Donald J. Trump, accustomed to the White House and his Florida estate, will spend days in a dingy Manhattan courthouse.
Credit...Pool photo by Brendan McDermid

As Trial Looms, Trump Plays to a Jury of Millions

Donald J. Trump and his lawyers realize his chances in the courtroom are dicey. He intends to make whatever transpires a political triumph.

by · NY Times

The first criminal trial of Donald J. Trump will begin on Monday, and the 45th president thinks he can win — no matter what the jury decides. Mr. Trump will aim to spin any outcome to his benefit and, if convicted, to become the first felon to win the White House.

Manhattan prosecutors, who have accused Mr. Trump of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal, hold advantages that include a list of insider witnesses and a jury pool drawn from one of the country’s most liberal counties. Mr. Trump and some aides and lawyers privately concede that a jury is unlikely to outright acquit him, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

So Mr. Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee, is seeking to write his own reality, telling a story that he believes could pave his return to the White House. He has framed his failed efforts to delay the case as evidence he cannot receive a fair trial, casting himself as a political martyr under attack from the prosecution and the judge.

To pull off an acquittal, he is considering testifying to personally persuade jurors of his innocence.

It would be a rare and risky move for most defendants. But Mr. Trump is putting his own stamp on the role, attacking the district attorney who brought the case, Alvin L. Bragg, with all the power of his bully pulpit. That behavior and its aftershocks are expected to continue throughout a weekslong trial.

Mr. Trump, 77, is deploying the same tactics that made him the singular political figure of the last decade. Since announcing his first presidential candidacy, he has bulldozed through American life, flattening political and cultural norms as he goes. He stunned the world as the insurgent victor in the 2016 election, was twice impeached as president and pushed democracy to the brink as the incumbent who refused to concede his 2020 election loss.

Now, with jury selection starting on Monday, Mr. Trump will become the first former U.S. president to stand trial on criminal charges. Win or lose, he will be the first presidential candidate whose political fate, before being decided by millions of voters, will be shaped by 12 people in a jury box.

The 34 felonies Mr. Trump is facing, which could carry a four-year prison sentence, have struck a nerve with the former president. While Mr. Trump has spent years reveling in the glow of the White House and his sunny South Florida estate, the trial will be held in a dingy county courtroom. When the former president is there — he is required to be in court, but can ask to be excused — he will be transported back to the borough and tabloid atmosphere where he made his name.

He established himself as one of the loudest voices in a loud city, gossiping about his love affairs and broadcasting his political opinions. That bombastic style, and his time on “The Apprentice” television show, gave him an immediate following when he became a candidate in 2015. He repeatedly condemned Muslims, insulted a prominent female journalist and a reporter with a physical disability and glorified political violence by saying he would pay the legal fees of supporters who assaulted protesters at his rallies.

“He’s been able to create the age of Trump by becoming the fist smashing into America’s sacred institutions,” the historian Douglas Brinkley said.

He added that while many Democrats hoped the trial would put an end to that, “Trump understands media culture well enough to really believe that ‘as long as other people are talking about me, I win.’”

In the courtroom, however, it has been quite some time since Mr. Trump won a major victory. In this year’s first two months alone, he lost a pair of civil trials in spectacular fashion, leading to an $83 million defamation judgment and a $454 million fraud penalty. In both cases, he took the stand. Both times it went poorly.

The losses hit his wallet and his ego. But they never threatened his freedom, unlike his four criminal cases unfolding in cities up and down the East Coast.

Whether those cases could imperil or aid his presidential campaign is an open question. Of the four, which include charges that he mishandled classified documents and tried to subvert democracy, the sex scandal cover-up case in Manhattan is viewed within Mr. Trump’s campaign as the least damaging. A conviction in any case would not prevent him from taking office.

Still, the Manhattan prosecution presents distinctive threats: For now, it is the only case on track to conclude before Election Day, as Mr. Trump has managed to bog down the others in delays and appeals. And even if Mr. Trump wins back the White House, he could not pardon himself for the Manhattan charges, as he could in the two federal cases he’s facing.

The Manhattan case is also replete with mortifying personal details for Mr. Trump and his family: There’s the porn star who said she had sex with him, the former Trump fixer who paid her off and the tabloid publisher who helped him bury all manner of scurrilous stories.

To adapt his candidacy to the trial, he will essentially bring his presidential campaign to the courthouse. One person familiar with his preliminary plans described weekend events held in strategically important states near New York, including Pennsylvania, where he is holding a rally this weekend. He will conduct radio and television interviews from Trump Tower, where he is expected to stay during the trial, which will be in session every weekday except Wednesday.

