Trump’s Trial Challenge: Being Stripped of Control
The mundanity of the courtroom has all but swallowed Donald Trump, who for decades has sought to project an image of bigness and a sense of power.
“Sir, can you please have a seat.”
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…when Justice Merchan admonished him to sit back down, the former president did so without saying a word.
…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.
It is the length of time as well as the physical circumstances and his total impotence. Six weeks in the same environment with the same impotence diminishes him. It “swallows him up”. Thinking of his civil cases, he didn’t have to be there, he could come and go as he pleased and present as he wished when he decided to be present. Thinking of his Atlanta mugshot, the ostentatious demonstration of power in the absurd motorcade, that was just a moment. He was in control of how he got to the jail and how he presented for that moment when the camera clicked. This has been a week already and will be six more weeks when he is totally impotent. That diminishes him.
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People close to him are anxious about how he will handle having so little to do as he sits there for weeks on end…
I think I have written this before, but I am not sure. I wonder with those close to him, whether the experience of this trial will take a permanent toll on Trump’s psyche. He is 77 years of age.
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…Mr. 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 on Friday, Mr. Trump appeared haggard and rumpled, his gait off-center, his eyes blank.
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Of the four criminal cases Mr. 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.
Yes, and I cannot believe that I didn’t see this coming. And what after this? It is reasonably foreseeable that he will move from this criminal trial to another when this one is over. And another after that. And another. With similar depressing physical plants (federal courtrooms are more majestic, but not Fulton County’s state courthouse!) and the same forced impotence. He will have to be present every day in each of those trials.
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. Mr. Trump hugged his arms to his chest and told an aide, “It’s freezing.”
Mr. Trump has often seemed to fade into the background in a light wood-paneled room with harsh neon lighting and a perpetual smell of sour, coffee-laced breath wafting throughout.
…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 Mr. Trump, the kind of public vulnerability he has rigorously tried to avoid.
Another very good point by Maggie Haberman. We are most physically “vulnerable” when we are not fully conscious. And no one looks good with their head lolling and their mouth hanging open. It's grotesque.
[Criminal] Trials are by nature mundane, with strict routines and long periods of inactivity. …
The mundanity of the courtroom has all but swallowed Mr. Trump, who for decades has sought to project an image of bigness…
His bigness is diminished, he is shrunken.
When the first panel of 96 prospective jurors was brought into the room last Monday afternoon, Mr. 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.
That is also ALWAYS the way of judges: the jurors’ schedules, the jurors’ convenience. It is not just the schedule of a judicial officer, not just his time, at the beginning it was ninety-six ordinary (for Manhattan) peoples’ schedules and time, now it is twelve: an emigrant from Ireland, a security engineer with a high school diploma, a young Black woman with a Master’s degree in education who teaches English in a public school, a young recent college graduate, a retiree, a speech therapist, an employee of an e-commerce company “who doesn’t really follow the news”, a woman who works for a multinational apparel company who doesn’t like Trumpie’s “public persona”, who also “doesn’t really follow the news”, two lawyers, of a profession and had they been his lawyers, one of whom will testify against him, he thought should work for the “honor” of it, for free.
These are the people, and they are working for free, but for the American court system now, and they are sitting in judgment of Alvin Bragg’s “mountain” of evidence, and at the same time determining whether Mr. Big Orange Yellow is guilty of paying for sex with a porn star with the stage name of “Stormy Daniels” while his wife was nursing his last child, and then years later paying hush money to that porn star so that he could become President of the United States. They wait for no one. It is he who waits, and waits, and waits, for them. It is all so little, so small, so tawdry and decrepit and this courtroom is just where it belongs.
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The highly telegraphed plan was for Mr. Trump to behave as a candidate in spite of the trial, using the entire event as a set piece in his claims of a weaponized judicial system.
But last week…Some advisers are conscious of Mr. Trump appearing diminished…
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…the shared sense among many of his advisers is that the process may damage him as much as a guilty verdict. The process, they believe, is its own punishment.
