"Some People Never Go Crazy"

Trump New York Trial Diary, Entry #9

Good Morning:

Shot last night from Battery Park

some people never go crazy.
what truly horrible lives
they must lead.

— “Some People,” Charles Bukowski

Here’s Tuesday’s livestream trial dispatch with Tyler McBrien and Anna Bower. The dispatch had technical problems so is available in audio form only:

Here’s yesterday’s Trump Trials & Tribulations, with Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff:

Here’s Anna and my written dispatch from yesterday, which covers Tuesday’s proceedings. It opens:

As Donald Trump enters the room—notwithstanding his red tie, which signals Trumpian normalcy insofar as that is a thing—it becomes clear that today is a different sort of day. His entourage is bigger. 

Most visibly, today marks the first day that a member of Trump's family has appeared alongside him in court: Eric Trump. The younger Trump is sitting alongside an older woman named Susie Wiles, who has been hailed as Trump’s “most important adviser” and “de facto campaign manager.” Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who narrowly escaped impeachment and remains under indictment for securities fraud, is also here. 

It is 9:32 am, and Justice Juan Merchan sweeps into the courtroom, resplendent in his robes, the fluorescent light glinting off of his silver cap of hair, judicial authority radiating from his very being. 

And here is the #BeastOfTheDay, an eagle who likes to hold hands:

explainingtheuniverse

A post shared by @explainingtheuniverse

---

Trump Trial Diary, May 2, 2024

The first time you stare at the back of Donald Trump’s head for hours upon hours at a time, the experience can be overwhelming. It’s not, of course, that there’s anything special about Trump’s head, other than the whole orange thing. It’s that it’s the head of Donald J. Trump, former and perhaps future president of the United States, sitting against his will in a courtroom in the first criminal trial in American history against a former president.

It is that this most narcissistic of heads has to be here in this courtroom, whereas I can get up and leave any time. It is that this head—along with the exceedingly grumpy countenance it bears—has to listen and not interrupt while people say bad things about it, hold it in contempt of court, issue orders that actually bind it—and sometimes gag it.

It is that while this head may someday soon, very soon, menace us all again, it is—for now and in this courtroom, at least—just a gloweringly powerless presence, resentful and angry looking but unable to control the flow of events, unable to ignore those events either, subject to the permission of some lesser head’s will for even basic aspects of being Donald Trump’s head.