Big challenge for Trump has been losing ability to control
Donald Trump had stood up to leave the Manhattan criminal courtroom as Justice Juan M. Merchan was wrapping up a scheduling discussion Tuesday.
But the judge had not yet adjourned the court or left the bench. Trump, the 45th president of the United States and the owner of his own company, is used to setting his own pace. Still, when Merchan admonished him to sit back down, the former president did so without saying a word.
The moment underscored a central reality for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. For the next six weeks, a man who values control and tries to shape environments and outcomes to his will is in control of very little.
Everything about the circumstances in which the former president comes to court to sit as the defendant in the People v. Donald J. Trump is repellent to him. The surroundings that evoke New York City's more crime-ridden past. The lack of control. The details of a case in which he is accused of falsifying business records to conceal a payoff to a porn actor to keep her claims of an affair with him from emerging in the 2016 election.
Of the four criminal cases Trump is facing, this is the one that is the most acutely personal. And people close to him are blunt when privately discussing his reaction: He looks around each day and cannot believe he has to be there.
Asked about the former president's aversion to the case, a campaign spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, said that Trump “proved he will remain defiant” and called the case “political lawfare.”
He is sitting in a decrepit courtroom that, for the second half of last week, was so cold his lead lawyer complained respectfully to the judge about it. Trump hugged his arms to his chest and told an aide, “It's freezing.”
For the first few minutes of each day during jury selection, a small pool of still photographers was ushered into Part 59 on the 15th floor of the courthouse. Trump, obsessed with being seen as strong and being seen generally, prepared for them to rush in front of him by adjusting his suit jacket and contorting his face into a jut-jawed scowl. But, by day's end Friday, Trump appeared haggard and rumpled, his gait offcenter, his eyes blank.
Trump has often seemed to fade into the background in a light wood-paneled room with harsh fluorescent lighting and a perpetual smell of sour, coffee-laced breath wafting throughout.
His face has been visible to dozens of reporters watching in an overflow room on a large monitor with a closed-circuit camera trained on the defense table. He has whispered to his lawyer and poked him to get his attention, leafed through sheaves of paper and, at least twice, appeared to nod off during the morning session. (His aides have publicly denied he was dozing.) Nodding off is something that happens from time to time to various people in court proceedings, including jurors, but it conveys, for Trump, the kind of public vulnerability he has rigorously tried to avoid.
When the first panel of 96 prospective jurors was brought into the room April 15, Trump seemed to disappear among them, as they were seated in the jury box and throughout the rows in the well of the court. The judge has made clear that the jurors' time is his highest priority, even when it comes at the former president's expense.
Trump's communications advisers or aides who provide him with a morale boost have been sitting at a remove. Natalie Harp, a former host on the rightwing OAN news network, who for years has carried a portable printer to supply Trump with a steady stream of uplifting articles or social media posts about him, is there. But she and others have been in the second row behind the defense table, or several rows back in the courtroom, unable to talk to Trump during the proceedings.
It is hard to recall any other time when Trump has had to sit and listen to insults without turning to social media or a news conference to punch back. And it is just as hard to recall any other time he has been forced to be bored for so long.
People close to him are anxious about how he will handle having so little to do as he sits there for weeks on end, with only a handful of days of testimony expected to be significant. It has been decades since he has had to spend so much time in the immediate vicinity of anyone who is not part of his family, his staff or his throng of admirers.
Over the next six weeks or so, Trump will have to endure more, including listening as prosecutors ask witnesses uncomfortable questions about his personal life in open court. On Tuesday, he'll face a hearing over whether the judge agrees with prosecutors that he has repeatedly violated the order prohibiting him from publicly criticizing witnesses and others.