Here’s why Trump has met his match with Georgia judge overseeing trial: report

Fulton Couty Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee's decision to allow former President Donald Trump's criminal 2020 election subversion trial to be televised suggests that Trump may have finally met his media "spectacle" match,"The New Yorker's Charles Bethea writes.

"A review of his body of work reveals an entertainer with a knack for surprising his audience," Bethea says. "See, for example, the What-A-Man pageant, for performative young men, held annually in the early two-thousands, at North Cobb High School, in Kennesaw, Georgia. Contestants offered their best pickup lines and revealed other talents. The quarterback usually won. But, in 2007, a self-described 'orch dork' took home the honor. That dork? Scott McAfee. Tall and decked out in black, he wore a Stars-and-Stripes-patterned bandanna around his blond hair as he performed Jimi Hendrix's version of The Star-Spangled Banner on an electrified cello. His classmates screamed for him to toss his shirt into the crowd."

McAfee studied music before becoming a lawyer and a member of the conservative Federalist Society, and Bethaa notes that "after getting his law degree, he worked as a state prosecutor and a federal prosecutor, and then became the inspector general of Georgia."

Bethea continues, "Earlier this year, McAfee, who is thirty-four, was appointed to the Superior Court of Fulton County. In August, he was chosen for the Trump case by a random selection process. The decision to televise the proceedings was in keeping with his typical courtroom rules."

McAfee said, "I have no aspiration to become the next Judge Ito,' referring to Lance Ito, the bearded and bespectacled judge who presided over the OJ Simpson trial, in 1995, as a hundred and fifty million Americans tuned in to watch," Bethea adds. "'Or the next Judge Judy, for that matter.' The Trump trial will surely surpass both Ito's and Judy's ratings. He went on, 'The idea with my job, in general, is to keep your head down. Stay even-keeled and manage expectations. This is not What-A-Man North Cobb 2007. It'll be mission accomplished if I personally bore everyone to death during my trials.'"