Mr. Trump and the Republican Party have made the trial a staple of his campaign fund-raising. One email sent on Friday had the subject line “72 hours until all hell breaks loose!” — ominous language evocative of his social media posts before a pro-Trump mob swarmed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Mr. Trump has not since summoned a similar uprising. But the spectacle of the trial is expected to spill into the streets of Lower Manhattan, where protesters, both those who love and defend Mr. Trump and those who hate and want him convicted, will gather behind police barricades as traffic grinds to a halt.

Stephen K. Bannon, the right-wing media host who is Mr. Trump’s former White House chief strategist, will have episodes of his “War Room” show recorded outside the courthouse. The area will be crawling with police officers and the U.S. Secret Service, and, for a few weeks, the general disruption will alter the flow of life on the city’s downtown streets.

The atmosphere will be less raucous and more tense inside the courtroom, under the watchful eye of the presiding trial judge, Juan M. Merchan, who is known for his strict control of proceedings. There, while the Secret Service and much of the press corps remain glued to Mr. Trump’s every move, prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office will tell the story that they hope will lead the jury to convict Mr. Trump.

Mr. Bragg, the district attorney who has bet his career on the case’s outcome, argues that the payment was Mr. Trump’s original act of election interference. His prosecutors will tell jurors that during the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump repeatedly tried to kill damaging stories, regardless of whether they were true, and coordinated hush-money payments to three different people who were hawking embarrassing information.

The 34 felony charges of falsifying business records, though, directly relate to only one of those episodes, involving the porn star Stormy Daniels, who said she and Mr. Trump had sex in 2006. When Ms. Daniels looked to sell her story a decade later, Mr. Trump sought to keep it under wraps.

At Mr. Trump’s direction, prosecutors will say, the former fixer, Michael D. Cohen, paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet. After Mr. Trump won the election, the new president reimbursed Mr. Cohen, and his company disguised the purpose of the payments in corporate records, stating they were for a “legal expense.”

In response, Mr. Trump has falsely claimed that Mr. Bragg is following orders from President Biden to prosecute him. He has assailed Mr. Bragg, who is Black and a Democrat, as a “racist” and sought to change the conversation by blaming the district attorney for violent crime in New York City — even though murders and shootings have gone down during Mr. Bragg’s tenure.

At Mr. Bragg’s request, Justice Merchan recently imposed a gag order on Mr. Trump, barring him from attacking witnesses, prosecutors and jurors. After Mr. Trump took aim at Justice Merchan’s daughter, a Democratic political consultant, the judge expanded the gag order to include his own family.

Mr. Trump has pressed the judge to step aside, citing his daughter’s career. Justice Merchan has already rejected one such request, noting that a judicial ethics panel concluded last year that he had no real conflict.

The former president has also taken aim at some of Mr. Bragg’s key witnesses, hurling threats and social media screeds in their direction. Mr. Cohen, in particular, has felt the brunt of the attacks from Mr. Trump, who has sued him, called him a “rat” and referred to him as “death.” Their confrontation in the courtroom, where Mr. Cohen will be the star witness, is expected to be the climactic moment of the trial.

But if Mr. Trump were to take the stand, Mr. Cohen would be quickly overshadowed. The former president is likely to delay a final decision until he knows whether the judge will restrict prosecutors’ efforts to cross-examine him, and until he can assess the performance of his former fixer.

The jurors will be assessing Mr. Cohen, too. If even one does not believe his testimony, the trial could end with a hung jury, a clear victory for the former president. Todd Blanche, the lawyer leading the case, has told Mr. Trump in recent weeks that he can win the trial, people with knowledge of the discussion said.

The case could be won or lost during jury selection, in the next two weeks. The expectation is that many potential jurors will be Manhattan Democrats with animus for Mr. Trump. The former president’s lawyers are hoping to spot sympathizers and will focus on younger Black men and white working-class men.

But Mr. Trump may struggle even with sympathetic jurors if he chooses to testify. At the civil fraud trial, the judge — who decided that case instead of a jury — was not impressed.

He “rarely responded to the questions asked, and he frequently interjected long, irrelevant speeches,” the judge wrote in his decision, adding, “His refusal to answer the questions directly, or in some cases, at all, severely compromised his credibility.”

Our Coverage of the Trump Hush-Money Case

The Manhattan district attorney has filed charges against former President Donald Trump over a hush-money payment to a porn star on the eve of the 2016 election.