Donald Trump: Classic or Dud?

also important to remember they explicitly tell the jury they are not there to decide if the defendant committed a crime, they're there to decide if he did X, Y, and Z, which are often very specific things, things which I assume the prosecution has a ton of evidence for. so whoever wants to hold this up is going to have to look like an insane person in front of a group of people who will have been their only real contacts for 6 weeks

I’d say the fact that Trump did not have the wherewithal to be able to set up shell corps and off shore accounts to handle such slush funds and make such payments hard to track is further proof he is a pretty shitty evil business genius.

When the judge tells your lawyer, "You're losing all credibility with the court," that's a good thing, right?

NYT says it's bad for Biden

lol

Judge Merchan is clearly not buying that this is passive, he asks, “How does it get there, how does it get on to your client’s Truth Social account?”

Trump lawyer Todd Blanche replies: There’s a group of folks that work with President Trump that when they see articles they believe President Trump’s audience should read.

Blanche added that “there’s a mechanism” through which they get posted.

Merchan asked of re-posting: What is the mechanism?

Blanche said: I believe you click on it.

seems to be a nonzero chance his lawyers are trying to get him thrown in jail because it would be bad for Biden

idk it's very weird seeing Trump actually being in a situation where he can't just lie about everything all the time

also hilarious that the trial is barely underway and the judge is already completely fed up with them

When Cohen was Trump's henchman dealing with a news story about an allegation Trump raped a previous wife, he said "there is no such thing as marital rape" in between leaving threatening messages on journo's phone. Really nice, progressive guy.

any other president would have the best lawyers in the world i imagine. trump takes what he can get.

yeah he's a real piece of shit and I think the fact that Trump needed a guy like that to be his fixer doesn't reflect very well on his "I didn't do any crimes" stance

https://i.imgur.com/PGefR9r.png

lmao he's posting while the judge is deciding whether or not to throw him in jail for posting

he may be one of the worst humans in history but he will almost certainly go down as one of the all-time great posters

Per the hallway pool, Donald Trump was not chatty as he returned to court following a break, ignoring questions such as “Are you going to keep Truthing?”, “How are your lawyers doing?” and “Does your lawyer have any credibility?”

SHOCKER: legal people interested in legal things talk to each other!

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/23/anti-trump-legal-pundits-calls-00153300

pretty tough decision for Merchan knowing that jailing an ex-president would be a total circus but also knowing that literally anyone else in the country would've gotten the clink well before this point

Prosecutors said themselves they weren't interested in jailing at this point. Which, smart.

Build the wall

just let him post but tell him that every insult will add 50 million to his fine

Gotta say all the Pecker testimony has kinda been great/hilarious, just basically going on about how he and Trump were basically working hand-in-glove on a lot of fronts.

“When he was in a good mood, he’d laugh and slap me on the back, call me ‘the Big P’l

merchan should go out of his way to keep trump out of jail and safe by putting him in a secured yurt in a nearby park.

all that Pecker stuff seems very illegal

“very legal & very cool” - all he has to do is say it and it becomes so

Per NYT:

Trump, speaking in the hallway outside the courtroom, says he thinks the gag order is unconstitutional. He’s holding a stack of printed articles that he says he’s not sure he’s allowed to share because of the gag order, which only pertains to a limited set of issues. While in the middle of talking to reporters, he says, “I’d love to talk to you people, I’d love to say anything that’s on my mind, but I’m restricted.”

I look forward to him just wandering around wanting people to read his papers.

https://i.imgur.com/TVv0j1n.png

this kinda blows up Trump's "Michael Cohen just does all this stuff on his own" defense

If this basic approach is repeated for the McDougall and Daniels stories as well then yeah. (Meaning, Pecker talking with Trump about it directly.)

“I’d love to talk to you people, I’d love to say anything that’s on my mind, but I’m restricted.”

Amazing! It would appear that Trump is convinced that Mechan really would jail him for contempt if he oversteps his gag order and all the speculation that he wants to go to jail in order to juice his campaign contributions is groundless. He is an inveterate brinksman, but it seems he always pulls back when he senses he might go over the brink and... suffer consequences!

Is there any jeopardy for pecker in this? was he breaking the law too, or just trump & cohen?

Not illegal to spike a story. I guess someone could argue there was blackmail going on, but Trump hasn’t said and I don’t even know what the legalities of that are anyway.

I think it might've been illegal to do what he was doing as an unreported campaign contribution, plus the Ted Cruz stuff sure sounds like libel. but Pecker does have immunity in this case so it doesn't really matter.

He is an inveterate brinksman, but it seems he always pulls back when he senses he might go over the brink and... suffer consequences!

its more likely that he just has nothing to say. slandering the judge and jury is all he's got.

he's allowed to slander the judge, but not the jury or witnesses. anyway, it looks to me that the gag order is cramping his style and the fact that Mechan quickly reprimanded him from the bench for muttering in court got his attention.

I hope he saw this and was pissed off:

A day after Trump issued a call for more supporters to gather outside the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, the number reached its nadir. The number of identifiable Trump fans across the street in Collect Pond Park on Tuesday sank to the mid-single digits, after hovering at about a dozen for a week.

Also, a little more about that dump truck:

Trump continues to receive favorable treatment from the New York City Police Department. For a week, a large N.Y.P.D. dump truck has parked in the intersection of Hogan Place and Centre Street, with a uniformed driver sitting inside. Minutes before Trump's arrival each morning, the dump truck has pulled a half-car length forward, blocking news photographers’ views of him entering the side door of the courthouse. And this afternoon, like those before it, the driver did the same maneuver for Trump’s 2:37 p.m. departure.

xp that explains this among earlier comments

The former president spoke abut the pro-Palestinian demonstrations in several US universities, describing them as a “disgrace to our country” and “all Biden’s fault”.

He said people were wanting to “protest peacefully” at the Manhattan court but “we have more police presence here than anyone’s ever seen … you can’t get near this courthouse”, meanwhile “you have nobody up in a college, where you have very radical people wanting to rip the colleges down, the universities down.”

http://media.oregonlive.com/cycleoregon/photo/9993058-large.jpg

Must be some mad strong protestors then

lmao "All Biden's fault" yeah man Biden's really been great with Palestine

"sank to the mid-single digits"

feel like they cd probably have told us which of these digits it sank to

Watters: Trump needs exercise. He’s usually golfing and you’re going to put a man who’s almost 80 sitting in a room like this on his butt for all that time? It’s not healthy. He needs sunlight. He needs activity. It’s really cruel and unusual punishment pic.twitter.com/xT1RKZyIgc

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 22, 2024

what the fuck kind of argument is this. like even ignoring the fact that Trump famously doesn't believe in exercise remember this is the guy they want to be the next president. someone for whom sitting for 8 hours is somehow "cruel and unusual punishment". imagine if he had an actual job!!

🎻

put him on a treadmill in the courtroom

"Let's do court outside today!"

all the same, a motorized desk and SAD light for him would be so funny

Trump continues to receive favorable treatment from the New York City Police Department.

Of course.

https://i.imgur.com/pxMDUhT.png

Staten Island
Rockaway
Long Beach
South Williamsburg
Bensonhurst

that is fascinating

Man, a friend of mine moved down to Rockaway during Covid and while it was cool to wander through the dunes and shit, I have never seen more Nazi (aka thin blue line) flags in one place in my entire life. Fuckin cop-humping bastardville.

orthodox jews more like conservative haha

The NYPD needs to be disbanded and its members sent to reeducation camps to be de-Nazified