A two-day national Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted online after Trump’s guilty verdict, found that one in ten registered Republican voters were less likely to vote for Trump following his conviction, and one in four independent voters were less likely to support him as well.
However, NBC News senior political director Mark Murray cautions against over-interpreting that:
Of the 2,556 adults who responded to the poll, 41 percent said they would vote for Biden, and 38 percent said they would vote for Trump — which is a difference within the poll’s margin of error.
Of registered Republicans, 35 percent said Trump’s guilty verdict made it more likely they’d vote for him. 18 percent of independents said the same. And 56 percent of registered Republicans said the verdict would have no effect on their vote, as did the same percentage of independents.
Regarding other views of the verdict, 53 percent of respondents said they didn’t think Trump should be jailed, while 46 percent said he should. A slim majority also thought the hush-money case against Trump wasn’t politically motivated, while 46 percent said it was — in order to keep Trump from becoming president again.
A larger majority, 60 percent, said it was important that the three pending trials Trump faces should be completed before the election — which is at this point extremely unlikely.
In the end, it was Manhattan’s plodding and plainspoken district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who proved the pundits wrong and delivered what all the big-talking power brokers could not: the criminal conviction of ex-president Donald Trump for the corrupt and illegal business practices that helped him win the 2016 race for president.
Bragg does not swagger into a room the way so many New York lawyers and politicians do. He does not preen, pose, shout, or boast. Even when traveling with an armed security detail, he tends to arrive quietly, with the friendly, open and approachable style of a Sunday school teacher, which Bragg has been for years.
It is typical for New York’s men of power to huddle in dark bars and boozy back rooms, swapping gossip, cutting deals, and sipping booze. You’re more likely to find Bragg in Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church chatting about values, scripture, and how to make one’s way in the world with honesty and integrity. That, alone, makes him a different kind of fish in the shark tank of New York politics, which is stocked with bullies, boasters, bluster, and bullshit.
“This type of white collar prosecution is core to what we do at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office,” Bragg said after the conviction, repeating almost word for word what he’d said last April after Trump’s indictment and arrest. He was telling the truth: An investigation by NBC News showed that during Bragg’s first 15 months as DA, the office charged 166 felony counts for falsifying business records against 34 different people or corporations. As Bragg put it: “While this defendant may be unlike any other in American history, we arrived at this trial, and ultimately today at this verdict, in the same manner as every other case that comes through the courtroom doors — by following the facts and the law, and doing so without fear or favor.”
Fear and favor have been floating around People v. Trump from the start. The defendant himself, a former president of the United States who instigated the January 6 riot at the Capitol, publicly predicted that “death and destruction” would be the result of his being tried on criminal charges by Bragg. That didn’t happen, even when Trump posted the word “PROTEST” on social media and only a handful of people turned out. But Bragg did receive at least 89 death threats, including a note that said “Alvin — I’ll kill you,” included with a package containing a suspicious white powder. Another ominous note read: “Remember we are everywhere and we have guns.”
In addition to dodging pro-Trump death threats, Bragg had to fend off attacks from men like Carey Dunne and Mark Pomerantz, two seasoned prosecutors brought in as special assistant district attorneys by Bragg’s predecessor, Cy Vance. Dunne and Pomerantz quit the D.A.’s office when, shortly after taking office, Bragg refused to bring sweeping racketeering charges against the Trump Organization.
“I believe that your decision not to prosecute Donald Trump now, and on the existing record, is misguided and completely contrary to the public interest. I therefore cannot continue in my current position,” Pomerantz wrote in a resignation letter. “I have worked too hard as a lawyer, and for too long, now to become a passive participant in what I believe to be a grave failure of justice.” Pomerantz went on to write a self-aggrandizing book attacking Bragg and disparaging the case against Trump as “the legal equivalent of a plane crash” due to “pilot error.”
In legal terms, many attorneys, including my friend Elie Honig, were bothered by Bragg’s use of New York’s clunky two-step law that makes it a felony to file false business records. Trump has been convicted of using false records — disguising his hush-money payments as a “legal fee” paid to his fixer/lawyer Michael Cohen — with the intent of concealing or advancing additional crimes. The quirk under New York law is that those additional crimes do not need to be proved or even specified. We don’t know whether the jurors believed Trump intended to violate campaign finance laws, tax laws, or some other statute.
The legal objections were accompanied by complaints from the pundit class that condemned Bragg for bringing a case that they called trivial or a distraction; the critics included Jonathan Chait, Peggy Noonan, Richard Hasen and Van Jones. The main complaint seemed to be that falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to a porn star was small potatoes compared to sweeping charges of election fraud in Georgia or the mishandling of top secret documents in Florida.
“The players in the drama aren’t people of import who stand for big things, they’re not fate-of-the-republic people, they don’t have any size. They’re tacky lowlifes doing tacky lowlife things,” Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “The case involves a questionable legal theory that depends on the testimony of Michael Cohen, who is half-mad in his own right.”
Fair enough. But Ron Kuby, a well-known left-leaning attorney, pointed out in the Daily News that the tackiness of the witnesses and the complexity of the law do not constitute a valid defense. “It is true that the application of these laws has never been used to criminalize attempted campaign finance violations, but that is because most candidates for president keep better books,” Kuby wrote earlier this year. “It is no more novel than arresting a presidential candidate for DWI; it has never happened before but the law is unambiguous.”
That sounds about right to me: if Trump or any other candidate was charged with driving while intoxicated, few people would say the matter should be ignored. Bragg, operating at the steady, methodical pace of the courts, stood up for the principle that using business records to hide additional crimes should not be ignored or dismissed for Trump or anybody else. And he convinced a jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the former president violated the law.
Bragg now gets the last laugh against his critics in the legal profession. Pomerantz got a book contract and made money; Bragg got a conviction and made history. And politically, he has made more of the dent in Trump’s attempted comeback than any of the louder, flashier Democrats that frequent the cable news shows, liberal think tanks, and the big-donor speaking circuit. It almost reads like the kind of lesson from scripture that gets taught in Sunday school: that sometimes, the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong
Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
The phrase “convicted felon Donald Trump” has a gleeful ring to it for the many Americans rooting against the former president. Unfortunately for that crowd, experts say it was always extremely unlikely that he would leave the courthouse in handcuffs after his guilty verdict, and he’ll almost certainly remain free on bail in the time before sentencing.
The major question on Judge Juan Merchan’s plate now involves the sentence itself. Already, Merchan has approved a sentencing date of July 11, which was agreed to by both the prosecution and defense (and will be just days before the start of the Republican National Convention). Between then and now, Merchan will have to determine if a nonviolent offender with no criminal record, convicted of Class-E felonies — the lowest tier of felonies in New York State — deserves jail time or probation.
After that, the long and arduous appeal process will begin, and it seems unlikely to be resolved before the election in November.
The Washington Post notes several possible scenarios for Trump as he navigates the New York criminal justice system following his conviction, even if he only receives a sentence of probation:
[Trump may now face conditions] he may consider insulting, including a required inmate review by the New York City Department of Probation. The probation office on the 10th floor of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse prepares presentencing reports for judges. There, Trump would be interviewed about his personal history, his mental health and the circumstances that led to his conviction. …
The Class E felony charges are punishable by 16 months to four years in prison. Among the key issues to be determined would be whether Trump faces some form of incarceration, either in a government facility or a private location, or a less-restrictive experience through probation.
If he is sentenced to probation, for example, Trump would be required to clear any out-of-state travel — such as to campaign rallies and fundraisers — with a probation officer. If Trump were to serve home confinement at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., New York authorities would probably have to work with counterparts in Florida to accommodate him, the experts said.
