What's Going on in There?

Power diminished, psyche unraveling

There are a lot of crucially important events unfolding across the country (Supreme Court decisions, chaos in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives) and the world (Ukraine, Sudan, Israel, and Palestine), so in some ways it seems perverse, once again, to focus so much attention on one man. The fact remains, however, that the trial taking place in Room 1530 in the Manhattan Criminal Court will have a massive and complicated impact on the future of this country. 

For the first time in American history, a former occupant of the White House is facing criminal charges. As David Corn of Mother Jones put it, “[Donald] keeps setting new Guinness Records in terms of unprecedented history.”

The reality is, the future of the country is, to a significant degree, tied to the future of Donald Trump.

Standard Operating Procedure

Before jury selection began, Judge Merchan took Donald through the Parker warning — standard operating procedure in a criminal trial:

“You have the right to be present during the trial and to assist your attorneys. Do you understand?” 

“Yes.”

 “If you disrupt the proceedings, you can be excluded from the courtroom and committed to jail based on your conduct, and the trial will continue on in your absence. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“If you do not show up, there will be an arrest. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

Per the judge’s instructions, Donald will be stuck in that New York City courtroom for at least four days a week and eight hours a day. He is not free to come and go as he pleases. He needs to ask for permission if he wants, for example, to attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court for the presidential immunity case (denied) or his son’s high school graduation (despite the fact that he didn’t attend the high school graduations of his four older children). The decision is pending, despite Donald’s claim that the judge has already ruled against him. 

No doubt Donald feels as though he’s being singled out for extraordinary punishment, but that’s because he has so rarely been in a situation in which he has no control over either the narrative or the proceedings. Because this is a criminal trial, he will have virtually no say about anything that happens inside that courtroom and, indeed, over anything that happens to him if he steps outside the lines that Judge Merchan draws.

Donald doesn’t handle it well when he feels like the walls are closing in on him. He freaks out — and acts out — when he feels thwarted because he so rarely ever has been. We’re looking at a very old and fairly complex psychology that goes back to his childhood. The crows finally coming home to roost when he’s in his late 70s is something that he’s not going to be able to manage. 

We’re going to be seeing Donald Trump in a unique context for which he is totally unprepared. At a rally or at a press conference, he controls the room. He is determining the narrative, and any gaps or ramblings can be put down to the fact that he’s riffing or being extemporaneous or doing improv. 

In the courtroom, however, Donald can’t speak out of turn — he will be subject to the judge’s rules. And a lot of people are going to see certain traits, like his thuggishness, his temper, his sense of grievance, that may play well to some in certain settings, but that in this setting will come across very differently. He will be seen to be rude, weak, and incapable of controlling himself when bound by the same rules to which the rest of us must conform. 

There’s a reason he tried to get this case delayed until the 11th hour. Even after one day, it was clear Donald wasn’t faring well. He’s experiencing serious psychological trauma. The narcissistic wound that he’s suffering right now is basically short-circuiting him.

We Deserve Cameras in the Courtroom 

It’s a travesty that there are no cameras or live audio feed in the courtroom. Thankfully there are several reporters in the courthouse able to live tweet, so we do get some sort of a play-by-play, but that doesn’t make up for not being able to see and hear what’s actually going on — from Donald’s demeanor, facial expressions, and body language to the jurors’ reactions, the tone of the counsel’s questions, and the judge’s rulings.

As was the case in his recent civil trial, Donald will make use of the media to give his spin in the courthouse hallway at every opportunity. The very first time he stepped up to the microphones yesterday morning, he lied constantly. In the two- to three-minute rant, he said one true thing. “Nothing like this has ever happened before.” Everything else was a lie. That is a pretty simple declarative statement, and it also underscores the fact that the media should not cover any of these statements.

Whether having cameras in the courtroom would help or hurt Donald is irrelevant, just as the political fallout from or people’s reactions to the verdict, one way or the other, are irrelevant. This is one of the most significant trials in American history. It is simply a matter of fairness to the American people. It benefits all of us to be able to see the wheels of justice turning — which by the way, we’ve been denied for a very, very long time.

For the sake of fairness and transparency, the rules around this issue need to change.

Fair Trials, Jury Tampering, and Suborning Perjury

What Donald doesn’t understand is that the American people have a lot of respect for the judicial process, and jurors take their jobs very seriously. That’s why people like Paul Manafort, even with Donald Trump supporters on the jury, was found guilty; that’s why a jury ruled against Donald in one of the E. Jean Carroll cases. They understand that they are not there to be fans or followers — they are there, as judges instruct them, to be finders of the facts. And if the facts aren’t with you, which Donald knows they're very often not, what do you do? You tell people to lie to get onto a jury to help you get a mistrial.

