Next week, in a Manhattan courtroom, citizen Donald Trump will arrive at the day of reckoning.

Trump has until now led a charmed legal life. A combination of a pallid Department of Justice, a corrupt and incompetent judge in Florida, and a partisan Supreme Court have allowed him to escape accountability for his Jan. 6 assault on democracy. Compared to the enormity of Trump’s crimes, the peccadillo of a secret payoff to a porn actress seems like small potatoes.

Everyone is asking me these days whether the trial will end in a hung jury. Surely, they say, there will be at least one Trumpster on the jury who will hold out for acquittal. I think this is pure fantasy.

In my experience, hung juries are a rarity, particularly where, as here, the proof is strong and the law is straightforward. The seasoned prosecutor Elie Honig estimates that the number of hung juries ranges from five to ten percent. Others might give a smaller number.

I don’t think there will be a hung jury here. The evidence against Trump is so overwhelming that my bet is on a unanimous verdict of conviction.

Of course, the prosecutor has an advantage out of the starting gate. The institutional pressures favor him. “Why would we be here,” the jurors wonder to themselves, “if the evidence didn’t warrant a conviction?”

Trump failed to take the stand. The jurors are not supposed to draw any inference of guilt from this, but everyone knows they do. If the key issue in the case is whether........

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