Donald Trump’s career-long habit of a ready-fire-aim stream of consciousness can now be held against him by prosecutors and a judge while the former president is on trial. Photo / Dave Sanders, The New York Times
Donald Trump’s career-long habit of a ready-fire-aim stream of consciousness can now be held against him by prosecutors and a judge while the former president is on trial. Photo / Dave Sanders, The New York Times
The former president has spent decades spewing thousands and thousands of words, sometimes contradicting himself. That tendency is now working against him in his Manhattan criminal case.
“So that’s not true? That’s not true?”
The judge in control of Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial had just cutoff the former president’s lawyer, Todd Blanche. Blanche had been in the midst of defending a social media post in which his client wrote that a statement that had been public for years “WAS JUST FOUND!”
Blanche had acknowledged during the Tuesday hearing that Trump’s post was false. But the judge, Juan Merchan, wasn’t satisfied.
“I need to understand,” Merchan said, glaring down at the lawyer from the bench, “what I am dealing with.”
The question of what is true — or at least what can be proved — is at the heart of any trial. But this particular defendant, accused by the Manhattan district attorney’s office of falsifying business records to conceal a sex scandal, has spent five decades spewing thousands and thousands of words, sometimes contradicting himself within minutes, sometimes within the same breath, with little concern for the consequences of what he said.
Trump has treated his own words as disposable commodities, intended for single use, and not necessarily indicative of any deeply held beliefs. And his tendency to pile phrases on top of one another has often worked to his benefit, amusing or engaging his supporters — sometimes spurring threats and even violence — while distracting, enraging or just plain disorienting his critics and adversaries.
If Blanche seemed unconcerned at the hearing that he was telling a criminal judge that his client had said something false, it may have been simply because the routine has become so familiar.
Trump’s career-long habit of a ready-fire-aim stream of consciousness — on social media, on television, to newspaper reporters, to rally attendees — can now be held against him by prosecutors and a judge who has genuine power over him.
Prosecutors have asked the judge to hold the former president in criminal contempt for violating a gag order that bars him from attacking witnesses, which they argued was necessary given that his previous attacks had “resulted in credible threats of violence, harassment and intimidation.” Merchan’s questioning of the truth of what Trump wrote on Truth Social was one of several episodes that have brought into stark relief how talking constantly in public — which made Trump a tabloid fixture and then a reality-television star — has been working against him lately.
Eventually, the case could threaten not only Trump’s freedom but also the central tenets of a lifelong ethos ever-present in the former president’s patter: a convenient disregard for the truth, the blunt denial of anything damaging and a stubborn insistence that his adversaries are always acting in bad faith.
The consequences so far have been minimal. Prosecutors told the judge at the contempt hearing Tuesday that for now, they were not seeking jail time for comments that mostly targeted two key witnesses: Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and personal lawyer, and Stormy Daniels, the porn actor who claimed to have had an affair with Trump and whom Cohen paid US$130,000 ($220,000) to keep silent weeks before the 2016 election.
Trump is less moved by threats of being fined. Still, when he faced a similar punishment in a civil fraud trial late last year, he slowed his attacks on a court official after the penalties mounted.
Donald Trump's attorney Todd Blanche. Photo / AP
Trump explained his mentality succinctly while running for president in 2016. When the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, asked him why he responded to every single slight, the candidate replied, “I have to defend myself.”
Trump’s words — which helped deliver him to the White House through dozens of rallies and interviews — often worked against him once he was there. In July 2016, his public call to Russia to “find” Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails from her private server just after he officially became the Republican nominee became a piece of the investigation into whether his campaign had conspired with Russians to help elect him.
Trump was also investigated for obstruction of justice as part of the broader Russian interference investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. One of those possible acts of obstruction was a series of social media posts in April 2018 in which he declared Cohen, his personal lawyer who was under investigation, would never flip on him. (Cohen eventually did so; he is expected to be a key witness at Trump’s criminal trial, and prosecutors have suggested they may enter those posts into evidence.)
As a sitting president, Trump was shielded from prosecution; he faced only a hefty report by Mueller.
Those protections fell away when he lost the presidency and left the White House. But Trump has not changed his approach to public life, and appears quite unlikely to ever do so.
Trump has long conflated legal problems with public-relations problems, treating the legal kind as easily spun away with statements or deflection.
Since the charges were unveiled in April 2023 by District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Trump and his advisers have braided together legal and political responses. They successfully called on Republicans to defend the former president and baselessly maintained that Bragg, a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Democratic county, was acting on orders from Trump’s political opponent President Joe Biden.
Prosecutors have asked Judge Juan Merchan to hold the former president in criminal contempt for violating a gag order that bars him from attacking witnesses. Photo / AP
They have also tried to use political arguments to justify Trump’s actions in the case. During the gag-order hearing Tuesday, Blanche sought to excuse a collection of Trump’s verbal assaults on Cohen and Daniels. He argued that, in attacking them, the former president had been responding to political attacks by his adversaries — who just happen to be witnesses in the case.
The judge wasn’t buying it. He told Blanche that he was planning to ask, in every example, “What precisely is it that your client is responding to?” When Blanche did not have the requested information at hand, Merchan reminded him of the purpose of the hearing.
“I am going to decide whether your client is in contempt or not,” he said, adding, “I keep asking you over and over again for a specific example, and I am not getting an answer.”
Merchan has yet to issue a ruling on whether to find Trump in contempt. While prosecutors have argued that Trump is “angling” to be arrested, some people close to Trump insist privately that, for all his bravado, he desperately wants to avoid jail.
Nonetheless, Trump has continued apace with comments that test the limits of what he can say. Two days after the hearing, prosecutors offered four new instances in which they said he had violated the gag order.
Two were during political interviews. One was in the hallway, right outside Merchan’s courtroom, where cameras are stationed to capture Trump speaking before and after court sessions. There, Trump hammered at Cohen’s credibility once again.
In response, Merchan set a new hearing for this week in which, once again, the former president’s statements will be in the spotlight: dissected, considered and, ultimately, judged.
