While this falls far short of the punishment he deserves, there was considerable satisfaction to be gained from reports that Donald Trump spent much of the first week of his first criminal trial sitting in silence listening to mean tweets about him read aloud in court. For hours at a time, potential jurors in his New York "hush-money" trial were interviewed to determine whether they could judge the ex-president with an open mind. In the process, both past social media posts and in-the-moment honest opinions were made public. Trump is such a famous narcissist that he literally has a woman who follows him around with a wireless printer to feed him a steady supply of online praise. Hearing what people outside the paid shills have to say was, all reports suggest, very upsetting for the former president. He glowered and eventually tried to leave the courtroom so quickly that he had to be told to sit down by the judge.
The jury is now impaneled, and no longer will be asked to talk about past social media posts calling Trump "dumb as [expletive]." But, as Monday's trial opening suggested, this trial is set to put Trump's fragile ego through a lengthy battering. It's hard to believe this — considering his ridiculous hair, hideous makeup and comically oversized suits — but by all accounts, Trump seems to actually believe he cuts an impressive figure. He famously spent decades longing to be included in the ranks of Manhattan's social elite, imagining he had a "classiness" they simply failed to perceive. As Elizabeth Spiers of the New York Times wrote last week, "The rich and powerful sometimes invited him to their parties, but behind his back they laughed at his coarse methods and his tacky aesthetic."