It’s also worth noting that Trump’s felony conviction does not bar him from running from president. And he’ll most likely be able to vote in November, since while Florida bars felons convicted in Florida from voting, it respects out-of-state voting restrictions when a felon is convicted elsewhere. New York State bars felons from voting only if they are currently incarcerated, so unless Trump has received a prison sentence and is serving that sentence on Election Day, he’ll probably be able to vote in Florida.
Most Americans see Memorial Day as a time to pay tribute to the U.S. service members who gave their lives for their country, or perhaps fire up the BBQ with friends and family to celebrate the unofficial start of summer, or maybe save some money on a new mattress. According to Google, a lot of Americans also make a point to look up what the “Memorial Day meaning” is. Then there’s Donald Trump.
For years, MAGA’s once and future king has made a tradition of celebrating major holidays — from Christmas to Mother’s Day to Easter — by launching CAPS-littered attacks on his perceived enemies. And if Trump Googled the meaning of Memorial Day on Sunday morning, even the search engine’s bizarrenew AI is unlikely to have answered that the holiday was about “human scum” or a good opportunity to rack up some more defamation damages.
In a Truth Social post, the former president wished a happy holiday to “to All, including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country,” before repeating his attacks on two of the judges in New York who have presided over cases against him and his corporation this year. Trump devoted most of the post, however, to once again defaming E. Jean Carroll, the writer who, according to Carroll — and, last year, a jury in a civil trial — he sexually assaulted in a New York department store in the 1990s, and who has twice successfully sued Trump for defamation, including in January when a jury awarded her well over $80 million in damages.
Trump did not refer to Carroll by name in his post on Sunday, though it was obvious she was the “woman” he mentioned and once again called a liar.
The massive sum the jury awarded Carroll in January — which is Trump is trying to appeal — was largely an effort to deter Trump from further defaming her, but the deterrent lost its effectiveness less than a month and a half later. When he resumed his defamation of Carroll in March, her attorneys indicated they might indeed file another lawsuit. Carroll lawyer Roberta Kaplan reiterated that point again in response to Trump’s new attack on her client Sunday. “We have said several times since the last jury verdict in January that all options were on the table. And that remains true today — all options are on the table,” Kaplan said in a statement to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.
Donald Trump’s guest list in court includes Lara Trump, Eric Trump, Lauren Boebert, Mike Johnson, Judge Jeanine, Matt Gaetz, Susie Wiles, Vivek Ramaswamy, and J.D. Vance (among others). Art: Isabelle Brourman
Another day in paradise at the courthouse!” Jason Miller told me. A former aide to Rudy Giuliani, Miller was a Republican operative well known in New York and Washington, D.C., when he became a senior communications adviser on Trump’s first presidential campaign. Since then, he has floated in and out of official roles with a stint in the middle at Gettr, a rival to Trump’s own Truth Social. For the 2024 campaign, he holds the vague title of senior adviser; in practice, he is more like Trump’s shadow, his status in the campaign hierarchy confirmed by his fixed proximity to the candidate. On this occasion, he was speaking from a holding room adjacent to the 15th-floor courtroom where Trump now spends most of his weekdays captive to the whims of a judge. From roughly 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, the court maintains custody of the candidate. On Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, the campaign gets custody of the defendant. Donald J. Trump for President 2024 has, by necessity, moved its operational headquarters from Palm Beach to the criminal court at 100 Centre Street.
While the area outside the courthouse has become an open-mic lounge for MAGA sycophants and Republican leaders who have determined they must convincingly mimic the behaviors of those political animals to survive in Trump’s kingdom, the holding room is where Miller and other campaign officials monitor trial proceedings as they tend to the business of trying to install Trump back in the White House. “We can listen and watch what’s going on, and we can do important things like call you back,” Miller said in his perma-ironic lilt. “He’s full time in the courtroom, and he’s somehow full time on the campaign trail. We are maximizing every single minute the president has. If we can’t be on the campaign trail, we’ll bring the campaign trail to President Trump.”
It’s The Campaign Trial.
Some Trump 2024 campaign staff began their migration back to New York in April when jury selection got underway. In 2016, the campaign was run from a studio on the fifth floor of Trump Tower, where The Apprentice was once filmed, and the 2020 reelect was based in a sleek building in Rosslyn, Virginia, across the Potomac from the White House. But unlike on most campaigns, the real nerve center of the operation was always the area directly surrounding the candidate; to work in an office and out of Trump’s sight was to run the risk of falling out of the loop or an internal rival getting in his ear and killing you off. Trump was — is — simply too vulnerable to influence and too inclined to chaos. As his 2016 rally schedule became more grueling, with the 757 crisscrossing the country throughout the week, senior leadership kept themselves at his side and on the road. Whenever possible, Trump would fly back to New York, preferring to spend his nights in his own bed. History’s greatest extrovert is, paradoxically, a homebody, and his residences — Trump Tower, the White House, Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster — are always also his places of business. For Trump 2024, a rotation of staffers travels with the candidate wherever he goes, forming a roving satellite campaign that, until the verdict is in, finds itself stationed mostly in lower Manhattan. Adapted to Florida heat, Trump had trouble adjusting to the initially freezing temperatures inside the courtroom, which is now quite warm (though Trump and his disciples, even as some of them visibly sweat while seated behind their leader during the proceedings, insist it’s still cold).
With the candidate out of control of his own whereabouts on trial days, the campaign must be run from wherever the defendant happens to be. Often, that means the motorcade on the way downtown to the courthouse in the morning or back uptown at the end of the day. “We use things such as traveling on the plane, even traveling from Trump Tower to the courthouse,” Miller said. It was “fake news,” he added, when asked if it was true that Trump fell asleep in the car. “Sometimes we’ll meet with him in his office in Trump Tower on the 26th floor. Sometimes there’ll be meetings in the personal residence. It’s a balance because he’s been forced to essentially be full time here in the courtroom.” When he’s in the courtroom, the campaign hums along elsewhere in the building, making it a kind of co-working space for Team Trump and the other defendants who await their own court appearances in literal jail cells on adjacent floors.
During trial proceedings on May 13, Trump appeared to be most awake and alert while reviewing polling numbers as others around him — a roomful of lawyers and a jury who will decide whether to make him the first former president in American history to be convicted of a crime — focused on the case. A Trump assistant reportedly travels with a portable printer for the purpose of keeping him updated on news related to his existence in analog, his preferred medium. “It’s the staff’s job to keep him informed of what’s happening while he’s in the icebox,” Miller said.
Miller denied that the campaign is run from the courthouse war room where he admits he now spends many of his weekdays running the campaign. “Far from it,” he said. “Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita run the campaign from our headquarters in West Palm Beach.” But senior campaign officials have been spotted filing into the two rows of benches on the left side of the courtroom, behind the defendant, including Wiles herself, who made an appearance seated next to Eric Trump, the only immediate member of the family who has attended the proceedings so far. “I don’t think he wants us there,” Eric’s wife, Lara, now the nominal president of the Republican National Committee, told me last month at a Saturday-night cocktail party in Washington. “I think he wants to keep us away from that.” Of the trial itself, she added, “I mean, I think it’s ridiculous.” I told her it seemed lonely in the courtroom for her father-in-law. “And cold. And boring,” she said. Eric showed up for the first time soon after and has been a regular presence ever since, alongside Boris Epshteyn, an adviser recently indicted in Arizona for his role in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and Andrew Giuliani, whose father, Rudy, was indicted in the same Arizona case. On Monday, Senator J. D. Vance attended the proceedings, a development that suggested Trump’s vice-presidential selection process had moved to the courthouse too. On Tuesday, Vance’s act was followed by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (though only in the hallway), Vivek Ramaswamy, and Governor of One of the Dakotas Doug Burgum. Lara showed her face for the first time too — an admission that her initial read of her father-in-law’s desires was wrong or that those desires are evolving as the trial wears on. Thursday’s hearing brought a flock of eager Freedom Caucusers, including Representatives Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert.
