We’re three days away from the Iowa caucuses, but nobody really cares. Even though Trump did not win Iowa in 2016, everyone expects he will win handily this time, although record cold weather could possibly throw a spanner in the works.

Instead, the more interesting news of the week came from two different courtrooms – one in D.C., and one in New York City – both of which featured cameo appearances by Trump.

We start Tuesday in D.C., where the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals heard Trump’s interlocutory appeal in the criminal case arising out of the events of January 6th, with the appellant himself taking the unusual step of being in the audience.

Procedurally, the D.C. Circuit had moved extremely quickly to hear this case, motivated perhaps by the fact that the district court trial date had been set for March 4th, and perhaps also by the fact that if the D.C. Circuit hadn’t shown its willingness to move so swiftly then the Supreme Court might have been more inclined to grant the government’s motion for certiorari before judgment. The district court judge, Tanya Chutkan, issued her ruling denying Trump’s motions to dismiss the charges on grounds of presidential immunity and constitutional immunity on December 1st; by December 13th the D.C. Circuit had granted the appeal with a swift schedule for briefing, making it possible to have oral arguments on January 9th. That is, by the standards of the appellate courts, incredibly fast.

Trump’s argument for immunity attempts to weave together two concepts. One is that SCOTUS previously established, in Nixon v. Fitzgerald, a principle that Presidents are immune from civil (as opposed to criminal) liability for actions lying within the “outer perimeter” of their duties, whereas no prior case has ever explored potential criminal liability for Presidential actions (recalling that Ford pardoned Nixon shortly after taking office, mooting the issue with respect to Tricky Dick). The other is that Section 3 of Article I of the Constitution says explicitly that, after an impeachment trial by the Senate, “the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”

From this raw material, Trump’s current legal team has advanced a principle that a former President can only face criminal liability for official actions after a Senate conviction on impeachment charges related to those actions. Consequently, per this purported legal principle, the January 6th charges must be dismissed since Trump was acquitted in the February 2021 impeachment trial.

Or, as former Obama administration official Eric Solomon wittily put it: “Trump’s position is that Biden can kill him if 34 Senators agree.”

Among the many factors undermining Trump’s legal argument – in addition to it being a logically fallacious reading of the Constitutional language, and to it having crazy potential consequences – is the fact that various prior actions contra-indicate this interpretation of the law. One example is Nixon’s acceptance of Ford’s pardon; if Nixon were immune on the grounds that he had not been impeached and convicted, then there was nothing for which he needed to be pardoned. Another example is that, in Trump’s second impeachment trial, his then legal team argued that impeachment was pointless since he was already out of office and since he would now be subject to the criminal justice system for his conduct on January 6th.

As such, the widespread consensus is that Trump will lose this appeal. However the question remains, how exactly will he lose it, and how rapidly; and then, what happens next in terms of further avenues of appeal on this issue before the district court trial can commence.

Norman Eisen and two co-authors wrote an extensive treatise earlier this week, laying out a dizzying variety of possibilities. As I write this it is now the Friday night three days after oral argument, and nothing has come out of the D.C. Circuit yet; the waiting game continues.

Two days later in New York, Trump was once again inside a courtroom, as part of the closing arguments of what I’ll refer to as the “New York Trump Org” case, a civil lawsuit brought by New York Attorney Letitia James against Trump and other family members who served as executives of the interconnected family of companies that Trump likes to style as the “Trump Organization.”

I’ll likely talk about this suit at greater length when the decision is issued, which should happen by the end of January, and hence will make do for now with a brief summary.

The allegations made by James in September 2022 were: that the Trump Organization repeatedly prepared, and disseminated to potential lenders and insurers, unaudited financial statements that purported to have been prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP but in fact were not; that, in doing so, the Trump Organization violated a New York law regarding “persistent fraud or illegality in the carrying on, conducting or transacting of business”; and that the appropriate remedy is to prevent Trump from conducting business in New York for 5 years and to have him disgorge at least $250 million.

For reasons I don’t entirely understand, this trial is being heard by a judge alone, and not by a jury. Furthermore, the judge (Arthur Engoron) kicked off the trial in September 2023 with a finding of fact that fraud had in fact occurred, making the trial’s sole purpose the quantification of how much Trump would need to disgorge. The prosecution is now arguing that amount should be $370 million.

Trump has been attacking the judge and the process throughout the trial, and he sought to personally participate in the closing arguments this week. That went about as well as you think it might.

So, to sum up: The presumptive winner of next week’s Iowa caucuses spent his week making legal arguments about the scope of presidential immunity that would be laughable if they weren’t so dangerous, followed by ranting against the sole arbiter who will determine whether his business interests in New York remain viable and how many hundreds of millions of dollars he may have to forfeit as a penalty for committing civil fraud.

That would have been a pretty astonishing sentence to write, prior to these 2020s. Now, it’s just part of the background noise of the world in which we live.