NEW YORK—Forty-four years ago, Donald Trump, who made an appearance Monday in a New York criminal case, told a story about attending the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in 1964, when he was 18 years old. It was a horrible day. Trump was there with his father, Fred, the carpenter turned landlord who founded the Trump empire.
“The rain was coming down for hours while all these jerks were being introduced and praised,” Trump told the New York Times for a long profile piece . “But all I’m thinking about is that all these politicians who opposed the bridge are being applauded. Yet, in a corner, just standing there in the rain, is this man, this 85-year-old engineer who came from Sweden and designed this bridge, who poured his heart into it, and nobody even mentioned his name.”
“I realized then and there,” Trump said, “that if you let people treat you how they want, you’ll be made a fool. I realized then and there something I would never forget: I don’t want to be made anybody’s sucker.”
That Trump remembered this moment, years later, after a run of what seemed at the time like unqualified success in New York is telling. It reveals something immutable about the character of the man, something on brazen display Monday as he sought to push back another trial. For Donald Trump, there are and only ever will be two sides to any interaction: the player and the guy getting played. His only enduring life philosophy, after more than 50 years in the public eye, as a developer, a playboy, a politician and a fraud, is that he’s going to take you before you take him, no matter where that equation goes.
On Monday, Trump made his latest appearance in what has come to stand in for a presidential campaign this year. It was a potentially fraught day. He faced not only an in-person hearing in his criminal trial in New York state but also a deadline for the payment of a nearly half-billion-dollar bond in a civil case that went against him earlier this year.
Trump has effectively sewn up the Republican nomination for president. At this point, he isn’t doing any real political events. (There are zero rallies scheduled on his official campaign page.) Court is basically the only chance both the political and the criminal press get to see him these days. So it was no surprise that on Monday, despite the cold, well over a hundred journalists from all over the world were lined up across the street from the Manhattan Criminal Court well before 8 a.m. waiting for a chance to watch Trump appear.
The case before the court Monday is in a weird way both the most and the least concerning of Trump’s many legal entanglements. He is facing trial for allegedly falsifying documents related to a hush money payout during the 2016 campaign to a pornographic actress he still claims he never slept with. Compared to the others criminal charges he faces, in Florida and Washington and Georgia, the New York matter is relatively minor. The actual wrongdoing, compared with attempting to overthrow an election, is difficult to explain. And even if convicted, Trump isn’t likely to face jail time for what amounts to small-scale records fraud.
But the New York case is dangerous for Trump in another way. Perhaps because it relates to the 2016, not the 2020, election, it is by far the most likely of Trump’s criminal cases to actually go to a jury before the election in November. That is a big deal for Trump. Polls have consistently shown that a criminal conviction would make some voters less likely to support him. That probably explains why his lawyers have been going to such extreme, and on Monday increasingly humiliating, lengths to push the trial back.
Monday was supposed to have been the start of the trial proper. It was pushed back after Trump’s attorneys received a late dump of documents from federal prosecutors who had been investigating a separate but related case. Trump’s lawyers had argued in court filings that the late disclosure was not only improper but “unethical,” “desperate” and specifically geared toward interfering with the 2024 presidential vote.
It was almost immediately clear Monday that the judge hearing the case, Juan Merchan, had little time for that argument. Merchan spent most of the brief hearing admonishing, dismissing and occasionally interrupting Trump’s lead attorney Todd Blanche. He questioned Blanche’s interpretations of reality. He blasted his arguments. He all but accused of him deliberately trying to slow down the trial. “It’s odd that we’re even here and have taken this time,” he said at one point.
After a brief recess, Merchan delivered his ruling from the bench. He didn’t buy Blanche’s motion. He wasn’t pushing back the trial any longer. It is now set to begin on April 15.
For a different lawyer, representing a different client, Monday would have marked a painful defeat. But not for Blanche. Trump’s team got what IT wanted out of the disclosure mess. They bought another three weeks of delay.
It was a legal stunt. A normal person, a normal public figure, would have been embarrassed to have it called out. But Donald Trump doesn’t care. He just shrugs and moves on to the next stunt. In fact, his lawyers already have. Before the hearing adjourned, Blanche asked to deliver a new motion for delay, arguing there has been too much publicity to allow for a fair trial.
Trump’s superpower has always been his shamelessness. When he first started appearing in the New York press, in the 1970s, he told reporters he had graduated top of his class from Wharton business school. It was a lie. But when it came out, Trump didn’t care. He just shuffled on to the next claim. Somebody’s always got to be the sucker, after all. And if you fell for it, well, the sucker is you.
The question now is whether Trump can keep suckering the courts, and the public, all the way through to next November, whether, to put it another way, he can get away with it, all of it, again. Merchan, for one, seems determined to keep the New York criminal trial on track. But the other ruling Monday, in the civil fraud case, was much more favourable to Trump. An appeals court agreed to stay most of the verdict against him pending appeal and ruled that he would only have to put up $175 million (U.S.), a fraction of the original judgment, until that appeal was heard.
As for Trump, he isn’t counting on being in court again anytime soon. After the hearing ended, his motorcade headed south to 40 Wall St., one of several Trump buildings that might have been seized if he hadn’t received Monday’s reprieve in civil court. After a lengthy, often garbled address to the cameras (he promised, among other things, to bring “crime back to law and order”) Trump was asked if he would testify in the New York criminal case.
“I don’t know that you’re going to have a trial,” he said. “I think you’re going to get some court rulings.” And besides, he added, even if he does go to trial, even if he is convicted, that doesn’t mean he won’t win the presidency. “It could also make me more popular,” he said. “The people know it’s a scam.”
