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In today’s edition:

• A presidential criminal trial that’s both shaky and consequential
• Could good defense de-escalate the Iran-Israel tensions?
• Dating is hard when there’s almost no one around

A past (and future?) president’s first criminal trial

Happy Tax Day. Happy Boston Marathon Day. And happy Donald Trump’s Business Falsification Records Trial (Not to Be Confused With His Other Trials) Kickoff Day to all who celebrate.

The trial, which concerns Trump’s alleged laundering of hush money to cover up alleged infidelity through his then lawyer in the run-up to the 2016 election, marks the first ever criminal prosecution of a former U.S. president. (The Post’s news side is liveblogging it here.) At press time, jury selection was just about to get underway, after morning proceedings that Trump enlivened by reportedly falling asleep.

Our columnists will be observing with, we hope, greater alertness. Ruth Marcus says that in her eyes, the “shakiest case against Donald Trump” is the first to go to trial, and that makes her nervous. That’s not because there isn’t something big at stake, she writes: “This isn’t trivial — it’s serious.”

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“But it’s not hard to imagine that jurors could balk — it just takes one to produce a hung jury — at shoehorning Trump’s payments to Daniels, however odious, into the tangential crime of falsifying business records.” And several other pitfalls are apparent, too. All in all, Ruth sees a possible conviction ahead but wishes prosecutors were leading off with a better hand.

Jen Rubin has another view: “It actually might be the most consequential of the four criminal cases facing the former president.” Trump’s alleged funneling of funds to quash deleterious rumors and subsequent coverup represent a genuine — and successful — duping of voters to influence the election, she writes. Jen bats down some of the objections to this case and certainly speaks for some onlookers when she says, as the proceedings finally begin, “We made it.”

Chaser: E.J. Dionne hops over to a completely different Trump legal affair — the Supreme Court’s upcoming hearing of Trump’s “claim that presidents should enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for illegal acts performed in office” — and tackles the implications of asserting, in essence, that “it takes a criminal to be a good president.” He adds, “This has implications voters should take very seriously, including for national........

© Washington Post