Trump is running a tv spot in which, amidst a hail of lies, he laments the enormity of his having been indicted. He claims repeatedly “I am an innocent man.” 

But anyone who has not been asleep for the past 50+ years has to ask “Of what at all could Trump be innocent?” It is hard to think of an evil that Trump, whose whole life has been an amoral fraud, has not done or abetted.

However, even a sexual predator, even a thief and con-man, even a traitor to his friends and to the country he has been exploiting might claim innocence on the basis of an insanity plea. Let him come forward, declare his responsibility for the crimes of which he has and shall be charged, but also maintain that he had no control over his own behavior, that he was driven to a life of crime by irresistible inner compulsions.

He would not have to fake this.