Justice Juan Merchan held Donald Trump in criminal contempt this week in the Stormy Daniels hush money trial for violating the court order prohibiting Trump from attacking witnesses. Merchan fined him $9,000 and threatened “an incarceratory punishment” if Trump continues his “willful violations of ... lawful orders.”
Trump responded, well, contemptuously, calling the judge “Rigged” and “Crooked.”
But if Trump campaign advisers were to undertake a sober analysis of the gag order’s effects, they might ask Merchan to expand it further — in fact, they might request a total gag order. The more Trump talks these days, the worse it is for him.
Campaigning in Wisconsin on Wednesday afternoon (he had the day off from court), Trump had another one of his frequent episodes of word garbling. Reading from a teleprompter, he tried to say “infrastructure” but it came out as “infrastruckershurpar.” In what might have been an attempt to speak Yiddish, he said President Biden’s latest plan to forgive student debt is “even more be-cocked” than the last one. He twice referred to a vegan restaurant as “vagan” and seemed to mix up gross domestic product with Grand Old Party: “The economy is crashing, with the GOP growth plunging by more than 50 percent.” (Trump had similarly announced last week that the stock market, within a few percentage points of its all-time high, “is, in a sense, crashing.”)
At a rally at an airfield in Michigan on Wednesday evening, Trump seemed startled — by an airplane. “I thought that was China!” he said, after looking around for the source of the jet noise. Trump again struggled with his teleprompter, at one point walking over to adjust it. “These teleprompters are just gonzo, folks,” he reported. Even with the prompter, he stumbled over his usual closing line: “Under our leadership, the forgotten man and woman will be forgotten no longer. And it wasn’t forgotten. Man and woman. Four years ago, was not forgotten.”
What was forgotten was good taste. In Wisconsin, he had fun with whether it was acceptable to call Chris Christie a “fat pig.” In Michigan, he applauded one of his warm-up acts who had delivered a vulgar sexual slur against the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer.
Inside the courtroom, Trump isn’t allowed to talk, leaving him to rant from behind metal barricades before and after proceedings. His primary concern? The temperature in the courtroom.
“I’m going to sit in a freezing cold icebox for eight hours, nine hours,” he told reporters as his trial resumed on Tuesday morning. Sixty-two seconds later, he told reporters the same story again: “I’m going to go into the icebox now and sit for about eight hours or nine hours.”
He has been repeating himself on this for weeks. “I’m sitting here from morning until night in that freezing room — freezing,” he reported on April 18.
And on April 23: “They’re keeping me in a courtroom that’s freezing, by the way.”
And on April 26: “We have another day in court, a freezing courthouse.”
Those in the courtroom reported that it was cold during the first week, though temperatures are now in the comfortable range, if not too warm. But Kvetchy McKvetchalot thinks it’s part of a conspiracy against him, and not, as the judge explained when the former president’s lawyers complained, a quirk of the old building’s ventilation system.
“It’s very cold in here — on purpose, I believe,” Trump said — yet more evidence, he asserted, of a “rigged trial.”
It isn’t just in the courthouse, however. Trump even gets cold at home — in Florida. A transcript of an April 12 interview with Time magazine, published this week, includes Trump’s dissatisfaction with the temperature at his Mar-a-Lago compound: “[Asks an aide to turn down the air conditioner.]”
Why would it be that Trump, a snowbird who recently moved full time to Florida from New York, is so cold all the time? An article from Today’s Caregiver magazine titled “Why are Seniors Always So Cold?” provides a possible explanation: “As we age, our bodies become sensitive to cold temperatures. This is because of a decrease in the metabolic rate. Our aging bodies are not capable of generating enough heat to help maintain the normal temperature of 98.6 degrees.” It can happen because old folks lose subcutaneous fat, or from taking blood-pressure medication.
I mention this not to make fun of Trump because he’s old. I, myself, am an old person in training (and I’m doing quite well at it!). But Trump is running on the charge that Joe Biden, 3½ years Trump’s senior, is too old to be president. “Where’s SLEEPY JOE?” Trump asked on his social media site Wednesday morning. “He’s SLEEPING, that’s where!!!” (Biden, at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner last weekend, acknowledged that “yes, age is an issue. I’m a grown man running against a 6-year-old.”)
It has also been shown that sleep deprivation causes people to feel cold — and that fits well with another symptom Trump has been exhibiting in the courtroom. “Daytime napping is frequently seen in older adults,” researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of California at San Francisco report, and “longer and more frequent daytime naps were associated with higher risk of Alzheimer’s dementia.” Excessive napping “was correlated with worse cognition a year later.”
This might be relevant, because, as has been widely reported, Trump seems to have been napping his way through his hush money trial. From the courtroom, reporters have been sending so many dispatches recording Trump’s frequent visits to the land of Nod that it sounds as though they are observing a sleep study:
- “Trump’s eyes were closed for extended periods and his head has at times jerked in a way consistent with sleeping.”
- “Trump has been motionless in his seat for several minutes. His eyes appear to be closed.”
- “Trump is sitting in the courtroom with his eyes shut, leaning back comfortably.”
- “He was jolted awake when Todd Blanche, his lawyer, nudged him while sliding a note in front of him.”
- “Trump is seated by himself looking fatigued and with his eyes closed.”
