Week Three Dawns: What to Expect

Trump New York Trial Diary, Entry #11

Note: I wrote this yesterday morning and hit send just as Donald Trump was entering the courtroom. Apparently it did not send. I’m not sure why. I am publishing it unchanged from yesterday save to add a link to yesterday’s livestream to the bottom.

Good Morning:

Subway mosaic with police barricades. Penn Station.

We are six months out from the 2024 presidential election; the polling averages show for the former president with the narrowest of leads in the national polls; and today, we begin a third week of the man’s criminal trial in New York.

But let’s start with today’s #BeastOfTheDay, the hippopotamus, about which you may wish to learn some true facts:

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Trump Trial Diary, May 6, 2024

The latest dispatch by Anna Bower, Tyler McBrien and me from the courtroom is available here and covers the astonishing cross-examination of Keith Davidson and the testimony of Hope Hicks last week. It’s quite long. There was a lot to cover. It opens:

It’s a foggy, misty morning at 100 Centre St, as a gaggle of press line up to enter Justice Juan Merchan’s courtroom for Day 10 of Trump’s criminal trial on 34 felony counts for falsification of business records.

It’s also a quiet morning, with nary a protester in sight. Collect Pond Park, just opposite the courthouse, is totally empty.

A lone protester arrives, ringing a replica of the Liberty Bell and waving a wooden Eastern Orthodox cross aloft. The back of his shirt reads: “THE 3 GREATEST U.S.A. PRESIDENTS: GEORGE WASHINGTON, JOHN F. KENNEDY, DONALD TRUMP,” but it’s unclear whether he is here chiefly to protest the trial or chiefly to bless us all. He is a momentary spectacle, in any event, gone in the time it takes to compose a tweet.

To pass the time, a German reporter teaches his American counterpart how to say “hush money”—Schweigegeld—but laments that it sounds better in English.

“My god,” she replies with interest. “So how do you say pornstar?”

Pornostar. Or, the reporter thinks for a second, perhaps Sexfilm für Erwachsene, which directly translates to “sexfilm for adults.”

The language lessons don’t stop there. In the courtroom, while waiting for the proceedings to begin, a French reporter also translates key trial vocabulary: hush money is pots-de-vin, literally “pot of wine.” How very French, the American reporters all agree.

What is on tap this week? We don’t know, of course. The prosecution does not disclose its witness list or order in an attempt to prevent Trump from setting mobs upon the witnesses. But I think we can anticipate a few things with reasonable certainty.