At the courthouse, I was thinking about Aristotle. Not because the law is reason free from passion but because he theorized that eels spring into existence through a kind of mud metamorphosis. Scientists now believe the European eel is spawned in the Sargasso Sea, then swims across the Atlantic, and when it reaches maturity, it migrates thousands of miles back there, to the location of its birth, to spawn and die. There is a similarly disorienting circular quality to Trump’s current stint in New York.
What year is it? From his penthouse in Trump Tower, the candidate’s relationship to his phone is compulsive and his output on social media is prolific. He calls in to Hannity, his picture frozen onscreen as he offers rolling commentary on a breaking-news event in his familiar rasp. He fires off a post in which he says an MSNBC personality “looks like shit.” He emerges through the gilded doors of the Fifth Avenue high-rise dressed in his uniform of too-big Brioni suit and too-long red tie, trailed by security and yes-men and a beautiful assistant. He boards an idling SUV. He delivers a winding campaign speech with asides about Chris Christie, Hillary Clinton, and Frank Sinatra, and in exchange for the entertainment, his fans charge his life force with their attention. Miller is around. Dan Scavino too. So is Omarosa. And Hope Hicks. And Stormy Daniels. I’m on the phone with Sam Nunberg. I’m texting Michael Cohen, Kellyanne Conway, and Steve Bannon. Roger Stone is not speaking to me, and it’s anyone’s guess as to what he’s upset about this time. I’m sure he’ll get over it, whatever it is. He always does.
The experience for many of those people is very different today, of course. Hicks is not his spokeswoman but a witness for the prosecution; when she arrived on the stand, she hadn’t seen Trump in about two years. Cohen is no longer his fixer but a witness, too. Daniels is not defined by her bought-and-paid-for silence but by her testimony. And Omarosa is still on television, as God intended, but when she sits down next to me for one of CNN’s Last Supper panels, it’s to spin against Trump, not on his behalf.
For all witnesses, the experience of reliving the 2016 campaign has been blurring. Much was made of Hicks crying on the stand. Pundits speculated that the tears were the result of a realization that her testimony had damned her former boss. Yet just before she broke down, Hicks, a crier by nature, had been talking about February 2018, an era defined by her relationship falling apart and tabloids hounding her and 17 people getting shot to death at a high school in Parkland, Florida; at the time, she had to remind Trump to tell the victims’ families “I hear you.” She quit her job (for the first time) six weeks later. When the defense began cross-examination, Hicks was asked about the very start of her time with Trump — a man she had helped elect president of the United States; a man she maintained great personal affection for until he finally made that impossible as he squandered the presidency through his narcissism and sociopathy; a man who was now sitting feet away from her as a criminal defendant. Almost ten years earlier, when she accepted a casual invitation to fly with him to Iowa, she could not have imagined this was where she would land. Call her naïve, but she had been so hopeful then.
Or take Cohen. He had lived much of his life in service to Trump. He was a company man, snapping up real estate in Trump buildings. Even now, after he had served time in prison for lying on his boss’s behalf and spent the ensuing years in what amounted to a protracted public-therapy session, trying to figure out why he had fallen victim to what he had come to see as a cult, he still lived in a Trump building on Park Avenue. In the weeks leading up to the trial, he was nervy and anxious. He lost sleep. He lost weight. He wanted to be a good witness. And he wanted revenge, definitely. But he also wanted something he knew he would probably never get. As he readied himself for this most cinematic of betrayals of his former boss — serving as the star witness in his criminal trial — he was desperate to understand how Trump had been able to betray him. Really, this was another way of asking if a man he once loved had ever loved him back.
In the nine years since he began his unlikely political rise, Trump was elected president, impeached, voted out of office, and impeached again after he tried and failed to overturn the results of the election he lost and his supporters staged a violent attack on the Capitol. There were also innumerable outrages and absurdities that at any other time would have upended an administration and outright ended the political career of its leader.
Yet despite or perhaps because of that, one of America’s two major political parties was fully remade in his image. The ideological topography of the country is now defined by a fault that splits it with about half the population convinced that he’s a savior and about half convinced that he belongs in jail for any number of the crimes he is alleged to have committed across 88 counts in four criminal indictments. Never mind the civil trials. And never mind the crimes against good taste.
When Miller calls from the Trump courthouse war room and strikes an upbeat tone as he yaps about how he loves Diet Coke, the preferred beverage of his boss, so much so that he travels to the trial with his own supply of the stuff, it is tempting to laugh because, well, the campaign is being run from a criminal courthouse. (Trump must suffer without a steady hit of aspartame, however. “Nobody is allowed to bring Diet Cokes into the courtroom,” Miller said. Trump drinks it instead during lunch breaks — “He doesn’t have to request it. We have it there already,” per Miller — where he adheres to The Standard Trump Diet. McDonald’s, Miller said, is “one of our many menu options we have in rotation for court days.”)
And yet despite or perhaps because of all this, it is possible and maybe even likely that Trump will become president again. Most general-election surveys show the former president functionally tied with President Joe Biden. When independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is factored in, the tie becomes a Trump victory of more than four percentage points. “President Trump’s numbers just keep going up,” Miller said. “I don’t think this is having the effect that Biden and the Democrats hoped that it would.”
From the perspective of the Trump campaign, the past few weeks have gone pretty well. If it feels like 2016 again, great. That was the election they managed to win, after all, even if the alleged means by which they achieved the outcome are the reasons they find themselves working from the courthouse today. “The excitement level feels like we’re in the home stretch of 2016,” Miller said. “The major difference this time,” he added, is not that the campaign is being run from a criminal courthouse but that the candidate is more experienced at running for president on his third attempt. “He knows exactly what he wants to say. So it’s really kind of the best of both worlds.”
How could things be going better? If the candidate goes to jail for contempt, he’s a martyr. “I don’t mind being Nelson Mandela because I’m doing it for a reason,” Trump said. If he is found guilty, it’s a witch hunt, like he’s always said, and he’ll appeal. If he gets off, he was always right when he said, as he always has, that he did nothing wrong.
Just as it was strangely true that each successive indictment seemed to make Trump a stronger candidate in the Republican primary, it is also the case that the trial is making him a better performer on the trail. At after-court stops and onstage at rallies, he has become a kind of SuperTrump, a monstrously turbocharged version of the original model. Quicker and noticeably happier. He even smiles.
After court, Trump has made the most of his drives back uptown, stopping at bodegas and construction sites. On May 2, a campaign official told me to arrive at a fire station at 51st and Third by 3 p.m. Although Trump would be in court for another hour at least, a crowd of security and press formed across the street from the station. Half a dozen men dressed like mini-Trumps paced back and forth with purposeful expressions on their faces. At 5 p.m., Trump arrived by motorcade. He stepped out of his SUV holding two pizzas, which he raised in the air in the self-congratulatory manner of anyone arriving anywhere holding pizzas.
He is, it seems, newly appreciative of his freedom, even as he repeatedly violates a gag order on the understanding that further violations of the gag order could land him in jail. “The Constitution is more important than jail,” he said, after a recent warning from the judge.
