Technically in custody, the former president had to push his own way through a set of doors at the Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday, scowling at judiciously placed cameras but not allowed to speak, for he was not in charge. He headed into the courtroom, took his seat at the defense table and was arraigned on tawdry criminal charges.
A photo of a seated, silent, somber-looking Donald Trump, surrounded by his lawyers and guarded by police, soon was released. That image was as telling as it was historic.
“That’s a man who looks like a defendant,” Alyssa Farah Griffin, the former Trump White House director of strategic communications, said on CNN. “He has lost control.”
