The blue suit, white shirt, red tie and American flag pin looked familiar. So did the TV cameras following every move and reporters hanging on every word. So did the wild hand gestures as he unleashed a torrent of incendiary rhetoric about the elites supposedly out to get him.
But this was not Donald Trump at one of his rollicking campaign rallies in middle America. This was the former US president standing outside a New York courtroom, with uniformed officers looking on, during a civil fraud trial accusing him of grossly inflating the value of his businesses.
The incongruous spectacle was proof, if any more were needed, that Trump’s court appearances and White House campaign woes have essentially merged. The legal woes that would distract or destroy most candidacies have now become a defining feature of his 2024 presidential run.
“Every time he’s in a courtroom, he’s campaigning,” said Joe Walsh, a former Illinois congressman who challenged Trump in the 2020 Republican primary. “The courtroom has replaced his rallies and that’s what the next 14 months are going to look like. He’s a showman; he loves this shit. This will be his campaign and it could work.”
Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in Atlanta, Miami, New York and Washington. But first this week he had to deal with a civil fraud case brought by the New York attorney general Letitia James that accuses Trump and his company of deceiving banks, insurers and others by overstating his wealth by as much as $3.6bn.
Judge Arthur Engoron has already ruled that Trump committed fraud. If upheld on appeal, the case could possibly cost the ex-president control of some of his crown jewels including Trump Tower, a Wall Street office building and golf courses. James is also seeking $250m in penalties and a ban on Trump doing business in New York.
Trump was under no obligation to appear in court but seized his chance to grandstand and further his narrative that has been martyred by a politically biased justice system. He had good reason based on how his previous, mandatory court appearances this year have played to his advantage in the Republican primary race which he now dominates.
Just as on those occasions, reporters queued overnight to get a seat in court, TV helicopters followed his motorcade and his pronouncements were assured more extensive coverage on cable news than his rallies, which many outlets now make a conscious effort to ignore.
Trump sat at the defense table observing the proceedings, at times looking sullen or leaning to confer with his lawyers. But not for him the humiliation of slipping into court while trying to hide his face under a jacket or blanket. He addressed the media assembled in the courtroom hallway several times each day, railing against the case with anger and insults familiar to his followers.
“It’s a scam, it’s a sham,” he said on Monday. “It’s a witch-hunt and a disgrace.” He described James as “incompetent” and part of a broader Democratic conspiracy to weaken his election chances. After the former president posted a picture of the judge’s clerk on his social media network, Truth Social, the judge slapped a gag order barring Trump from talking about his staff.
The performance may give his lawyers nightmares but it comes with financial rewards. One fundraising email from the Trump campaign was headed: “President Donald J Trump is appearing in a New York courtroom RIGHT NOW, we are calling on YOU to condemn the witch hunt.” The message said: “It’s now clear: The Liberal Mob will stop at nothing to SILENCE him and every last freedom-loving Conservative who supports our Conservative movement.”
The strategy has proved effective after Trump’s four indictments over efforts to stay in power following the 2020 election, his handling of classified documents and hush money paid to an adult film star. This week his campaign announced that it raised more than $45.5m in the third quarter of the year – far surpassing Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor once seen as his principal rival. The campaign said it made $3m by selling coffee mugs, t-shirts and posters of the mugshot taken of Trump in Atlanta, where he faces state racketeering charges.
Trump continues to hold massive opinion poll leads over DeSantis, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and other candidates in the Republican primary, where many voters – even those who oppose him – dismiss the legal cases as politically motivated. His decision to skip the primary debates appears to have paid off. He now frequently quips at his rallies that he is the only person who goes up in the polls each time he is indicted.
Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “This next election cycle will be historic in so many ways but the idea that the overwhelming leader of the Republican primary for president is a twice impeached, four-times indicted scofflaw boggles the mind.”
Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, a pro-democracy group opposed to Trump, raised concerns that mainstream media could be unwitting accomplices. “They cannot cover this as if it’s a conventional election because it’s not and what we’ve seen already is people have become almost desensitised to it. It’s no longer shocking, and it should be.
“I blame the US mainstream media partially for that because they have normalised this, with the OJ Simpson, Bronco-style camera angles of him driving to the courthouses four times, from when he leaves his golf course to when he arrives at the courthouse.
“This is our democracy on the line and we should not be covering it as if it is some third-rate reality show … that’s where Trump thrives the most, because it desensitises people to how extraordinarily detrimental to our democracy this actually is.”
She is not alone in fearing a repeat of the 2016 election, in which Trump’s antics received billions of dollars worth of free advertising.
Marty Baron, a former Washington Post editor, said at a Washington Post Live event on Friday: “I do think people are still struggling with how to cover him. I think there have been some recent really big mistakes; the interview on CNN, terrible mistake. I think the more recent one with Meet the Press, I think that’s a mistake. It’s just doing an interview with him like that is just giving him a platform.”
Baron, author of a new book, Collision of Power, added: “He controls the conversation, and more and more what we ought to be doing is saying, ‘What would this second Trump administration actually look like? Who would he appoint to be members of his cabinet? What kinds of policies would he implement at the beginning?’
Clearly, it would be a vengeance tour. He would be targeting the Department of Justice, the FBI, the press, courts, you name it.”
