Lock me up! Don says
Plays martyr over judge’s gag order in hush-money case
Donald Trump is taunting the Manhattan judge who’s trying to get him to stop going after relatives of prosecutors and court officers, raving over the weekend that it would be a “great honor” to be sent to prison for violating the prohibition.
The former president made the jarring claim on his Truth Social platform after Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan recently moved to expand the scope of the gag order in the criminal case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
“If this Partisan Hack wants to put me in the ‘clink’ for speaking the open and obvious TRUTH, I will gladly become a Modern Day Nelson Mandela — It will be my GREAT HONOR,” Trump ranted on Saturday afternoon. “We have to Save our Country from these Political Operatives masquerading as Prosecutors and Judges, and I am willing to sacrifice my Freedom for that worthy cause.”
Mandela, the famed anti-apartheid activist, spent 27 years in prison prior to becoming South Africa’s president from 1994 to 1999.
For his part, Trump faces multiple criminal trials including the one set to start next Monday in Manhattan. It’s centered on hush money he’s accused of illegally paying to silence porn star Stormy Daniels over an affair she says they had.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsification of business records in the case alleging he concealed reimbursement to Michael Cohen in 2017 to disguise funds given to Daniels and a Playboy model to buy their silence about alleged trysts.
Last month, Merchan issued a gag order barring Trump — whose 2016 run against Hillary Clinton notoriously drew supporter chants of “Lock her up!” — from making public comments or directing others to make comments about witnesses, court staff, jurors and prosecutors with the exception of Bragg.
As Trump targeted the judge’s daughter, Loren, Merchan last week expanded the order to include family members of attorneys and court staff — a move strongly opposed by Trump’s side.
Trump’s “pattern of attacking family members of presiding jurists and attorneys assigned to his cases serves no legitimate purpose. It merely injects fear in those assigned or called to participate in the proceedings,” Merchan wrote last Monday.
The weekend wasn’t the first time Trump has talked big about going to jail.
Trump claimed being arrested would be “a great honor” in August when he departed his New Jersey golf club for Washington, D.C., where he faced arraignment over his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“I am now going … to be arrested for having challenged a corrupt, rigged & stolen election,” he wrote on Truth Social at the time. “It’s a great honor because I am being arrested for you.”
It’s Trump’s long-running contention that he’s a martyr for his supporters who are being targeted by an overreaching “Deep State.” He posted on social media in 2020, “In reality they’re not after me, they’re after you. I’m just in the way.”
In his recent civil fraud case in Manhattan, Trump was fined $15,000 for violating a gag order when he attacked the principal law clerk for the judge in that proceeding.
If he keeps running his mouth in the hush-money case, he faces fines and potential jail time.