NEW YORK – “Sir, please sit down.”
donald trump stood up to leave Manhattan criminal court as Judge Juan M. Merchan wrapped up a discussion about scheduling on Tuesday.
But the judge had not yet closed the courtroom or left the courtroom. Trump, the 45th president of the United States and owner of his own company, is used to setting his own pace. Still, when Merchan warned him to sit down again, the former president did so without saying a word.
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The moment highlighted a central reality for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. During the next six weeks, a man who values control and tries to shape environments and outcomes according to his will will have very little control.
All about the circumstances in which the former president arrives in court every day to be a defendant in the People v. Donald J. Trump, at 100 Center St., is repulsive to him. The environment trapped in amber that evokes New York City’s more crime-ridden past. The lack of control. Details of a case in which he is accused of falsifying business records to hide a payoff to a porn star to prevent her allegations of an affair with him from emerging in the 2016 election.
Of the four criminal cases Trump faces, this is the most deeply personal. And those close to him are blunt when they privately discuss his reaction: He looks around every day and can’t believe he needs to be there.
Asked about the former president’s aversion to the case, a campaign spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, said Trump “has proven he will remain defiant” and called the case a “political war.”
He sits in a decrepit courtroom that, during the second half of last week, was so cold that his lead lawyer respectfully complained to the judge about it. Trump hugged his arms to his chest and told an aide, “It’s freezing.”
During the first few minutes of each day, during jury selection, a small group of photographers were led to Part 59 on the 15th floor of the courthouse. Trump, obsessed with being seen as strong and in general, prepared for them to run in front of him, adjusting his jacket and contorting his face into a jutting scowl. But by the end of the day on Friday, Trump looked haggard and rumpled, with an off-center gait and blank eyes.
Trump often seemed to fade into the background in a bright, wood-paneled room with harsh neon lighting and a perpetual smell of sour breath and coffee wafting throughout.
His face was visible to dozens of reporters watching in a crowded room on a large monitor with a closed-circuit camera pointed at the defense table. He whispered to his lawyer and nudged him to get his attention, flipped through wads of paper and, at least twice, appeared to doze off during the morning session. (His aides have publicly denied that he was dozing.) Dozing is something that occasionally happens to a lot of people in court cases, including jurors, but it conveys to Trump the kind of public vulnerability that he has strenuously tried to avoid.
Trials are by nature mundane, with rigid routines and long periods of inactivity. Trump has always avoided this type of officialdom, whether avoiding rigid schedules or anyone else’s practices or structures, from his early 20s to his time in the Oval Office.
The mundanity of the court has practically swallowed Trump, who for decades sought to project an image of greatness, which he built from a reality TV studio to the White House.
When the first panel of 96 potential jurors were brought into the room Monday afternoon, Trump appeared to disappear among them as they sat in the jury box and along the rows in the courthouse courtyard. The judge made it clear that jurors’ time is his highest priority, even when it comes at the former president’s expense.
Trump’s advisors or communications advisors who provide him with a moral boost have been away. Natalie Harp, a former host for the right-wing news network OAN who for years carried a portable printer to provide Trump with a steady stream of uplifting articles or social media posts about him, is there. But she and others were in the second row behind the defense table, or several rows back in the courtroom, unable to speak to Trump during the proceedings.
It’s hard to remember any other time when Trump had to sit and listen to insults without taking to social media or a press conference to fire back. And it’s equally difficult to remember any other time when he was forced to be bored for so long.
Those close to him are anxious about how he will deal with having so little to do as he sits there for weeks on end, with just a few days of testimony expected to be meaningful. It’s been decades since he spent so much time in the immediate vicinity of someone who isn’t part of his family, his team or his crowd of admirers.
Over the next six weeks, Trump will have to endure more, including listening to prosecutors ask witnesses uncomfortable questions about his personal life in open court. On Tuesday, he faces a hearing to determine whether the judge agrees with prosecutors that he has repeatedly violated the order prohibiting him from publicly criticizing witnesses and others.
Most of the time, Trump was forced to sit at the table, unable to use his cell phone, and listen to prosecutors describe him as a criminal, while jurors were asked their opinion of him. Some of these opinions were negative, and one potential juror was forced to read aloud his old social media posts calling him a sociopath and an egomaniac. The only times he smiled was when potential jurors mentioned works of his that they liked.
The highly telegraphed plan was for Trump to behave like a candidate despite the trial, using the entire event as a backdrop to his demands for an armed judicial system.
But last week in New York, Trump’s only political event was a stop at an Upper Manhattan bodega to highlight the neighborhood’s crime rates. The appearance seemed to bring him to life, but it also seemed more like a stop a mayoral candidate would make than a would-be presidential candidate. Some advisers are aware that Trump appears diminished and are pushing for more — and bigger — events around the New York area.
Many in Trump’s wider orbit are pessimistic about the case ending in a hung jury or a mistrial, and consider a full acquittal to be virtually impossible. They are preparing for him to be convicted, not because they concede the legal grounds, but because they think the jurors in Manhattan’s overwhelmingly Democratic majority will be against the polarizing former president.
But the feeling shared by many of his advisers is that the trial could harm him as much as a guilty verdict. The process, they believe, is its own punishment.
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