Why? Because as anyone who has ever reported on it knows, the jury phase is normally dull for everyone involved. The last time I was called (10 years ago in Brooklyn), the judge wouldn’t let us read, which — as any of my former therapists could tell you — was agonizing for me. As the attorney and judge questioned other people from the jury pool, the court officer marched around yelling at anyone peeking surreptitiously at a magazine or book under their coat.
If my compulsion is reading, Donald Trump’s is talking. He is, as my father used to put it, a “gasbag,” a person who is almost physically unable to enter a public space without dominating it verbally. But Trump is extreme in this regard: grammatically mangled, cognitively garbled, dishonest, unpunctuated and verbally inaccurate, his declarations are a firehose of gasbaggery. And one of the benefits of filling the air with your own opinions is that you never have to listen to, or think about, anyone else’s views.
So one of the last week’s pleasures was that Donald Trump was not allowed to speak in the courtroom unless spoken to. This meant that he was also forced to listen to whatever anyone said about him without responding to them, an exercise that will continue this week. He had to do this for five days in a row, except when he was asleep, a phenomenon that some Democrats believe will neutralize Trump’s attacks on President Biden as “Sleepy Joe” and a “low energy” person.
One guess as to why Trump nods off is that when he can’t talk, play golf or watch TV he is bored; another is that he doesn’t sleep well (look at the bags under his eyes!) But there are other theories. Bess Levin at Vanity Fairbelieves that, since there is no food or drink allowed in the courtroom, the Former Guy — lacking the dozen or so Diet Cokes that he drinks daily — is in caffeine withdrawal. The Lincoln Project reports that Trump claimed that he wasn’t sleeping — he was praying.
Then there is some super-undignified gossip that, like former wingman Rudy Giuliani, the Big Guy is a gasbag in another sense as well. It’s always hard to know what to make of such things, because it’s such a juvenile thing to talk about, or even whether it is true. Yet these claims have been made in a number of places. Ben Meiselas, co-founder of MeidasTouch and owner of Los Angeles Magazine, affirmed the audible and olfactory evidence of human gas emanating from the defense table in his own publication. Others said Trump was sleeping and farting loudly at the same time.
But let’s return to the man’s verbal gasbaggery. When awake and not in court, Trump still can’t gas at will, because he is subject to yet another gag order from yet another court: the list of people he cannot talk about is growing. In late March, Judge Merchan instructed Trump not to make statements about jurors and witnesses in the case, since we all know that when he does that, it is an invitation to his followers to spend their days barraging these people with death threats. One week later, he expanded that gag order to families, when the Former Guy publicly attacked Merchan’s daughter, who has worked as a Democratic political consultant but is not involved with this case, on (Failing) Truth Social.
This is important in more than a public safety sense. Trump’s style as a gasbag is to entertain his supporters, not just with familiar conspiracies and projections of doom, but to populate these stories with new characters, preferably Black, Latino, female and immigrants who have made good. In the absence of being able to attack real people, Trump will be forced to rely on a stale, self-pitying conspiracy narrative that has no antagonists in it to keep his supporters’ attention.
It may even be the case that this trial will defy those doomsayers and be fairly normal and straightforward. After all the hand-wringing about how hard it would be to seat a jury, Judge Juan Merchan has managed to frog-march all the attorneys — Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Donald Trump’s defense team, Todd Blanche and Susan Necheles — through jury selection in five days. That’s about how long it usually takes: in fact, in the murder case I was called for, I was dismissed late on day 5, and I know jury selection went into at least a sixth day. With a full jury and six alternates seated, we should have opening statements sometime today.
But if Trump naps today, nightmares in other venues await. NBC reports that on Friday, Attorney General Letitia James filed a motion to void Trump’s $175 million bond in the civil fraud case she won in February. You may recall that Trump was initially assessed $454 million by the court (in addition to the $85 million or so that he owes E. Jean Carroll), and had to put that money in escrow pending appeal. On April 1, the appeals court permitted him to post bond for less than half of that sum: his lawyers claimed that the larger bond was simply not possible to obtain.