In ads, he says, “They wanna take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom… They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you and I just happen to be standing in their way, and I will never be moving.” Outside the court, he sometimes answers questions from reporters but always makes good on his lifetime commitment to the cameras, the object with which he maintains the most important relationship in his life.
At first I didn’t understand how he could be sleeping — or “closing his beautiful eyes,” as he says — through the events in court. Trump’s sleeplessness, revealed through at-all-hours social-media posts, was essential to his character. He bragged about needing only four hours a night.
I thought back on the beginning of the trial, when news of a self-immolation came just as court broke for lunch. At the park across the street, the air was hot and hazy with burning flesh, which I now know is not just a smell but a texture. Reporters scrambled for information, and the NYPD arrived for a press conference. Before it started, we were due back inside with the defendant. The manifesto made clear that the man chose to set himself on fire at the trial because of the concentration of cameras but that he was not protesting Trump or Trump’s prosecution. It was a good bet the press would care about his display, which aired live, in part, behind reporters on CNN. But he was wrong. He died later that night. We barely ever talked about it again. A man had set himself on fire, but it wasn’t about Trump so it didn’t matter.
After he lost in 2020 and before he was on trial in 2024, Trump worried about his relevance. He was very sensitive on the subject. “I’ve always been relevant,” he told me then. “Like, I’ve been in the mix.” Inside the courtroom, he never has to worry that our attention might drift away from him. Trump on trial is Trump at peace. Of course he can sleep easily.
Donald Trump on Thursday in Manhattan criminal court, where David Pecker continued his testimony. Photo: Mark Peterson/Pool
Even now, “President Donald Trump,” is still a phrase that requires conceptual gymnastics — a leap from the tabloid depths to the heights of power. Consider a pair of scenes, in a pair of courtrooms, Thursday morning. Promptly at 10 a.m., in Washington, to the ritual incantation of “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” nine black robed justices of the Supreme Court filed in to hear arguments in a case that could determine whether a president can be prosecuted for committing crimes while in office. Meanwhile, Trump was mired in Manhattan criminal court, listening as David Pecker, the former chief executive of the National Enquirer, testified about hushing up Trump’s alleged affair with a Playboy model, and oncediscussing the arrangement in the presence of the FBI director.
High, low. Low, high. They say justice is blind, but with Trump, it’s dizzy.
Let’s start at the top. In the marbled Supreme Court chamber, the mood was grave as the justices considered whether presidential immunity exists to protect Trump from prosecution for crimes related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “There are some things that are so fundamentally evil that they have to be protected against,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who posed a hypothetical about a president who ordered assassinations of political rivals. Her colleague Elena Kagan broached the scenario of mounting a military coup. Brett Kavanaugh warned of steamrolling prosecutors. Ketanji Brown Jackson theorized that White House might one day become a “seat of criminal activity.” Samuel Alito raised the possibility that the United States might be devolving into a cycle in which each president prosecutes his predecessor, as sometimes happens in the developing world. Neil Gorsuch, never one shrink from grandiosity, said the court needed to write “a rule for the ages.”
The second hand on the large antique clock hanging over the bench kept sweeping forward. Each tick brought Trump that much closer to his goal: getting to November. His immunity appeal makes a number of arguments, some mildly plausible and some risible, but for now they hardly matter. The appeal has already created the best thing Trump could have hoped for: a long delay. If the justices take a reasonable amount of time to make a decision, a trial in Washington — where even Trump’s lawyers admit he faces a high likelihood of conviction — is certain to be pushed past the election. And so just being in the Supreme Court in April represented an enormous victory for Trump, who wasn’t, in the literal sense, actually there. He had been hoping to attend oral arguments in person, but Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing his other case, had told him his presence was required in Manhattan, telling him that “having a trial” was “also a big deal.”
So Trump was forced to sit through another undignified day of testimony by Pecker, the silver-haired sleaze merchant who said he considered Trump a “friend” and “my mentor.” As he spoke, Trump would lean back in his chair, sometimes with his eyes closed, listening to a laborious account of the work it took to keep damaging stories about Trump out of the public domain before the 2016 election. “I wanted to protect my company, I wanted to protect myself and I also wanted to protect Donald Trump,” Pecker said. Prosecutors from the district attorney’s office sought to show that the two men had engaged in a conspiracy that continued after the 2016 election. Pecker testified that Jared Kushner had pulled him up to see President-elect Trump at Trump Tower during the transition, where he joined a meeting that included then FBI Director James Comey, and Trump asked him about his alleged former mistress, Karen McDougal.
Because Trump allegedly made the payoffs to McDougal and Stormy Daniels before he was elected, his immunity claim before the Supreme Court would not have helped him in the New York case, but if the Court does find he has some protection, it would likely end or severely hinder the other three cases against him. (Under questioning from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the attorney representing the Justice Department, Michael Dreeben, conceded that an immunity doctrine that applied to the January 6 case would likely also cover the substantially similar state case in Georgia.) John Sauer, a raspy-voiced appellate attorney for Trump, told the justices that the Framers intended to protect presidents from this sort of criminal liability. As proof, Sauer cited the fact that for “234 years of American history, no president was ever prosecuted for his official acts.” He suggested that without such immunity there could be “no presidency as we know it,” and raised that the possibility of future prosecution would make presidents vulnerable to “blackmail and extortion” by opponents.
“I understood it to be the status quo,” said Justice Jackson, who pointed out that it had long been presumed that presidents could be prosecuted after leaving office. Sauer responded by quoting something that Benjamin Franklin said at the Constitutional Convention.
“So what was up with the pardon of President Nixon?” Jackson retorted.
It is conservatives who usually accuse liberals of reading previously invisible meaning into the Constitution, and the Democratic appointees on the Court seemed to relish the opportunity to play up the irony. “The Framers did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution,” said Justice Kagan. “They knew how to. There were immunity clauses in some state constitutions.” But, she said, “They were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law.” Kagan focused on the most un-originalist element of Trump’s appeal: its interpretation of the impeachment clause of the Constitution. By any normal reading, it’s an accountability mechanism, but Trump seeks to turn it into a nearly impenetrable liability shield. Under Trump’s theory, a president could not be prosecuted for anything he did officially — no matter how illegal or immoral — unless he was first impeached and convicted by Congress.
Kagan brought up a series of doomsday scenarios. Would it be an “official act” for a president to sell nuclear secrets? What if a president ordered a coup? DId he have to be impeached in order to be held responsible? Each time, Sauer was forced to dissemble, saying the answers to each hypothetical were “fact-specific” and “context-specific.”
“That answer sounds to me,” Kagan said, sardonically, “as though it’s like, ‘Yeah, under my test, it’s an official act, but that sure sounds bad, doesn’t it?’”
After about 90 minutes, Dreeben, a veteran Justice Department attorney on the staff of Special Counsel Jack Smith, rose to speak, saying Trump’s “novel theory” would allow presidents to get away with “bribery, treason, sedition, murder, and, here, conspiring to use fraud to overturn the results of an election and perpetuate himself in power.” There seems to be little chance that any of the justices will go along with that. Trump’s own appointees seemed to be at pains to distance themselves from any defense of his actions. Barrett seemed particularly skeptical in her questioning. Both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said they were less concerned with the “here and now of this case,” as Kavanaugh put it, than with creating a durable standard for the future.
Kavanaugh grew impassioned as he criticized what he called “one of the court’s biggest mistakes,” a 1980s Supreme Court decision that upheld the law creating the independent counsel, a prosecutorial office meant to investigate high officeholders. He seemed to be speaking from experience: He once played a key role in Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation of Bill Clinton — which led to Clinton’s impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky affair — and he may have been alluding to Starr when he questioned Dreeben about the “risk” that the president could be victimized by “a creative prosecutor who wants to go after a president.” (Then again, maybe Kavanaugh was subtly needling Dreeben himself, who previously worked on a variety public corruption investigations, including Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump.) At any rate, the justice sounded determined to make sure that any decision on Trump’s immunity would be tailored narrowly, to prevent presidents from being prosecuted frequently.
