The civil-fraud case against Donald J. Trump’s businesses in New York, in which he was ordered to pay a penalty of $355 million, was not televised. Neither was his civil trial for the defamation of E. Jean Carroll. Nor — barring an unlikely change in federal court policy — will be his looming federal election-interference trial.
But outside the courtroom, the show goes on.
In each case, Mr. Trump has sought out the cameras, or brought in his own, to offer a stream-of-consciousness heave of legal complaints and re-election arguments. In the process, the former reality-TV host and current presidential candidate has turned his many legal cases into one-sided TV productions and campaign ads.
To TV producers, because Mr. Trump is a former president, a candidate and high-profile defendant, his on-camera tirades are news. But there is also a kind of transaction at work. TV news craves conflict and active visuals. There are only so many times you can show a motorcade, or reporters cooling their heels in the street. Mr. Trump’s appearances give them sound, fury and B-roll.
At the same time, Mr. Trump gets the kind of unfiltered access to the airwaves that networks were, once upon a brief time, wary of giving a candidate notorious for fabrications and conspiracy theories.
On the day a judge set a trial date for his Manhattan criminal case stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star, cable news networks took him live as he called the case a Biden-campaign plot to steal the election: “This is their way of cheating this time. Last time, they had a different way.”
On Friday evening, after the civil-fraud ruling, he spoke to the cameras at his home and private club Mar-a-Lago, claiming that the case (brought by the New York attorney general) “all comes out of Biden,” accusing the judge of corruption, citing his election poll numbers and lamenting that “the migrants come in and they take over New York.”
Some of his appearances have been art-directed to look even more like the campaign messages that they clearly double as.
After closing arguments in the fraud case, Mr. Trump took questions and reiterated his complaint in front of a wall of flags at his property 40 Wall Street, wearing a red tie and flag pin, as though he had just walked out of a summit meeting. Before the verdict in the Carroll trial, he appeared in a video on his social media platform Truth Social to declare, “I don’t even know who this woman is,” from a stately, wood-paneled room, flanked by two more American flags. (The video closed with a plug for his campaign text number.)
Mr. Trump’s star-spangled tirades exploit a void in TV imagery, at a time when Americans have become used to seeing everything from police-violence cases to celebrity defamation trials live on TV. (Not to mention the conflict-of-interest hearing into Fani Willis, the district attorney bringing charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election against Mr. Trump in Georgia.)
And how he delivers his complaints — the visual self-portrait he creates — may be as politically important as his words.
In the real world, Mr. Trump is a former president who lost an election and has been denying it ever since. In the dock, he is a defendant required to submit to the proceedings of law. He is a courtroom sketch, rendered in two shaky dimensions, with hooded eyes and a glum look.
But outside the court, he recasts himself as the defiant fighter. Appearing on camera at his own properties, arrayed in flags, he is in control. He is vested with authority. He is, the set dressing seems to suggest, still the president.
His appearances may be inaccurate or irrelevant or unhelpful to his legal defense. But they are forceful, a perception he always sought. (Recall how he constantly touted his “stamina” while running against Hillary Clinton.)
If he lashes out at a woman whom a jury found that he sexually abused, if he hits back at a prosecutor, if he slams a fraud case against his business, the headlines and TV captions are Trump Lashes, Trump Hits, Trump Slams — the kind of verbs of vitality and power (Hulk smash!) that are as valuable to him as currency.
This is an important kind of messaging for a candidate challenging an 81-year-old president with a stiff gait, a slushy speaking style and questions about his acuity — especially when said challenger is himself 77 years old and would rather not focus attention on his own cognitive lapses, incoherence and mix-ups on the campaign stage.
Mr. Trump, who likes to hire staff for their TV performance ability, has had backup from his legal team. After the Carroll jury returned an $83.3 million judgment, a reporter asked his lawyer Alina Habba if she had second thoughts about taking the case. Ms. Habba, a TV regular, pivoted and delivered a monologue suited to a Bravo reality show: “Don’t get it twisted!” she said, raising a finger. “I am so proud to stand with President Trump!”
It is easy to say that Mr. Trump, for 14 seasons the host of NBC’s “The Apprentice,” learned from reality TV that conflict equals attention. But it is at least as true that he became a reality star in the first place because it perfectly fit the way he had conducted himself as a media figure for years. The fight, he understands, is the point: It establishes you as a fighter.
Can it still work? You can make a strong case that without billions of dollars’ worth of free media, he would not have won the 2016 election. You can make as strong a case that his ensuing, exhausting four years of media dominance did just as much to lose him the 2020 election.
But for Mr. Trump, silence is rarely an option. His lawyers, along with media organizations, have argued for a change in the federal rules to allow his Jan. 6 trial to be broadcast live. (That is unlikely to happen.) A judge has said that his trial on elections charges in Georgia would be live-streamed, but it is unclear whether the trial will take place before the election — and Mr. Trump’s lawyers have also argued that he should not be tried in that case if re-elected.
In a sense, the voting public is serving as a kind of meta-jury, given how much of Mr. Trump’s legal fate could depend on whether he becomes president again. But as it stands, they will have to hear the courtroom testimony secondhand.
They will still get Mr. Trump’s side directly from him, though, stage-managed and retold for political advantage. With the trial(s) of the century unfolding behind closed doors, the cameras will be hungry. If there’s one thing Mr. Trump knows, it’s how to feed them.
James Poniewozik
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