Finding the Limits of What Works

Donald Trump has gotten where he is in part because he’s always willing to push the envelope beyond where anybody else would dare. And 99.999% of the time, he gets away with it. So what does he do? He doubles down. He triples down. He quadruples down. He pushes the envelope some more. Nobody, nobody — and we should never become inured to the injustice of it — nobody has come up with a way to hold him accountable in a way that matters to him. 

There have to be ways to demonstrate to the American people that, when all is said and done, we’re finished with this two-tiered justice system, that we finally, at the end of the day, realize the consequences of allowing somebody like Donald Trump to continue to skate. Because look where we are: This is a man who used his position in the Oval Office to incite an insurrection against his own government and yet, he’s still allowed to run for president again. It has to stop.

To Testify or Not to Testify

 In the past, Donald has said he’d testify only to pull himself back from the brink because, on some level, he knows how disastrous it would be for him. But these are very different circumstances. On the one hand, Donald’s impulse control has deteriorated markedly over the course of the last couple of decades. This decline, coupled with his belief in his superior ability to bend things his way and the fact that everything is at stake in this trial may push him to do the one thing that would be absolutely devastating for him — testify in his own defense.

First of all, Donald is going to have to sit there and take it for weeks on end. This is not going to sit well with him. He’ll feel immense pressure to take back control especially given the fact he knows he did all of the things he’s alleged to have done. 

I think we’re going to see clues in Donald’s behavior as we go that may determine his state of mind vis-à-vis whether or not he ultimately does testify. It also depends, in part, on if his spinning the courtroom proceedings in his hallway rants is enough to release the pressure of feeling helpless. 

In the end, if he chooses not to testify, he’ll play the victim by claiming that it’s because the system is so corrupt, that it’s so unfair to him, that if he did testify, his words would be twisted and, in the end, it wouldn’t be fair. Ultimately, he’ll say, how could he possibly testify, because that would be to legitimize an inherently illegitimate process — that he himself, by the way, has been undermining for months already. 

There will be a fascinating tension between his impulse to assert himself and his sense of self-preservation, which I think is deteriorating as each day passes.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Criminal

The courthouse is a ten-minute walk from my building (might as well be on Mars as far as my possible attendance goes), but why is nobody else in Donald’s family there to support him?

For her part, while Melania thinks the trial is a “disgrace,” she also thinks it’s Donald’s problem, not hers. As far as I know, his children have not given their reasons.

But this just underscores what an isolated figure Donald Trump is. He surrounds himself with sycophants, he gives rallies that thousands attend, when he descends to the Mar-a-Lago dining room, club members give him a standing ovation. But he is, in the grand scheme of things, utterly alone.

I’m not trying to garner any sympathy for this man — he’s cruel and he’s done untold harm to the people in this country and to this country itself — but it’s yet one more way in which he made his own aberrant circumstances seem unremarkable. Because it is utterly bizarre that nobody outside of his legal team accompanies him. It says a lot about his inability to inspire loyalty even among those who should care about him the most. And perhaps more damning than their absence and what that says about him as a man and as a parent and as a husband is that even though he clearly has serious untreated psychological disorders, there is not one person in his family who is willing to do anything to get him help.  

All of Donald’s relationships are transactional, so if his wife and children think they will benefit more from getting him back into the White House, they’ll ignore the fact that that may not be the best thing for Donald.

Being in a courtroom day after day is extraordinarily draining for the criminal defendant, and to face it with no emotional support could be potentially debilitating. While it’s true that Donald won’t really be engaged in every step of the process, he will not be able to avoid hearing the horrible truths spoken about him, or the lack of respect with which they’re spoken.

He’s also going to be bored out of his mind. For him to be facing this completely alone — without family, without friends, to the extent he even has friends — is telling on so many different levels, and it's going to play into the kind of stressors — the lack of control, the disrespect, the boredom — that he’ll be experiencing unremittingly on an almost daily basis.

Perhaps even worse for him, Donald explicitly sent out a call to have his followers show up in force. As Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out, several million people who voted for Donald live within a one-hour drive of the courthouse. Still, nobody showed.

Interest is waning in part because his need for attention never ends, and that’s exhausting for anybody who’s not him. 

Dread and Inevitability

I think it is up to anybody watching this trial not to buy into Donald’s attempt to become a martyr. We’re already seeing, after two days, that this is taking a toll on him. Donald knows that this trial is a potential game-changer. Let’s not pretend otherwise. He said that he plans to continue to hold rallies in the evenings and on weekends. He can’t help himself — and after long days of being forced to stay silent in the courtroom, surrounded by people who treat him like any other criminal defendant, he’s going to need that fix. 

We cannot underestimate the depth of the narcissistic injury that Donald is currently suffering. We need to pay attention to what he’ll be doing outside the courtroom, because that will likely have an impact on how he behaves inside of it. 

Donald has never faced the constellation of horrors he’s currently experiencing, so there’s no way of knowing the impact it’s all going to have on him, but on some very deep level, he’s been dreading this for decades — and the time has finally come.