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WAUKESHA, WI - MAY 1st: Former president Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally on Wednesday May 1st, 2024.  (Photo by Sara Stathas for the Washington Post)

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NEW YORK — My friend and former colleague Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of <a href="https://www.lawfaremedia.org/" target=_blank>Lawfare</a>, has provided indispensable legal analysis during Donald Trump’s hush money trial. But his most important insight into the trial is the need for cushioning.

When I arrived at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse early Monday morning for a few days of Trump trial tourism, I found Wittes in line holding not one but two pillows: an orthopedic doughnut to sit on and a padded, wraparound lap desk. If I didn’t do the same, he warned, “you’ll come away with injuries.”

He was vindicated within an hour of my arrival in the courthouse.

The courthouse, completed in 1941, apparently has not been updated much since then, nor even maintained. Its seats are hard, wooden pews with curved backs that accentuate the customary journalist slouch as we hunch over our laptops.

Posters warning of asbestos abatement hang in the lobby. The bathrooms have malfunctioning taps, missing toilet paper holders and what looks like years of grime on the floor. The courtrooms have almost no electrical power or internet connectivity, forcing those covering the Trump trial to lug backpacks full of enormous batteries, cables and hotspots. Temperatures fluctuate madly (a source of much <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/03/trump-napping-gaza-protestors-hush-money-trial/" target="_blank">irritation to the defendant</a>). The hallways are dark and green, and the fluorescent-lit courtrooms have names such as “Part 59” and “Part 75.” The elevators groan and creak; on the 15th floor, where the Trump trial is held, two of us had to manually push an elevator’s doors closed to get the carriage moving down to the lobby.

Mar-a-Lago it isn’t. This place, built on the site of a 19th-century prison and gallows complex called “the Tombs,” may be as close as Trump gets to prison — and it’s a reasonable facsimile. Attendees get colored “hall passes” that allow them to go to the restroom. Dozens of police guards bark orders (“We’re locking it down!”) and impose byzantine rules: No eating in the rooms, and no loitering in the halls unless you are eating. Multiple layers of security make it so difficult to reenter the building that reporters pack their lunches and eat on benches, or any other space they can claim, on unused floors of the building.

Those wishing to attend the proceedings start to line up around 6 a.m. for the 9:30 a.m. trial, in the middle of a media bivouac of satellite trucks, stand-up platforms and acres of police barriers. Those admitted to the courtroom (one reporter per outlet) and the overflow room (where video and audio are piped in) can’t watch Trump’s rants in the hallway, just steps away, and those in the “pool” to watch Trump’s rants can’t watch the trial.

Still, there are small pleasures: On the TV screens in the overflow room, right under the video feed of Trump at the defense table, is a chyron displaying the words “New York County Supreme Criminal.”

Angela Weiss

I expected to spend much of my year covering Trump this way, watching his trials in New York, D.C., Georgia and Florida. But suddenly, this trial — the least important of the four — looks like it will be the only one to get underway before the election.

In Florida on Tuesday, Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee and a thorough Trump partisan, postponed indefinitely his trial in the classified documents case. In Georgia on Wednesday, an appeals court agreed to hear an appeal from Trump that will almost certainly block the racketeering trial there from occurring this year. Last month, a Trump-friendly majority on the Supreme Court signaled that it would handle Trump’s sweeping immunity claims in such a way that will likely postpone his trial in the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/january-6-capitol-riot/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Jan. 6</a>, 2021, case until after the election.

For a candidate who moans nonstop about a “rigged” justice system, it looks more as though the deck is stacked in his favor. Yet Trump may be sorry when his time in court comes to an end in a couple of weeks. He will no longer be able to claim that his obligations in court keep him from the campaign trail (he tends to play golf on his days away from the trial anyway), and he won’t be able to complain about how he’s being persecuted by prosecutors and judges.

In the hush money trial, he’s practically begging to be jailed for contempt of court. Justice <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/03/31/trump-judge-merchan-indictment/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Juan Merchan</a>, finding Trump in contempt for a 10th time on Monday for violating a gag order preventing Trump from attacking witnesses, pleaded: “Mr. Trump, it’s important to understand that the last thing I want to do is to put you in jail. You are the former president of the United States and possibly the next president, as well. There are many reasons why incarceration is truly a last resort for me.”

Yet 48 hours later, before Stormy Daniels’s testimony, Trump toyed with the judge some more. He posted and then deleted a message on his Truth Social platform about the “CROOKED” judge “threatening me with JAIL,” while also claiming the judge left “no time for lawyers to prepare” for Daniels. (Her name had been on the witness list for months.)