By the end of the hearing, it sounded as if the Court was trending in the direction of a ruling that would potentially offer Trump immunity for some of his actions and not others. Barrett, in her questioning of Sauer, went through a long list of offenses alleged in the indictment, and compelled him to answer that some of them — like sending private attorneys off to put together fraudulent slates of electors — were in no way official actions. When Sauer proposed the Court strip the indictment of official acts, Chief Justice John Roberts said that would be like a “one-legged stool.” With Dreeben, Barrett explored the idea that the January 6 case might still be able to proceed, with only those indisputably private actions being presented to the jury as crimes. It seemed as if she were trying to offer a way out.
Unfortunately for Dreeben and his boss, Smith, it was hard to count five votes for a resolution that would allow them to take their case to trial before November. Roberts sounded particularly dubious of an appellate court ruling that resoundingly resolved the immunity issue in Smith’s favor, calling its reasoning “tautological.” Of the justices, Roberts, a proceduralist to his core, sounded the most inclined to punt the issue back to the district court, asking for it to come up with a test that would draw a distinction between the president’s official and private actions. If that happens, the Washington trial will be delayed many months. If Trump wins the election in the meantime, that will put the question to rest—unless Trump starts prosecuting his predecessors.
Justice Jackson suggested that her colleagues’ concerns about unintended consequences were misplaced. If anything, she said, a ruling that affirmed absolute presidential immunity would have the opposite of a “chilling” effect on the presidency. “If the potential for criminal liability is taken off the table,” she asked Sauer, “wouldn’t there be a significant risk that future presidents would be emboldened to commit crimes with abandon while they’re in office?” At roughly the same time, in New York, prosecutors displayed a photo of David Pecker with Trump at the White House, showing him as he discussed how he and the president had discussed the McDougal payoff during a walk in the portico. Justice Jackson’s concern wasn’t just a hypothetical. The White House, according to the Manhattan prosecutors, had already been a “seat of criminal activity.”
“Today was breathtaking,” Trump said Thursday afternoon after he emerged from the courtroom, where his defense attorney Emil Bove had begun his cross examination of Pecker. “I was forced to be here, and I’m glad I was, because it was a very interesting day in a certain way. But the U.S. Supreme Court had a monumental hearing on immunity.” He claimed that, if deprived of immunity as he conceived it, the presidency would become merely a “ceremonial” office.
“We want presidents that can get things done and bring people together,” Trump said. “The justices were on their game. So let’s see how that all pans out. But again, I say presidential immunity: very powerful. Presidential immunity is imperative, or you practically won’t have a country anymore.” With that, the ex-president left the courthouse. The screen split again and he returned to his campaign.
The scene from Monday’s opening arguments in Donald Trump’s criminal trial. Art: Isabelle Brourman
There was a simple question at the heart of Monday morning’s opening arguments in Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan: What’s the big deal? You may think it would be unnecessary to establish the stakes of the first prosecution of an ex-president, taking place amid a campaign that could very well return him to office. If Trump were going on trial for any of the other crimes, in other jurisdictions, that he is accused of committing — violating the Espionage Act, using political pressure to try to overturn the election in Georgia, subverting the peaceful transfer of power on January 6 — the answer would be self-evident. Yet this morning in Manhattan, Trump went on trial for the least of his offenses, making payoffs to a porn star.
Criminal law is not about narrative proportion, though — it deals in binary choices. Trump is accused of breaking the law, and though this trial may not be about his worst offense, he will still face a jury of 12 New Yorkers inside the scaffolding-shrouded criminal courthouse on Centre Street. It’s a fitting place to judge a squalid crime. The 15th floor, where the trial is being held, is locked down every morning, but elsewhere inside, the routine of arraignments, plea hearings, and sentencings keeps grinding forward. The grungy bathrooms smell like smoke, and sometimes you can find balled-up jail jumpsuits on the floor, left behind by perps who just got released.
Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom is unadorned. There is a little American flag — the type schoolkids wave for a presidential motorcade — tacked to a bulletin board on the wall, a few feet from a paper sign that reads “Active Shooter” with safety instructions beneath. The defendant in the case of People v. Donald Trump came in with a large retinue of aides and attorneys and took his seat at the defense table. As always, a group of five pool photographers rushed in and photographed him for a few moments as he sat there seething like a caged animal. Then he sat back, wearing a blue tie and a blank look on his face, as Matthew Colangelo, representing the Manhattan district attorney’s office, rose to begin the case for prosecution.
“This is a case about a criminal conspiracy and a cover-up,” Colangelo said in his opening words to the jury, “a criminal scheme to influence the 2016 election.”
It is easy to understand why Colangelo — a former Justice Department official who came to New York to handle the trial — wanted to start with some reframing. The “hush money” case, as it is often called, is one that even some prosecutors were reluctant to bring. It was originally a component of a wide probe into Trump’s finances that had been initiated under former New York district attorney Cyrus Vance, who charged the longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, with evading taxes on his compensation in an effort to flip Weisselberg against his boss. But he refused to turn on Trump. After a new district attorney, Alvin Bragg, was elected in 2021, he decided not to pursue the financial-fraud case. (Attorney General Tish James pursued it as a civil lawsuit, which resulted in a $455 million judgment against Trump.) All that was left after the investigation fizzled was a subset of charges related to payments to Stormy Daniels.
Under Vance, the DA’s office had been hesitant to pursue the Daniels case on its own for reasons both philosophical and tactical. If you were going to try Trump, it seemed to some of the key prosecutors involved, it should be for a major crime. And the Daniels affair seemed more seedy than felonious. The underlying facts concern a $130,000 deal that Michael Cohen, Trump’s then–personal attorney, made to buy silence from the actress when she was trying to sell a story about a sexual liaison with Trump to a tabloid. (Trump denies the affair happened.) The following year, after Trump became president, he allegedly arranged for his company to pay Cohen $420,000 to cover the payoff, expenses, taxes, and a bonus, all disguised as a “retainer agreement” for his legal services. Cohen pleaded guilty to federal crimes related to the payments in 2018, after which he became a cooperating witness for the DA’s office. Still, he was hardly an ideal witness: a convicted felon whose agenda was evident from the title of his memoir, Disloyal, and its sequel, Revenge.
Under New York State law, the crime Trump has been charged with, falsifying business records, is a misdemeanor unless it is committed in the course of another felony. It is not illegal to pay off a mistress or to reimburse a lawyer. Thus, in his opening statement, Colangelo had to explain how the $420,000 paid to Cohen had been part of a larger criminal scheme. In the prosecutor’s telling, it was all part of a plot initiated in 2015 in a meeting at Trump Tower between Cohen, his boss, and David Pecker, who was then the chief executive of the company that owned the National Enquirer. “Those three men formed a conspiracy at that meeting,” Colangelo said.
The “Trump Tower conspiracy,” as the prosecutor called it, allegedly had three elements: The Enquirer would publish positive stories about Trump and negative stories about his opponent, and most important, according to the prosecution, Pecker agreed to act as Trump’s “eyes and ears” down in the gutter. On at least three occasions, including with Daniels, Pecker or his subordinates alerted Trump to salacious stories about him that were being shopped, and they helped him get the stories snuffed out by persuading the sources to agree to sell the rights to their stories to the Enquirer or to entities controlled by Cohen in an industry practice known as “catch and kill.”
