“There is no breaking point with Donald Trump.”
The ex-president prepares to start his first criminal trial.
FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, the road to the White House will run through a criminal courtroom. Jury selection starts April 15 in Donald Trump’s hush money case tied to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Naturally, Trump plans to treat the case as a campaign event.
As with his other legal troubles, Trump wants to transform the Manhattan courthouse into a partisan crucible. He’ll try to fashion Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg into Joe Biden’s de facto running mate. And Trump’s legal team hopes to define his former fixer-turned-state’s-witness, Michael Cohen, as a perjurer in service of what Trump has taken to (misleadingly) calling “The Biden Trials.”
Crucial for Trump: The trial is in New York City, home to the nation’s media that made him into a celebrity developer, businessman, and TV star before he became a politician. The press will be camped out en masse at the courthouse to capture the historic spectacle and its gripping storylines of politics, sex, money, and fraud. And the media’s presence will give Trump the ability to instantly drive whatever message he wants.
“It’s a circus,” one Trump adviser summed up. “It’s going to be the ultimate media circus. And Donald Trump knows how to be a ringmaster.”
THERE IS A MINOR complication. On Tuesday, after 24 hours in which Trump bashed both the prosecutors and the judge at a press conference and then online, Judge Juan M. Merchan issued a gag order limiting Trump from attacking witnesses (such as Daniels and Cohen) or the assistant prosecutors in the case. Trump is free to still criticize D.A. Bragg and Judge Merchan.
The gag order could not have come as a complete surprise: Trump has been partly gagged in his federal January 6th election interference case in Washington and was also gagged in his New York civil fraud case last year. So he has some experience with gag orders.
For a candidate who hates being told what to do, the new gag order serves as a reminder that his campaign-trail tactics have limits once he crosses the courthouse threshold. And the trial stands as a major obstacle for his campaign, which has to schedule his more traditional political appearances around his court time—meaning his campaign work will mostly be done on weekends and Wednesdays, when the court is out of session.
THERE’S NO PLAYBOOK for a presidential candidate standing trial in a criminal case, but Trump started to write the first chapter of one during the GOP primary. He leaned into his indictments and succeeded in convincing Republican primary voters that the criminal charges against him were badges of honor. It worked. But the general election could be different. Polls indicate that a conviction, as opposed to an indictment, could be a net negative for Trump. The trial also threatens to make the election a referendum on Trump’s behavior rather than Biden’s record.
And the actions at the heart of the case would (should?) be a horror for any married man: Trump (allegedly) had a one-night stand with porn star in 2006, just after his (third) wife had given birth to their first and only child. Trump denies the affair. Few believe him. Even in Trump’s orbit.
“It’s humiliating for Melania,” said one confidant of the former president. “Even Donald Trump spends time in the doghouse, and this is a doozy. There’s no way this won’t make him miserable to be around. Staff will need to tiptoe around him.”
THE BEGINNING OF JURY SELECTION on April 15 will kick off ten of the most consequential days in modern presidential campaign legal history.
On April 16, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Fischer v. United States, which could limit the application of a federal statute used to charge Trump in two of the four counts in his January 6th election-interference case. On April 25, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Trump’s presidential immunity claims.
Of Trump’s four criminal cases, Bragg’s is the likeliest to be adjudicated before Election Day. Marital issues aside, it’s also the case that gives Trump the best chance to prevail, because while the facts of the case are relatively established, Bragg is attempting a relatively novel interpretation of criminal statutes. Even so: Prosecutors don’t often go to trial unless they have a good chance to win, and even Trump’s otherwise Pollyannaish team believes that the best he can hope for in deep-blue Manhattan is a hung jury.
“Bragg’s case is a joke. If there’s any case [Trump] has to pick before Election Day, it’s Stormy Daniels,” said a person in Trump’s orbit familiar with his legal team’s thinking. “Of all the cases he faces, J6 worries him the most. If you’re Donald Trump, winning the election looks easier than winning J6 in front of a Washington jury.”
Biden, meanwhile, is showing signs he may be gaining in the polls. And the president is blowing Trump away in fundraising, forcing Trump to focus heavily on courting donors, which is not an activity he’s accustomed to.
THE QUESTION IS WHETHER OR NOT all of this adversity gets inside Trump’s head. After Judge Merchan set the trial date for April 15, Trump held a press conference afterward in the courthouse. He fumed at Bragg and took repeated aim at an assistant prosecutor in Bragg’s office, Matthew Colangelo, who worked in the Justice Department during Biden’s presidency and had helped state AG Letitia James bring her successful civil fraud case against Trump.
“Colangelo is a radical left [prosecutor] from the DOJ who was put into the state working for Letitia James and was then put into the District Attorney’s office to run the trial against Trump,” Trump said at a press conference Monday, in the third person. “This is all Biden-run things [sic], meaning Biden and his thugs.”
On Tuesday morning, Trump bashed Colangelo again on Truth Social and called Judge Merchan a “certified Trump Hater.” The judge then issued the gag order.
One name Trump did not mention during his Monday press conference was that of his former attorney, Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to charges arising from the Stormy Daniels hush money scheme in a federal case that prosecutors declined to bring against Trump. Trump advisers say Cohen will play a big role in Trump’s defense and messaging.
And Cohen says he’s ready for it.
“If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with your bullshit. That’s all he’s got,” Cohen told The Bulwark. “He tried it with the NYAG and look where that got him.”
Leading up to Monday’s deadline, Trump was hurting for money as he continued hunting for someone to issue him a nine-figure bond. One Mar-a-Lago club-goer described Trump as looking “unusually pale and haggard”; another insider said Trump was lashing out at his lawyers.
Publicly, however, Trump was his usual self.
On Thursday, at a $3 million fundraiser at his golf club in Doral, Florida, donors said they were surprised by his sense of calm.
“It was the same old Trump, sort of unbothered, defiant and cracking jokes,” said one donor, who remarked that Trump spent time getting laughs from the audience by mocking the first name of Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis, saying her first name sounded like slang for a person’s posterior.
Said another donor: “He actually looks like he’s having fun, but I don’t get it. I couldn’t do that. I keep wondering where his breaking point is.”
When asked about this remark, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung responded: “There is no breaking point with Donald Trump. He’s going to win.”