The sight of a sullen Donald Trump sitting in a New York courtroom, flanked by lawyers, is now so common that it no longer surprises.
Yet an unspoken tension was added when the former – and perhaps future – US president appeared Monday morning in Manhattan criminal court. The charges he faced – for his alleged role in discreetly paying money to a former adult porn actor – are not civil, but criminal. So it’s not just his reputation or his bank account that are at stake. This time, Trump risks losing his freedom.
That might explain why he was more compliant in opening arguments than in other recent civil trials involving his business practices and the defamation of a New York writer. Wearing a white shirt and blue tie, Trump maintained his steely demeanor throughout an abbreviated two-and-a-half hour session. On one occasion, he shook his head when a government prosecutor told the court that he had interfered in the 2016 election. But for the most part, Trump has been subdued.
It also didn’t draw much of a crowd. His wife, Melania, and daughter, Ivanka, were nowhere to be found. Instead, he had to settle for the moral support of Andrew Giuliani, the son of the former New York mayor, and his former lawyer Rudy.
Only a handful of supporters mingled in the heavily guarded square outside the courthouse. A man wearing a Puerto Rico basketball jersey was having a circular argument with a Chinese woman who was waving a Trump flag at him and shouting, “American citizen!” Nearby, the sidewalk was still stained where a man espousing wild conspiracy theories set himself on fire Friday.
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This horrific event, alongside a series of television news cameras, contributed to the feeling of a city gone mad – whether it was the recent violence on the subway or the anti-Israel protests at the University of Columbia that prompted the administration to call the police and cancel in-person classes.
As has become his courtroom habit, Trump reserved his outrage for the hallway, where he fumed to reporters about the injustice of it all.
“This is an accounting matter, which is a very minor thing in terms of the law, in terms of all the violent crimes that are happening,” he said at one point, repeating a argument intended to attack Alvin Bragg: the Manhattan district attorney. “That’s what gets me off the campaign trail. Because I should be in Florida right now, I should be in Georgia right now, I should be in a lot of places campaigning, but I’m sitting here,” he added.
Strictly speaking, he may be right. Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels to buy his silence on the eve of the 2016 election about a past affair he denied.
In its details, however, the trial is sure to be about far seedier things than accounting, as Matthew Colangelo, an attorney with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, made clear during a roughly 30-minute closing argument.
Colangelo recited, in a bland tone, the now-infamous comments Trump made in 2005 to a news anchor. Access Hollywood, in which he bragged about his attractiveness to women and how he liked to “grab them by the pussy” — a line that has lost none of its cringe-inducing power since it first aired eight years ago. During the close fight against Hillary Clinton in 2016, tabloid reports of other infidelities could have sunk Trump, Colangelo argued, saying, “We’ll never know.”
Trump looked stoic. In the coming days, he could come face to face with Daniels and Karen McDougal, a former Playboy playmate who also claimed to have had an affair with Trump. Both are listed as potential government witnesses.
As the boss looked on, Trump lawyer Todd Blanche used his own opening argument to try to humanize a larger-than-life figure who might just be the most famous person on the planet. Trump, he told jurors, was not just a former president and a celebrity: “He’s also a man. He’s a husband. He is a father”, and another, “shrouded in innocence”.
In contrast, Blanche went after the man who is expected to be one of the government’s key witnesses: Michael Cohen, the former Trump lawyer and arranger who made the payment to Daniels and who, according to previous testimony before Congress, then demanded a refund from his boss. for “legal services”.
“He’s an admitted liar,” Blanche said, adding that Cohen was “obsessed with President Trump — even to this day.”
Given the brevity of the hearing, the prosecution spent only a few minutes with its first witness: David Pecker, former publisher of the National Enquirer and Palm Beach bon vivant. Pecker has previously admitted to helping his friend Trump buy and bury unflattering stories in a practice known as “catch and kill.”
He brought slicked-back hair and an unexpected cheerfulness to the courtroom Monday. He also imparted some tabloid publishing wisdom, telling jurors: “Having worked in the publishing business for 40 years, I realized early in my career that the only thing that mattered was the cover of the magazine. »
It was something Trump, the master of self-promotion, could have told them.