Mary Altaffer

I came to New York expecting to see Trump <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/of-interest/2024/04/23/trump-asleep-nod-off-trial/" target=_blank>doze off during his trial</a>. Instead, I was struggling to stay awake myself.

Prosecutors don’t announce the order of witnesses, as a precaution to keep Trump from attacking them. So after waiting for three hours Monday morning to secure a seat, I learned that I was in for a day of accounting testimony — important to the case, but deadly tedious.

“Is there a check number on the stub?”

The only relief Monday was provided by Trump’s lawyers, who complained about everything, no matter how picayune, and without regard to whether their complaint had any truth. Trump lawyer Todd Blanche complained at length that the defense had not been provided with the name of one of the witnesses; her name was on the list of witnesses publicly disclosed during jury selection. Blanche argued that having the witness recalled to provide additional testimony would prejudice the jury against the defense. The testimony in question? The witness was going to read three of Trump’s tweets.

In the courtroom that morning, Trump’s lawyers tried to delay the day’s proceedings so they could raise more objections to the judge; outside the courtroom in the afternoon, Trump complained that the trial was taking too long.

But Tuesday brought blessed relief from the tedium. A witness from the publisher of “Trump: How to Get Rich” testified.

“What’s depicted in the cover photo?”

“And what’s the largest word on the cover?”

“And what percentage of the cover is the word ‘Trump’?”

“It looks about roughly 30 percent to me.”

The prosecutor then had the witness read passages from the book, such as: “For many years I’ve said that if someone screws you, screw them back. When somebody hurts you, just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can.”

In cross examination, Blanche tried to suggest Trump’s “ghostwriter” was behind such sentiments — and moments later denied to the judge that he had done any such thing.

The content of Daniels’s testimony wasn’t new — she had written or said most of it before — but hearing the prurient account in open court, with Trump at the defense table, was still stunning. It stunned Trump, for the judge had to admonish him, through his lawyers, for “cursing audibly.”

“Mr. Blanche, did you speak to your client?” Merchan asked after a break.

After <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/08/stormy-daniels-donald-trump-hush-money/" target=_blank>watching Daniels testify</a> on Tuesday, I abandoned my trial tourism. When Daniels returned to the stand for continued cross-examination Thursday morning, I “watched” it through the eyes of my Post colleagues (who report the action in live updates) and those of Lawfare’s Tyler McBrien (who <a href="https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1788532635884528013.html" target=_blank>live-tweets</a> so fast it’s like a transcript). The attacks on the adult-film star were ferocious, but Daniels didn’t lose her poise.

Trump lawyer Susan Necheles invoked Daniels’s 2018 “Make America Horny Again” tour, and she displayed the products Daniels has sold, including a “Stormy, Saint of Indictments” candle. “That was you selling your merchandise, right?” Necheles asked.

“That is me doing my job,” answered Daniels, who noted that her own crass commercializing was “not unlike Mr. Trump.”

Necheles, who asserted that Daniels has “a lot of experience making phony stories about sex appear to be real,” asked her: “And now you have a story you have been telling about having sex with President Trump; right?”

Replied Daniels: “And if that story was untrue, I would have written it to be a lot better.”

Necheles was skeptical that Daniels, after acting in “over 200 porn movies,” would really become lightheaded, as Daniels claimed, after seeing Trump on a bed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts.

“Yes,” Daniels rejoined. “When you are not expecting a man twice your age to be in their underwear.”

The Trump lawyer asked Daniels if she knew what was in the indictment against Trump.

“There was a lot of indictments,” Daniels responded, to laughter.

Necheles mentioned a Daniels tweet saying she was “the best person to flush the orange turd down,” then asked: “You said you were going to ‘flush’ President Trump?”

“I didn’t say ‘President Trump,’” Daniels shot back. “It says ‘orange turd.’ So, if that’s what’s interpreted by you …”

There was more laughter in the courtroom. Or so I’m told. By this time, I was sitting at home in an ergonomic office chair with plenty of memory foam.

White House Correspondent Association's Beckman Award

National Press Club's Gingras Prize

Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America (Doubleday, 2010)

Homo Politicus (Doubleday, 2008)

Smashmouth (Basic Books, 2001)

The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party (Doubleday, 2022)

Yale University, BA cum laude in political science

Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics. His new book is “The Destructionists: The 25-Year Crackup of the Republican Party” (Doubleday). 

Dana Milbank

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The media scene at Trump’s New York trial is the closest he’ll get to prison

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Former US president Trump's hush money criminal trial continues in New York City, USA - 09 May 2024

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