The New Yorker:

The most striking aspect of the former President’s hush-money trial so far has been that, for the first time in a decade, Trump is struggling to command attention.

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

No TV cameras are allowed in Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, and so the dispatches from Donald Trump’s hush-money trial have arrived mostly via text. The human arrangement on display, in which a man in his late seventies is forced to reckon not with his alleged major political crimes (those cases will be brought at later dates, in other jurisdictions) but with more tawdry matters, has proved delicious for the journalists in the room. Some have taken a vintage reporter’s hyper-observational approach: Jonathan Alter noted in the Times that although Trump normally wears a red tie, “for the last four days in court he’s gone with a blue one.” Others waxed more poetic: Olivia Nuzzi, of New York, wrote, “Trump is tilting his head dramatically and making trout-like movements with his mouth.”

All eyes, as usual, were on the defendant. Would Trump make a scene, would he go through with his pledge to testify, would he say something truly wild? Not yet. (Granted, there’s another four weeks to go.) In the corridors, he complained to reporters about the chilly courthouse; listening to testimony, he glazed over. Trump “appeared to nod off a few times,” Maggie Haberman, of the Times, reported, with his “mouth going slack and his head drooping onto his chest.” The minor drama of the pretrial motions orbited around whether the ex-President, under threat of being held in contempt, would stop saying nasty things on social media about the jurors, the witnesses, and family members of the judge and the prosecutors. Perhaps in anticipation that he won’t, the Secret Service is reportedly making contingency plans: according to protocol, if Trump has to spend a few nights in jail, at least one protective escort will join him.

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