Trump’s words could have consequences
Till now, false comments have cost him little
NEW YORK — “So that’s not true? That’s not true?”
The judge in control of Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial had just cut off the former president’s lawyer, Todd Blanche. Blanche had been in the midst of defending a social media post in which his client wrote that a statement that had been public for years “WAS JUST FOUND!”
Blanche had acknowledged during the Tuesday hearing that Trump’s post was false. But the judge, Juan Merchan, wasn’t satisfied.
“I need to understand,” Merchan said, glaring down at the lawyer from the bench, “what I am dealing with.”
The question of what is true — or at least what can be proved — is at the heart of any trial. But this particular defendant, accused by the Manhattan district attorney’s office of falsifying business records to conceal a sex scandal, has spent five decades producing thousands and thousands of words, sometimes contradicting himself within minutes, sometimes within the same breath, with little concern for the consequences of what he said.
Trump has treated his own words as disposable commodities, intended for single use, and not necessarily indicative of any deeply held beliefs. And his tendency to pile phrases on top of one another has often worked to his benefit, amusing or engaging his supporters while distracting, enraging, or just plain disorienting his critics and adversaries.
If Blanche seemed unconcerned at the hearing that he was telling a criminal judge that his client had said something false, it may have been simply because the routine has become so familiar.
Trump’s career-long habit of a ready-fire-aim stream of consciousness — on social media, on television, to newspaper reporters, to rally attendees — can now be held against him by prosecutors and a judge who has genuine power over him.
Prosecutors have asked the judge to hold the former president in criminal contempt for violating a gag order that bars him from attacking witnesses, which they argued was necessary given that his previous attacks had “resulted in credible threats of violence, harassment, and intimidation.” Merchan’s questioning of the truth of what
Trump wrote on Truth Social was one of several episodes that have brought into stark relief how talking constantly in public — which made Trump a tabloid fixture and then a reality-television star — has been working against him lately.
Eventually, the case could threaten not only Trump’s freedom but also the central tenets of a lifelong ethos ever-present in the former president’s patter: a convenient disregard for the truth, the blunt denial of anything damaging and a stubborn insistence that his adversaries are always acting in bad faith.
The consequences so far have been minimal. Prosecutors told the judge at the contempt hearing Tuesday that for now, they were not seeking jail time for comments that mostly targeted two key witnesses: Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and personal lawyer, and Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who claimed to have had an affair with Trump and whom Cohen paid $130,000 to keep silent weeks before the 2016 election.
Trump is less moved by threats of being fined. Still, when he faced a similar punishment in a civil fraud trial late last year, he slowed his attacks on a court official after the penalties mounted.
Trump explained his mentality succinctly while running for president in 2016. When the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, asked him why he responded to every single slight, the candidate replied, “I have to defend myself.”
Trump’s words — which helped deliver him to the White House through dozens of rallies and interviews — often worked against him once he was there. In July 2016, his public call to Russia to “find” Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails from her private server just after he officially became the Republican nominee became a piece of the investigation into whether his campaign had conspired with Russians to help elect him.
Trump was also investigated for obstruction of justice as part of the broader Russian interference investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. One of those possible acts of obstruction was a series of social media posts in April 2018 in which he declared Cohen, his personal lawyer who was under investigation, would never flip on him. (Cohen eventually did so; he is expected to be a key witness at Trump’s criminal trial.)
TRUMP’S REMARKS Prosecutors told the judge that, for now, they were not seeking jail time for comments targeting two key witnesses.