The former president has been giving numerous statements for decades, sometimes comments in which he contradicts himself. Now, that tendency is working once morest him in his criminal case in Manhattan.
“So that’s not true? That is not true?”.
The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan had just interrupted Todd Blanche, the former president’s lawyer. Blanche was defending a social media post in which his client wrote that a statement that had been public for years “JUST BEEN FOUND!”
At Tuesday’s hearing, Blanche had already acknowledged that Trump’s post was false. But the judge, Juan Merchan, was not satisfied.
“I need to understand,” Merchan said, looking at the lawyer from the stand, “what I’m dealing with.”
The issue of what is true—or at least what can be proven—is the central point of any trial. But this specific defendant, accused by the Manhattan district attorney’s office of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal, has spent five decades spouting thousands and thousands of words, sometimes contradicting himself in a matter of minutes, sometimes in the same prayer, without worrying regarding the consequences of what he has said.
Trump has treated his words as disposable products, intended for single use, and not necessarily indicative of deeply held beliefs. And his tendency to pile on his quotes has often benefited him, amusing or generating sympathy with his followers—sometimes provoking threats and even violence—while he distracted, outraged, or simply disoriented his critics and adversaries.
If Blanche seemed unconcerned at the hearing as he was telling a criminal judge that his client had said something false, it may have simply been because the routine has become so familiar.
Trump’s career-long habit of being ready to speak in a stream of consciousness — on social media, on television, to news reporters, to rally-goers — can now be used in his once morest by prosecutors and a judge who have real power over him.
Prosecutors have asked the judge to find the former president in criminal contempt for violating a gag order that prohibits him from attacking witnesses. They argued it was necessary, as his previous attacks had “resulted in credible threats of violence, harassment and intimidation.” Merchan’s questioning of the veracity of what Trump wrote on Truth Social was one of several episodes that have highlighted how to consistently speak in public — making Trump a tabloid fixture and then a reality star. — has recently turned once morest him.
Over time, the case might threaten not only Trump’s freedom, but also the core principles of the ethos of the former president: a convenient disregard for the truth, the outright denial of any harmful situation and a stubborn insistence that his adversaries always act in bad faith.
So far, the consequences have been minimal. Prosecutors told the judge at Tuesday’s contempt hearing that they were not, for now, seeking prison sentences for comments that focused primarily on two key witnesses: Michael Cohen, Trump’s former troubleshooter and personal lawyer, and Daniels, the porn star who claimed to have had an affair with Trump and whom Cohen paid $130,000 to keep quiet weeks before the 2016 election.
Trump is less motivated by threats of fines. However, when he faced a similar situation in a civil fraud trial late last year, he stopped his attacks on a court official following the penalties piled up.
Trump succinctly explained his mindset when he ran for president in 2016. When Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell asked him why he responded to every slight, the candidate replied, “I have to defend myself.”
Trump’s words — which helped him reach the White House through dozens of rallies and interviews — often backfired once in office. In July 2016, his public call to Russia to “find” Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails from her private server just following she officially became the Republican nominee became a piece of the investigation into whether her campaign had conspired with the Russians to help choose it.
Trump was also investigated for obstruction of justice as part of the broader probe into Russian interference by special investigator Robert Mueller III. One of those possible acts of obstruction was a series of tweets in April 2018 in which he stated that Cohen, his personal attorney who was being investigated, would never rat him out. (Cohen eventually did; he is expected to be a key witness in Trump’s criminal trial, and prosecutors have suggested they may turn over those tweets as evidence.)
As a sitting president, Trump was protected from impeachment; he alone was facing a harsh report from Mueller.
Those protections disappeared when he lost the presidency and left the White House. But Trump has not changed his approach to public life, and it seems highly unlikely that he ever will.
Trump has long confused legal problems with public relations problems, treating legal predicaments as something that might be easily separated with statements or distractions.
Since District Attorney Alvin Bragg unsealed the charges in April 2023, Trump and his advisers have intertwined legal and political responses. They successfully called on Republicans to defend the former president and baselessly argued that Bragg, a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Democratic county, was acting at the behest of President Biden, Trump’s political adversary.
They have also tried to use political arguments to justify Trump’s actions in the case. On Tuesday, during the gag order hearing, Blanche tried to justify a series of Trump’s verbal attacks once morest Cohen and Daniels. She argued that, by attacking them, the former president had been responding to the political attacks of his adversaries, who are only witnesses in the case.
The argument was not convincing to the judge. Merchan told Blanche that she planned to ask him, in each example, “What exactly is her client responding to?” When Blanche did not have the requested information at hand, Merchan reminded her of the purpose of the hearing.
“I’m going to decide whether your client is in contempt or not,” he said, adding, “I ask him once more and once more for a concrete example and I get no answer.”
Merchan has not yet commented on whether she will find Trump guilty of contempt. While prosecutors have argued that Trump is “seeking” to be detained, some people close to Trump privately insist that, despite all his bluster, he desperately wants to avoid jail.
However, Trump has continued to make comments that test the limits of what he can say. Two days following the hearing, prosecutors offered four new cases in which they said he had violated the gag order.
Two were during political interviews. One was in the hallway just outside the Merchan courthouse, where cameras are set up to capture Trump’s statements before and following the hearings. There, Trump hit Cohen’s credibility once once more.
In response, Merchan set a new hearing for this week in which, once once more, the former president’s statements will be at the center of the discussion: dissected, considered and, ultimately, judged.
#faces #consequences
