So Trumpie blew several gaskets in post-midnight posts today:
"Leave my children alone, Engoron. You are a disgrace to the legal profession!"
“Engoron is crazy, totally unhinged, and dangerous—Our Judicial System has gone to HELL.”
I was surprised that this trial, more than the four pending criminal trials, got to him like this. He has attended this one in person on several days. I thought through my surprise. I get it, it goes to his identity as the uber-successful businessman. These articles make the point but also how important to his identity his children are:
MSNBC’s Joy Reid asked [Trump biographer Tim] O’Brien how Ivanka Trump’s testimony may destabilize her father…
[Perhaps the modifier “further” would be appropriate there.]
The GOP presidential candidate frontrunner “prizes Ivanka” as an “Aryan trope he can parade around,” O’Brien replied. Donald Trump had been “embarrassed by his boys to a certain extent” with them acting as “fenceposts,” while Ivanka Trump “made sure to stay in his good graces, while not going completely off the reservation in any way,” he added.
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The New York case is in some ways the most deeply personal to Trump, advisers say. Though he is not required to attend, Trump has shown up to court for seven days of the proceedings since they began in early October, even as some advisers have argued for him to stay away. He has told advisers he wants to attend because his children’s inheritance and his family’s brand are on the line. Several people close to him described him as livid about the trial. “Everything about it makes him angry — including that it’s hurting his children,” said one adviser, who like several others spoke on the condition of anonymity to address the family dynamics.
“The trial strikes at his identity and the family. His kids, what he’s been able to build over years and years and years,” said David Urban, a longtime adviser.
…
“In my opinion, Donald Trump was more upset when the PGA Tour took the event away from Bedminster than when he was impeached, because it struck at the brand and the name,” Urban said, referring to Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J. “That’s what he cares about … ‘the empire that I’ve built.’”
…
The most significant shift in Trump’s post-presidential family life has been the retreat of his wife and older daughter from public life.