As it turns out, however, Former President Wile E. Coyote cannot just make a deal with Acme Insurance, Inc.: a bond company must be licensed by the State of New York, and it must prove that it has the assets to pay out should Trump lose his appeal. According to James’s filing, Knight Specialty Insurance Company, Trump’s guarantor of last resort, doesn’t meet either of these criteria; nor is it in control of the Trump assets that supposedly secure the bond against default.
Should the appeals court share James’s concerns with KSIC’s obvious lack of solvency (they only have $136 million cash on hand), it could revoke the bond as soon as today. This would put the Trump civil litigation team (as opposed to the criminal litigation team working in Judge Merchan’s courtroom) back on the clock to come up with the cash before the state of New York starts seizing golf courses and gilded elevators.
A second, related, nightmare is something I have written about before: the Trump campaign is very short on cash, in part because of the candidate’s massive legal expenses. Trump’s people have notified down ballot Republican campaigns that if they use the Former Guy’s image or name in their own fundraising appeals, they now need to send him 5 percent of the take, which is a lot for some of these smaller campaigns. As Amanda Marcotte quipped at Salon, making the analogy to a mob-style kickback, the message is: “Nice shop you got there, shame if something would happen to it.”
But I was curious as to whether this was a normal arrangement, so I called a Republican operative I know who agreed to discuss it off the record. “I have a very hard time seeing how this could be enforced,” this person began. First, if you are a former president of the United States, “You can’t own your own likeness and image,” which means you can’t charge people for it either. Furthermore, it will be difficult for the Republican National Committee or the Trump campaign to track every mailing, flyer and campaign ad sent out by hundreds of down ballot candidates.
And if it looks like the Trump people can enforce it? Then, candidates “are just going to drop the Trump name and image,” my source said. In my view, this is perilous, since not having a robust connection to state and local campaigns is one of the things that may have stood between Hillary Clinton and the presidency in 2016. In a tight race with candidates that are not generating enthusiasm, when voters come to the polls to support local and state candidates they know and care about, they link those people to the national ticket, and cast their presidential vote on a party line.
My source also pointed out that Republicans in safe seats are mostly raising money to give away anyway: as I understand it, this is the only reason anyone pays attention to Marjorie Taylor Greene at all — she is a monster fundraiser. Those candidates will redirect a portion of the money they normally give to House and Senate colleagues to Trump, something else that could also affect tight Senate, and particularly House races.
This is where the macro picture does not look good. Republicans in tight Senate races “are already way behind on fundraising,” my source said. “If candidates in contested races are also giving 5 percent to Trump, it will definitely hurt them.” In particular, it will hurt them if these funds come from so-called “house files,” lists of names not rented, but generated and owned by the candidate, which represent pure profit for a campaign. “He wants the money from that too,” my source said.
And here’s the thing: will the money Trump is demanding go to his campaign, or will it go to funding the platoons of lawyers trying to keep Trump solvent and out of jail? Or is there really any difference, since Trump is already spending Super PAC money that should be used on the campaign and for down ballot candidates, to pay his legal bill? As we know, the Former Guy has bled Save America leadership PAC for almost $60 million that represents media buys, organizers, canvassers and other campaign expenses. And the burn rate is already high. According to Jessica Piper at Politico, “Trump’s official campaign committee spent just over $3.7 million in March, with travel expenses, followed by payroll, occupying its biggest expenditure categories.”
But what is it being spent on? Rallies of committed Trump voters, not recruiting new voters. According to my source, the networks of campaign workers that ought to be emerging now to support a Trump presidency are not being organized and established. That costs money. “Trump’s not broke,” my source said, “but he has no campaign offices anywhere.” And the GOP in Michigan and Pennsylvania, two vital swing states, “are broke.” By contrast, “Biden already has a bunch of campaign offices up and running. This matters in close elections.”
In other words, what we may be seeing in the press coverage is a kind of demented Harold Hill candidacy, a fake Music Man running around the country selling a presidential campaign that doesn’t really exist. As we start to see President Biden’s numbers tick up, just remember: much of what happens in a successful presidential campaign is invisible, even in a media atmosphere that seems to make everything hyper visible.
