(Photo by Brendan McDermid-Pool/Getty Images)
Donald Trump is full of shit. Again.
Yesterday, the former president toddled out of the courtroom, fresh from his afternoon nap, and insisted that he wouldn’t be permitted to testify in his own defense because of the pending gag order which bars him from extrajudicial statements attacking witnesses and jurors.
“I’m not allowed to testify, I’m under a gag order. I guess?” he said, turning to his lawyer Todd Blanche for confirmation.
Blanche, the consummate yes man, nodded his agreement, as Trump promised that his team would be appealing the “unconstitutional” gag order.
The Trump campaign dutifully spammed out an email with the subject line “They’d cut my tongue out if they could,” seemingly suggesting that the former president had already been convicted.
Here on Planet Earth, he’s already appealed the gag order. The First Judicial Department refused to grant him emergency relief, and so the order will remain in place for the foreseeable future.
Trump is also confused about the relationship between the court’s ruling and his right to testify. To wit, there is absolutely zero relationship, and to imply otherwise is completely false. Perhaps Trump’s misunderstanding derives from his last two cases, where he was barred from using the courtroom as a forum to air lies and attacks on the prosecutors.
In the second E. Jean Carroll defamation trial, Judge Lewis Kaplan refused to allow Trump to get on the witness stand and deny that he’d sexually assaulted the plaintiff, since that was a fact already determined by the first jury. And in his civil fraud case, Justice Engoron ordered him not to attack the prosecutors in open court — and then he did it anyway.
Trump has consistently maintained that he’s going to testify in his criminal case, answering questions under oath about his sexual history with Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, the hush money payment in the lead up to the 2016 election, and the checks which he himself signed to Cohen. The court has also ruled that prosecutors can impeach him by asking about the verdicts in the civil fraud case and the E. Jean Carroll trial. And, not for nothing, but Trump doesn’t perform well under questioning — this is a guy who volunteered sua sponte that he wouldn’t want to have sex with the attorney deposing him.
But Trump, who literally has a woman follow him around with a portable printer spitting out hot takes from Jonathan Turley, Alan Dershowitz, Greg Jarrett, and Andrew McCarthy — all the best legal minds! — seems to genuinely believe that the prosecutors have no case.
Possessed of a boundless confidence in his own manly magnetism, he blames his lawyer Joe Tacopina for keeping him off the stand during the first E. Jean Carroll trial. So it seems pretty clear (at least to me) that he really does intend to take the stand in his own defense.
This morning, Trump seems to have gotten his facts straight … or straighter anyway.
“The gag order is not for testifying. The gag order stops me from talking about people and responding when they say things about me,” he told reporters camped out in the hall outside the trial.
Moments later, Justice Juan Merchan explained to the defendant (and his counsel) that an order regulating extrajudicial statements has nothing to do with testimony, because “extrajudicial” means “outside the courtroom.”
“The order restricting extrajudicial statements does not prevent you from testifying in any way,” the judge remonstrated.
Meanwhile, Trump would like you all to know that he was not napping in court.
Say that under oath …
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.