- “His eyes were closed for extended periods and his head dropped down twice.”
MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin reported this week that Trump’s lawyers have “tried a number of different devices to keep Trump awake,” including giving him papers to read and keeping him company during sidebars. No luck.
Whatever the cause of the dozing, Trump unquestionably suffers from another common senior affliction. He keeps repeating the same lines over and over. “Every single major legal scholar, Jonathan Turley, Greg Jarrett, Andy McCarthy, Dershowitz, every single scholar, Mark Levin — the great Mark Levin had a whole show last night — said that this is a disgraceful case,” Trump said in the courthouse lobby on Tuesday morning. Four minutes later, he repeated himself: “As Jonathan Turley said, as all of them said, every single one of them, Dershowitz, McCarthy, everyone, Greg Jarrett, Mark Levin, they all said this case should be ended immediately.”
At day’s end, Trump left court looking wan, and by the time he called in to Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News that night to denounce the anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University, he was not entirely making sense. “You go back 10 years, I mean, Israel was protected by Congress,” he ventured. “And now, Congress is just doing numbers that are unbelievable with, I think, a very, very small group of people within Congress, and it’s got to stop. But we have to go back to the roots.”
Call your representative and tell Congress to stop just doing numbers that are unbelievable!
And, while you’ve got them on the phone, tell them to turn up the thermostat. It’s freezing in here.
When called on the ludicrous things that come out of his mouth, Trump wilts. Conducting an interview this week with a Fox affiliate in Detroit, Trump claimed Venezuela “announced, the other day, a 72 percent reduction in crime in the last year. You know why? They moved all their criminals from Venezuela right into the good old USA.”
But the host surprised Trump. “Sir,” he asked, “where are those numbers coming from?”
“Uhhhh,” Trump answered, “I guess I get them from the papers. In this case, I think it’s a federal statement, or — well, they’re coming, actually, from Venezuela.”
There are no such statistics, and no evidence Venezuela has sent criminals to America.
Other things Trump says are even more worrying because they might be true. In his interview with Time, he said he would be fine with states monitoring women’s pregnancies and prosecuting them if they had abortions. He opened the door to building migrant detention camps, and said he was open to using the U.S. military to deport undocumented immigrants, even though that would violate federal law. He said he might order prosecutions of those who prosecuted him and fire prosecutors who didn’t follow his orders. He said he would consider pardoning all of those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He disparaged NATO and repeated his plans for mass firings of civil servants.
He also said he would change the law to reverse “a bias against White” people: “I think there is a definite anti-White feeling in this country and that can’t be allowed.” He walked away from his previous support for a Palestinian state, saying, “I’m not sure a two-state solution anymore is going to work.” And he said he wouldn’t hesitate to use the National Guard against pro-Palestinian protesters while also leaving open the possibility of using the broader U.S. military against them.
Those last Trump positions — the restoration of white power, the rejection of a Palestinian homeland, the willingness to mobilize troops against peaceful demonstrators — show how deeply misguided those on the far left are as they protest Biden’s policies on Gaza. Their frustration with the president’s support for Israel is understandable. But in making Biden the enemy, including with chants of “Genocide Joe,” the plans to trash the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the proliferation of vows of the “uncommitted” never to vote for Biden, they are in effect working to elect Trump. This isn’t principled protest; it’s nihilism.
They are working to help return to office an authoritarian who just last week said the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville in 2017 was “like a peanut compared to the riots and the anti-Israel protests that are happening all over our country.” In recent months, Trump said Israel should be allowed to “finish the job” in Gaza and boasted about cutting off aid to Palestinians. And he has vowed, if elected, to reimpose his travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries and “expand it even further.”
For those student protesters too young to remember, this is the guy who led the anti-Muslim “birther” campaign against President Barack Obama; who claimed thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 terrorist attacks; who said “Islam hates us” and employed several anti-Muslim bigots in his administration; who wanted to have police surveillance of U.S. mosques; who called for a “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”; who retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda videos by a white supremacist; and who told figures such as Palestinian American Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Somali American Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
So it’s entirely consistent that, in Wisconsin on Wednesday, he said that he’s “restoring the travel ban, suspending refugee admissions and keeping terrorists the hell out of our country.” He went on: “We’ve seen what happened when Europe opened their doors to jihad. Look at Paris, look at London. They’re no longer recognizable.”
Trump, on Hannity’s show this week, called the demonstrators at Columbia “paid agitators” and “brainwashed.” At his Wisconsin rally, he condemned the “raging lunatics and Hamas sympathizers at Columbia and other colleges.” He called for authorities to “vanquish the radicals,” many of whom “come from foreign countries.”
None of this should be surprising, either, for this is the same guy who called thousands of National Guard troops to Washington and federal police to Oregon to combat racial-justice demonstrators after the George Floyd killing; who held a Bible-wielding photo op in Lafayette Square after authorities cleared a peaceful demonstration with tear gas; who, according to his own former defense secretary, suggested to military leaders that they shoot demonstrators; who calls the free press the “enemy of the American people”; who defended the “very fine people” among the Nazis in Charlottesville; and who called those convicted of attacking the Capitol “hostages.”
Yet the pro-Palestinian activists, through their actions, would return the author of this ugliness to the White House. They must have been doing for the past eight years what Trump has been doing in court the past three weeks: napping.
