (or stories) come up on Friday. Even better would be if they can identify who was leading the charge. If it was solely from inside the Orange Messiah King’s court then whatever. We could certainly see Kellyanne Conway talking him out of it. In the unlikely though not impossible scenario it was mostly or entirely Donald who made the call then it would speak to the deep, palpable fear he faces. We’d definitely love that one.

The best case however might actually be if it was Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, or other members of the House GOP that got Trump to stand down. We know they’re already freaking the fuck out over having to spend the next year campaigning on Trump’s “innocence” and well-sourced reporting indicating that their fear was so great that they were actually able to use it to muzzle their feral overlord would be such a goddamned pleasure to be able to pick up and pass along to our readers.

Sure, we have plenty of other reporting, not to mention a whole lot of “vibes,” plainly indicative of that suffocating dread and pants-pissing terror permeating the GOP, but who among us doesn’t like having their preexisting biases confirmed by empirical data? And we just typed more than 800 words about this, so it better not have been just that fucking lawyer who talked Trump out of it.