“You will hear the defendant in his own voice,” Colangelo promised, indicating that the prosecutors plan to play tapes of Trump’s involvement in the catch-and-kill negotiations. “You’ll even hear him suggest, in his own voice, you will hear Mr. Trump suggest paying cash.”
None of this will surprise anyone who has followed Trump’s symbiotic relationship with the tabloid press — for which he has long been both a character and a source — or who has any familiarity with the transactional nature of that business. But according to the prosecution’s theory, the rules changed for Trump in 2015 whether he realized it or not. What might have been merely a sleazy deal when he was a celebrity became a felony because he was running for president. “Look, no politician wants bad press, but the evidence at the trial will show this was not spin or communications strategy,” Colangelo said. “It was election fraud, pure and simple.” The prosecutor said that as Trump began racking up states on Election Night in November 2016, the ramifications set in for one of the lawyers who represented Daniels in the hush-money deal.
“What have we done?” the attorney texted a top editor at the National Enquirer.
If you believe Trump should be held accountable for everything he did after that — a familiar litany of high crimes and misdemeanors, for which he was twice impeached — it may be easy to shrug off any concerns about proportionality or technical imperfections in the hush-money case. Al Capone, as anyone who has seen The Untouchables knows, was put away for tax evasion, not the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. In the weeks before this Trump trial began, some legal experts who had previously minimized its importance came around to the opinion that, in its grubby simplicity, the hush-money case had its merits. “Now, everybody’s coming to the table and saying, ‘We need to take another look at this case because we all dismissed it,’” says Karen Friedman Agnifilo, a former top lieutenant to Vance in the DA’s office. “Dismiss it at your peril.” Even some of Trump’s loudest defenders have trouble seeing a route to an acquittal. “In New York,” says the famed attorney and former Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz, paraphrasing the legal adage, “if you indict a ham sandwich named Trump, you’ll get a conviction.”
“President Trump is innocent,” his lead attorney, Todd Blanche, said as he began his own opening statement. “He is cloaked in innocence. That cloak of innocence does not leave President Trump today, it does not leave him at any point in this trial, and it does not leave him when you deliberate.”
Blanche previewed the elements of his defense. On one level, it is not much different than the case made by most every other defense attorney representing most every other defendant who passes through the Manhattan criminal-courts building. The prosecution has the burden of proof; the star witness is a fink. “He’s a convicted perjurer. He’s an admitted liar,” Blanche said of Cohen. Just the night before the trial, the attorney claimed, Cohen had talked about wanting “to see President Trump in an orange jumpsuit.” He claimed Daniels had lied about the sexual encounter and had threatened to go public with it in “an attempt to extort President Trump.”
“Objection,” one of the prosecutors said.
“Sustained,” said Judge Merchan.
Still, the jury heard the word extort, and maybe Blanche succeeded in planting a seed of doubt. His objective over the rest of the trial, which is scheduled to last six to eight weeks, will be to grow it, little by little, asking the jurors, Was this really as big a deal as the prosecutors suggested? Was it really election fraud? Did it really change history? Or was this trial just about some money and a nondisclosure agreement signed between two consenting adults, one of whom was running for president and wanted to avoid an embarrassing scandal?
“I have a spoiler alert: There’s nothing wrong with trying to influence an election,” Blanche said. “It’s called democracy.”
In this April 15, 2024, courtroom photo, Trump is shown looking down, not sleeping — but you can use your imagination. Photo: Jabin Botsford-Pool/Getty Images
“Sleepy Joe” was always a low-energy Trump nickname. Donald Trump’s derisive name for Joe Biden never had the zing of “Crooked Hillary” or “Liddle Marco,” and it was too similar to other Trump nicknames like “Sleepin’ Bob” Casey and “Sleepy Eyes” Chuck Todd. Now there’s a new problem with it that no one anticipated: It’s easy to turn it back on “Sleepy Don” when he nods off — repeatedly! — during a criminal trial over hush-money payments he allegedly made to cover up an affair with a porn star.
During day one of Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan — which will determine whether he broke the law by paying off Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election, then disguising the payments — the former president reportedly fell asleep in the courtroom. Maggie Haberman wrote on the New York Times’ trial liveblog on April 16:
Trump appears to be sleeping. His head keeps dropping down and his mouth goes slack.
Haberman said Trump was roused a short time later:
Trump has apparently jolted back awake, noticing the notes his lawyer passed him several minutes ago.
Stewart Bishop, a reporter for Law360 who was in the courtroom, made the same observation:
Courthouse News reporter Erik Uebelacker, who was watching from the overflow room, agreed:
In an interview during a break, Haberman told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Trump looked sleepy during previous court appearances but this incident was worse:
As he was exiting court on Monday, Trump reported glared at Haberman, who broke the news about his courtroom nap.
On Monday evening, Haberman confirmed on CNN that Trump gave her a “pretty specific stare” as he walked out:
So perhaps Trump was embarrassed — but incredibly, it wasn’t enough to keep him from dozing off again during the proceedings on Tuesday morning.
Or on Friday morning. Maggie Haberman spotted Trump’s third courtroom nap:
Trump appears to have fallen asleep in court again. It happened several times just now. His eyes were closed for extended periods and his head dropped down twice.
While there are sketch artists present and there were some photos taken of Trump at the beginning of each day’s proceedings, there is no audio or video broadcast of the trial. So we may never see photographic evidence of Trump’s inability to keep his eyes open in court (which, in addition to being funny, is notable since he keeps insisting he’s far more spry than Biden, though they’re about the same age). It’s probably just as well; knowing Trump, he’d frame the “Sleepy Don” shot as a defiant statement against “political persecution” and start selling it on T-shirts.
This post was updated after Trump fell asleep again on Tuesday.
The first former president to be charged with a crime, Trump appeared in a Manhattan courtroom last year and pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Prosecutors allege that in 2016 he personally played a role in Cohen paying Daniels $130,000 to silence her allegation that she and Trump had an affair years earlier. (He has consistently denied her allegation.) Trump is accused of breaking the law by categorizing the reimbursements to Cohen as a legal retainer; prosecutors say Cohen performed no legal services. Trump is charged for each of the records prosecutors say were bogus: checks made out to Cohen, invoices from Cohen, and accounting entries in Trump’s books.
Although once a loyal enforcer for Trump, Cohen now calls him “a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.” A key witness for the prosecution, he alleges that during the 2016 election, Trump directed him to facilitate a $130,000 payment through a shell company to Daniels in order to suppress her story that she and Trump had sex a decade earlier. He claims that Trump later reimbursed him for the payment, disguising the expense in business records as a retainer for legal services. (Cohen has also said that he played a role in the National Enquirer’s parent company, AMI, paying to “catch and kill” model Karen McDougal’s story of her own affair with Trump.)
Cohen’s credibility is expected to come under fire because of his own legal history: In 2018, he pleaded guilty to lying to Congress. That same year, he was also sentenced to three years in federalprison for tax evasion, bank fraud, and campaign-finance violations in connection to the payments made to Daniels and McDougal.
Stephanie Clifford took the stage name Stormy Daniels when she began working as a stripper and kept that name when she transitioned into adult films. In 2006, according to Daniels, she met Trump in Lake Tahoe, where he was hosting a celebrity golf tournament. She alleges that he invited her to dinner in his hotel suite and, after some conversation and Daniels spanking Trump with a copy of Forbes, the two had sex.
