NEW YORK — In the end, after everything, he kept his mouth closed. He shocked us with his silence, with the words he didn’t say.
Donald Trump, the former and possibly future president of the United States, will not testify in his own criminal trial. “The defence rests,” his lawyer, Emil Bove, said Tuesday morning, with Trump still sitting next to him, where he has been for the past six weeks, planted at the defence table, his eyes mostly closed.
With those three words, Bove brought an end to the main business of a trial stuffed with side shows, gag orders, courthouse binoculars and long debates over when a defendant can be said to be sleeping as opposed to just resting his eyes.
It marked a subdued close to a proceeding that has been explosive at times, boring at others and often just kind of gross. It featured betrayal, reluctant sex, secret payoffs and a turncoat tabloid king with a Canadian connection — David Pecker, the former National Enquirer chief who served for years on the board of Postmedia, Canada’s largest newspaper chain.
Bove’s brief statement also set the stage for a verdict, which may come as soon as next week, that could upend the U.S. presidential campaign, send Trump to prison, or just sink like a slimy stone in a fetid pond, disappearing like so many Trump scandals of the past.
It is another defining moment in an undefinable era, one that has managed over time to make the unprecedent seem almost mundane.
On Tuesday morning, crowds were gathered in a park across the street from the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, hoping to snag one of the few public seats available inside during each day of the trial. Those near the front were mostly hired guns, according to a police officer managing the lines. A broker was paying them to stay overnight, so he could then sell their spots to the highest bidders in the morning.
(The broker, the officer said, had been a constant pain during the trial, double-selling spots, underpaying his sleepers and generally making life harder for the officers tasked with keeping order outside the court.)
A handful of Trump supporters were set up on the other side of the park, occasionally sparring with any anti-Trumpers who happened to walk by. “America’s a racist country!” one man in a Puerto Rico sweater yelled at a group. “So why are you here?! So leave! So leave! So leave!” one of the Trumpers replied.
Inside the courtroom, the mood was still sharp after an explosive Monday when the trial judge, Juan Merchan, had cleared the room over the angry objections of the gathered press. It was an extraordinary moment, one reporters compared the next morning among themselves to a parent losing control with a four-year-old.
Over the past several months, Merchan has often had the air of a dad just barely holding on. On Monday, he appeared, ever so briefly, to let go, clearing the courtroom after angrily accusing a defence witness of “staring (him) down.”
Republican lawyer Robert Costello, a longtime friend of Rudy Giuliani’s best known for his involvement in the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, had been openly scoffing at Merchan’s decisions while in the witness box, calling one “ridiculous.” Merchan warned him about decorum— “You don’t give me side eye,” he said. “You don’t roll your eyes” — then threatened to strike his entire testimony from the record.
Ten minutes later, it was all over. The trial went on. The atmosphere in the court was like that in the kitchen after Mom and Dad have a big fight; everyone was just pretending that everything was fine.
The Costello/Merchan blow-up was only the latest in a trial that has featured arguments over how explicit Stormy Daniels could get describing what she claimed was a sexual encounter with Donald Trump (not very) and whether Trump’s lawyers could question his former attorney, Michael Cohen, on whether he called one of them a “crying little s—-”. (He did, but Merchan struck the question down as not relevant).
As is often the case with Trump, the pure volume of weirdness has had a deadening effect as the weeks have gone on. By midway through the trial, reporters were barely mentioning anymore that Trump spent most of every day in court with his eyes closed. (That does not appear to be an exaggeration. The Star used binoculars to study Trump’s face dozens of times Monday. His eyes were closed well over 90 per cent of the time.)
On Tuesday, Trump was joined in court by, among others, ‘80s comedian Joe Piscopo and Sebastian Gorka, a disgraced former national security official who arrived carrying a novelty steel briefcase embossed with the presidential seal. That got a chuckle from the crowd but not much more.
All the details of the trial had begun to blend into a kind of slurry. It still looked grotesque on the whole. But none of the individual parts could stand out in the mush.
Still, as late as Tuesday morning it remained possible Trump would testify in his own defence. He had spent weeks complaining about a gag order that barred him from speaking publicly about witnesses, members of the court staff or their families during the trial.
“We know he wants to testify. He’s willing. He’s able — nothing to hide,” one of his civil attorneys said Monday outside the court. But when given the opportunity to finally offer his side, under oath, Trump balked. His defence rested without calling him to the stand.
The jury will begin deliberation, likely next week, about the conspiracy Trump is alleged to have led to silence a sex worker on the brink of the 2016 election, and the business records he allegedly falsified in an effort to cover it up. Trump has denied all the charges.
Merchan dismissed the jurors Tuesday morning, minutes after Bove spoke. He heard arguments Tuesday afternoon about the charge he will give the jury next week after both sides offer their closing statements.
For the prosecution, it’s a simple story: Trump ordered Cohen to pay Daniels $130,000 to keep silent about their alleged encounter then covered it up, illegally. The evidence, they will say, is overwhelming.
For the defence, it is equally simple. Cohen is a serial liar, they will say. Nothing he says can be trusted. And without his testimony there is zero evidence Trump approved the payoff, let alone did anything to cover it up.
As of next week, it will be up to the jury to decide. They will have six weeks of testimony to lean on, but they won’t have the words of Trump himself. For perhaps the first time in his 50 years in the public eye, Trump decided to keep his mouth shut, along with his eyes.
On Tuesday afternoon, as the lawyers argued about language and the law, Trump sat slumped in his seat. He wore a blue suit with a white shirt and a bright yellow tie. His lips were slightly parted. His eyes were closed. His chin hung loosely over his chest. At one point, he swiped lazily at his cheek as if he was swatting an invisible fly.
