A gag order? For Trump? C’mon.
An intensifying round of gag order poker between New York Judge Juan Merchan and Donald J. Trump has broken into its second week, so if you haven’t been tracking it, here’s a quick blow-by-blow:
March 26 — Judge issues gag order to prevent Trump from poisoning the ramp-up to his hush money/porn star trial starting April 15, which is not to be confused with his business fraud trial, with either of his defamation trials, with his stolen documents trial, with his insurrection trial, nor with any trials yet to be scheduled resulting from Trump’s chronic contumacious afflictions.
March 27 — Trump defies gag order, trashing the judge and the judge’s daughter, who was once a political consultant with Democratic clients.
March 29 — Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg urges judge to expand gag order, making it clear that the gag order precludes Trump from targeting family members of court officials, witnesses, potential jurors, etc.
April 1 — Judge expands order, saying just about exactly that.
April 2 — Trump violates the expanded order this morning, posting a clip of Fox News lying about the judge’s daughter, and that, essentially, was where we were when I started writing this.
Withering judges
As the legal system should know from decades of its own pratfalls, issuing a gag order against Trump is, in the words of an old Penguins coach, like trying to teach table manners to a shark.
Judge Merchan now becomes at least the fourth “no-nonsense” jurist to morph instantaneously into a “some nonsense” or “plenty of nonsense” judge when confronted by Trump’s lifelong passion for making a farce of the legal system. Like Lewis Kaplan, Arthur Engoron, and Tanya Chutkan before him, Merchan’s no-nonsense bonafides appear to be withering with every fresh blitz of Trump’s endless, vituperative gibberish.
“This pattern of attacking family members of presiding jurists and attorneys assigned to his cases serves no legitimate purpose,” Merchan wrote in the directive expanding the gag order Monday night. “It merely injects fear in those assigned or called to participate in the proceedings, that not only they, but their family members as well, are ‘fair game’ for defendant’s vitriol. It is no longer just a mere possibility or a reasonable likelihood that there exists a threat to the integrity of the judicial proceedings. The threat is very real.”
Whether Trump wins the presidency in November looks almost beside the point when you consider that he’s already demonstrated how to bring traditional American jurisprudence to its knees. Some serious people have begun to notice.
No equal justice with Trump
Citing his urgent concern for “the future of our country and the future of democracy in our country,” U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton decided to do a rare cable news interview last week in which he led with the obvious.
“I think it’s important,” he said, “in order to preserve our democracy that we maintain the rule of law. And the rule of law can only be maintained if we have independent judicial officers who are able to do their job and ensure that the laws are, in fact, enforced and that the laws are applied equally to everybody who appears in our courthouse. If we don’t have a viable court system that’s able to function efficiently, then we have tyranny.”
As the baggage handlers at the airport like to say, there’s a lot to unpack there.
Equal justice under the law has long been more an American philosophical tenet than a daily reality, but when it becomes achingly obvious that anyone else with Trump’s proclivities would win an all-expenses-paid trip to Rikers Island, the damage becomes foundational.
Merchan can fine Trump, but those fines tend to get reduced, or paid for by bored billionaires and MAGA suckers who groove on the former president’s Messiah complex.
Merchan can jail Trump, and go into history as the judge who triggered every attendant convulsion therefrom, who risked his personal safety and his family’s for the rule of law, and who finally understood that the cost of jailing a former president with a record of inciting violence is exceeded only by the cost of not doing it.
Delegitimizing the law
Trump’s entire legal strategy, from the moment he and his father were dragged into court by the Justice Department more than 50 years ago over discriminatory housing practices in New York, has been to delegitimize the process through delays, spurious filings, appeals, countersuits, and very loud, very public jactations of victimhood.
Has it worked? Absolutely. This is a man who’s taken the notion that the President of the United States is outside the laws of the United States to the Supreme Court, which is actually planning to kick it around later this month.
But in this moment, it’s Judge Merchan’s play. If he doesn’t enforce the gag order, he’ll be helping Trump delegitimize the court, the trial, and the legal system writ large.
It’s pathetic. It’s tragic. It’s so Trump.