In January 2018, after The Wall Street Journal broke the story that Cohen had paid off Daniels, she sued Trump to get out of their nondisclosure agreement. Soon after, she went on 60 Minutes, during which she detailed having sex with Trump and said she only signed the NDA out of concern for her and her family’s safety. Daniels will be allowed to testify after Judge Merchan rejected an attempt from Trump’s legal team to block her testimony.
McDougal is a model and former Playboy Playmate of the Year who has claimed to have had a monthslong affair with Trump back in 2006, when he was newly married to his wife, Melania Trump. In 2016, McDougal was paid $150,000 by American Media, Inc. in exchange for the rights to her story about the affair and for her to stay silent on the subject in the media. AMI never published her story about Trump — a move known as a “catch and kill.” McDougal went on to sue AMI in order to be freed from her contract. She and the company would later reach a settlement, allowing her to speak about her experience with Trump. She is expected to testify during the trial.
David Pecker is the former head of American Media, Inc., the publisher of the infamous National Enquirer. A longtime friend of Trump’s, he frequently used the Enquirer to run unflattering stories about Trump’s rivals, including Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz.
Also during Pecker’s time at AMI, the company often utilized the practice of “catch and kill” — when a publication buys the rights to a potentially damaging story and suppresses the information by declining to publish it. Pecker did this to McDougal and a former doorman at Trump Tower who prosecutors allege was trying to sell a story about a supposed love child of Trump’s. Pecker also communicated with Cohen regarding Daniels’s story. He is expected to testify.
In 2021, voters elected Democrat Alvin Bragg to be the Manhattan district attorney — the first Black person to serve in the role. Last April, Bragg announced that his office had filed felony charges against the former president, becoming the first prosecutor in the nation to indict Trump. To do so, though, Bragg used a novel legal theory to upgrade what is usually a misdemeanor (falsifying business records) to a felony by arguing that the records were changed in order to cover up another crime: in this case, violations of the state’s campaign-finance laws. Bragg’s office alleges Trump tried to hide relevant information about his alleged affair from the voting public prior to the election.
Judge Merchan is presiding over the historic trial, though it’s not his first time dealing with Trump figures. He oversaw the trial of former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg for financial fraud and tax evasion, sentencing him to five months in prison. He is also presiding over the pending trial of Steve Bannon, who is charged with fraud for allegedly bilking donors for a border-wall scheme.
Merchan immigrated to the United States with his family from Colombia when he was 6 years old, growing up in Jackson Heights. After working as a prosecutor in both the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the state attorney general’s office, he was appointed as a Family Court judge in 2006 and to the State Supreme Court three years later.
As he has done with other judges, Trump has attacked Merchan on social media, hurling insults and claiming that he is “corrupt.” Things escalated after Trump targeted Merchan’s daughter, suggesting that the judge is biased owing to his daughter’s work as a Democratic strategist. Merchan revised the gag order he placed on Trump to bar him from talking about his and Bragg’s families in addition to court staff and potential witnesses.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Merchan did not discuss specifics about the case but said that he and his staff want to be sure that they “dispense justice.”
“There’s no agenda here,” he said. “We want to follow the law. We want justice to be done.”
One of Trump’s closest aides as president, Hope Hicks first began working for Ivanka in the Trump Organization in 2014 before she became the Trump campaign’s press secretary in 2015. Hicks is expected to testify at the trial as a witness for the prosecution because she communicated with various figures involved in silencing Daniels, including Daniels’s then-lawyer, Keith Davidson, as well as Pecker and Dylan Howard, two AMI executives. The communications started the day after the release of the Access Hollywood tape in October 2016, which is believed to have sparked the plan to pay Daniels.
In 2023, Trump tapped attorney Todd Blanche to lead his defense in the Manhattan case. A veteran federal prosecutor experienced in white-collar cases, Blanche left his job as a partner at the prominent law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft to defend Trump. He previously represented Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, and Igor Fruman, an associate of Rudy Giuliani’s, in separate federal cases.
If defending Trump in Manhattan weren’t enough, Blanche is also taking the lead for Trump’s defense in the federal government’s classified-documents case in Florida and is co-counsel for the January 6–related case in Washington, D.C.
After defending the Trump Organization against tax-fraud charges filed by Bragg’s office in 2022, Susan Necheles is working alongside Blanche to defend Trump himself. A veteran defense attorney, she has represented no shortage of notorious clients throughout her career: Pedro Espada Jr., the New York State Senate majority leader found guilty of embezzlement; Clare Bronfman, the Seagram’s heiress in the NXIVM sex-cult case; and Venero Mangano, an underboss for the Genovese crime family known as Benny Eggs.
Donald Trump’s first and potentially only criminal trial before Election Day has begun. He’s returned to his former hometown to be tried by a jury of his peers in Manhattan that will determine whether he broke the law by paying, and subsequently disguising, hush money to Stormy Daniels to protect his reputation in the closing days of the 2016 election. The first-ever such trial for a former president, Trump could be sent to prison if convicted. (Judge Juan Merchan could jail him in the meantime for contempt of court, such as repeatedly violating a gag order.) The stakes could not be higher for the 77-year-old defendant or the country, which faces the possibility that he will end up behind bars or back in the White House or both. Below, our recap of the trial, which we’ll update daily with all the important developments and drama. (And here are the key people involved in the trial.)
On the first day of the trial, Judge Merchan worked to hammer down what would and wouldn’t be allowed in the court proceedings moving forward. Prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office sought a fine against Trump over a social-media post that called potential witnesses Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels “sleaze bags.” On his way into the courtroom, Trump railed against the trial, but he dozed off in his chair. And the jury-selection process got underway, but just barely.
Trump arrived at the courthouse in his motorcade around 9 a.m., stopping in the hallway outside of the courtroom to address reporters. He reiterated his claims that the case against him is unfair and politically motivated, calling it “political persecution” and “an assault on America.”
Trump arrives at court in lower Manhattan on Monday. Photo: Mark Peterson
Judge Merchan denied a motion from Trump’s legal team that called for him to recuse himself. He said that Trump was using a “series of inferences, innuendos, and unsupported speculation” to support his recusal claim. He reiterated his earlier decision that the Access Hollywood tape could not be shown in court, deeming it too prejudicial. Prosecutors are also barred from mentioning the numerous sexual-assault allegations against Trump. However, he ruled that Karen McDougal will be allowed to testify, though the prosecution won’t be allowed to mention her claim that her alleged affair with Trump occurred while his wife, Melania, was pregnant with their son, Barron. The prosecution will also be allowed to enter evidence about the National Enquirer’s past coverage of Trump.
Prosecutors filed a motion, claiming that several of Trump’s social-media posts violated the gag order Merchan set on Trump, which bars him from commenting publicly on potential witnesses, among others — he called Daniels and Cohen “sleaze bags.” Prosecutors are seeking a $1,000 fine per post.
The buzz of pretrial hype wasn’t enough to keep the 77-year-old awake. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman caught Trump appearing to fall asleep at one point during the proceedings, writing, “His head keeps dropping down and his mouth goes slack.”
96 prospective jurors were brought into the courtroom to kick off the jury-selection process, but more than half were quickly sent home after stating they couldn’t be impartial or were unable to serve. By the end of the day’s proceedings, Merchan had only gotten through the questionnaires of nine jurors, and none have been selected for the final panel. The novelty of possibly sitting on this particular jury wasn’t lost on these Manhattanites, some of whom were seen craning their heads to sneak a peek at the defendant. One juror was excused owing to a potential conflict with his son’s wedding in June, prompting congratulations from Merchan. Another who listed clubbing among her hobbies was dismissed after acknowledging she had “strong opinions or firmly held beliefs” about Trump. Another potential juror said his girlfriend worked in finance but admitted that he didn’t know what she did, sparking laughter from the prosecutors. A second group of prospective jurors will get their shot on Tuesday.
Behold the dour glowerer-in-chief:
Photo: MICHAEL NAGLE/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
A kidnapped-Biden truck drove in circles outside court on Monday morning:
Like any other trial, this one begins with the process of selecting a jury, which could take several days. Attorneys for the defense and prosecution will question a large pool of Manhattan residents until they find 12 jurors and six alternates. Judge Merchan drafted a 42-question-long survey for prospective jurors to fill out in order to determine their impartiality. In addition to personal questions, potential jurors are asked about their media diets, whether they’ve volunteered for Trump’s campaign or attended a rally, and if they’ve ever read any books or listened to any podcasts by Michael Cohen, a key witness for prosecutors, or Mark Pomerantz, the attorney who previously worked on the DA’s investigation into Trump. It also asks whether they have been a member of several extremist groups and movements, such as the Proud Boys and antifa.
Merchan previously ruled that jurors will be anonymous and have their identities shielded from the public owing to the risk of “a likelihood of bribery, jury tampering, or of physical injury or harassment.” Trump, his attorneys, and prosecutors will have access to the jurors’ names and addresses.
From potential witnesses to the judge and attorneys, here’s a quick primer on the big names in the trial.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty
The first former president to be charged with a crime, Trump appeared in a Manhattan courtroom last year and pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Prosecutors allege that in 2016 he personally played a role in Cohen paying Daniels $130,000 to silence her allegation that she and Trump had an affair years earlier. (He has consistently denied her allegation.) Trump is accused of breaking the law by categorizing the reimbursements to Cohen as a legal retainer; prosecutors say Cohen performed no legal services. Trump is charged for each of the records prosecutors say were bogus: checks made out to Cohen, invoices from Cohen, and accounting entries in Trump’s books.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty
Although once a loyal enforcer for Trump, Cohen now calls him “a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.” A key witness for the prosecution, he alleges that during the 2016 election, Trump directed him to facilitate a $130,000 payment through a shell company to Daniels in order to suppress her story that she and Trump had sex a decade earlier. He claims that Trump later reimbursed him for the payment, disguising the expense in business records as a retainer for legal services. (Cohen has also said that he played a role in the National Enquirer’s parent company, AMI, paying to “catch and kill” model Karen McDougal’s story of her own affair with Trump.)
Cohen’s credibility is expected to come under fire because of his own legal history: In 2018, he pleaded guilty to lying to Congress. That same year, he was also sentenced to three years in federalprison for tax evasion, bank fraud, and campaign-finance violations in connection to the payments made to Daniels and McDougal.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty
Stephanie Clifford took the stage name Stormy Daniels when she began working as a stripper and kept that name when she transitioned into adult films. In 2006, according to Daniels, she met Trump in Lake Tahoe, where he was hosting a celebrity golf tournament. She alleges that he invited her to dinner in his hotel suite and, after some conversation and Daniels spanking Trump with a copy of Forbes, the two had sex.
In January 2018, after The Wall Street Journal broke the story that Cohen had paid off Daniels, she sued Trump to get out of their nondisclosure agreement. Soon after, she went on 60 Minutes, during which she detailed having sex with Trump and said she only signed the NDA out of concern for her and her family’s safety. Daniels will be allowed to testify after Judge Merchan rejected an attempt from Trump’s legal team to block her testimony.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty
McDougal is a model and former Playboy Playmate of the Year who has claimed to have had a monthslong affair with Trump back in 2006, when he was newly married to his wife, Melania Trump. In 2016, McDougal was paid $150,000 by American Media, Inc. in exchange for the rights to her story about the affair and for her to stay silent on the subject in the media. AMI never published her story about Trump — a move known as a “catch and kill.” McDougal went on to sue AMI in order to be freed from her contract. She and the company would later reach a settlement, allowing her to speak about her experience with Trump. She is expected to testify during the trial.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty
David Pecker is the former head of American Media, Inc., the publisher of the infamous National Enquirer. A longtime friend of Trump’s, he frequently used the Enquirer to run unflattering stories about Trump’s rivals, including Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz.
Also during Pecker’s time at AMI, the company often utilized the practice of “catch and kill” — when a publication buys the rights to a potentially damaging story and suppresses the information by declining to publish it. Pecker did this to McDougal and a former doorman at Trump Tower who prosecutors allege was trying to sell a story about a supposed love child of Trump’s. Pecker also communicated with Cohen regarding Daniels’s story. He is expected to testify.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty
In 2021, voters elected Democrat Alvin Bragg to be the Manhattan district attorney — the first Black person to serve in the role. Last April, Bragg announced that his office had filed felony charges against the former president, becoming the first prosecutor in the nation to indict Trump. To do so, though, Bragg used a novel legal theory to upgrade what is usually a misdemeanor (falsifying business records) to a felony by arguing that the records were changed in order to cover up another crime: in this case, violations of the state’s campaign-finance laws. Bragg’s office alleges Trump tried to hide relevant information about his alleged affair from the voting public prior to the election.
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Judge Merchan is presiding over the historic trial, though it’s not his first time dealing with Trump figures. He oversaw the trial of former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg for financial fraud and tax evasion, sentencing him to five months in prison. He is also presiding over the pending trial of Steve Bannon, who is charged with fraud for allegedly bilking donors for a border-wall scheme.
Merchan immigrated to the United States with his family from Colombia when he was 6 years old, growing up in Jackson Heights. After working as a prosecutor in both the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the state attorney general’s office, he was appointed as a Family Court judge in 2006 and to the State Supreme Court three years later.
As he has done with other judges, Trump has attacked Merchan on social media, hurling insults and claiming that he is “corrupt.” Things escalated after Trump targeted Merchan’s daughter, suggesting that the judge is biased owing to his daughter’s work as a Democratic strategist. Merchan revised the gag order he placed on Trump to bar him from talking about his and Bragg’s families in addition to court staff and potential witnesses.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Merchan did not discuss specifics about the case but said that he and his staff want to be sure that they “dispense justice.”
“There’s no agenda here,” he said. “We want to follow the law. We want justice to be done.”
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One of Trump’s closest aides as president, Hope Hicks first began working for Ivanka in the Trump Organization in 2014 before she became the Trump campaign’s press secretary in 2015. Hicks is expected to testify at the trial as a witness for the prosecution because she communicated with various figures involved in silencing Daniels, including Daniels’s then-lawyer, Keith Davidson, as well as Pecker and Dylan Howard, two AMI executives. The communications started the day after the release of the Access Hollywood tape in October 2016, which is believed to have sparked the plan to pay Daniels.
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In 2023, Trump tapped attorney Todd Blanche to lead his defense in the Manhattan case. A veteran federal prosecutor experienced in white-collar cases, Blanche left his job as a partner at the prominent law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft to defend Trump. He previously represented Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, and Igor Fruman, an associate of Rudy Giuliani’s, in separate federal cases.
If defending Trump in Manhattan weren’t enough, Blanche is also taking the lead for Trump’s defense in the federal government’s classified-documents case in Florida and is co-counsel for the January 6–related case in Washington, D.C.
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After defending the Trump Organization against tax-fraud charges filed by Bragg’s office in 2022, Susan Necheles is working alongside Blanche to defend Trump himself. A veteran defense attorney, she has represented no shortage of notorious clients throughout her career: Pedro Espada Jr., the New York State Senate majority leader found guilty of embezzlement; Clare Bronfman, the Seagram’s heiress in the NXIVM sex-cult case; and Venero Mangano, an underboss for the Genovese crime family known as Benny Eggs.
