Oh, Good! More "Legal" Analysis!

Biden Has the Oval Office. But Trump Has Center Stage. - The New York Times https://t.co/tr3pJUuGYo

— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) April 5, 2023

Just for context. Let us proceed.

You might ask yourself whether Trump’s incendiary comments last night were clueless or calculated. As with many things Trump, it’s not an either/or. It’s a both/and situation. 1/ https://t.co/PFyoKkLRld

— Lisa Rubin (@lawofruby) April 5, 2023

Let's overthink this, shall we? And psychoanalyze and treat perfect strangers as if they were...well, us!

First, that Trump is spoiling for a public, political fight on his constitutional, free speech rights is obvious. That he could also take this fight to appellate courts, thereby also delaying the real proceedings, makes it a two-fer for him. 3/

— Lisa Rubin (@lawofruby) April 5, 2023

Sure, he wants this fight! Because Trump is really a deeply strategic thinker! That's why he decided to pay off a porn star he had sex with almost a decade earlier, to buy her silence on the eve of his election right after the Access Hollywood tape broke, and then consider reneging on the whole deal because, hey! He won!

Trump is playing four-dimensional chess while the rest of us are using Oreos to substitute for some of the missing checker pieces.  Yeah, that's it!

(In my view, those motions, if made today, would be what Trump calls stone-cold losers. You don’t get to switch judges or courthouses just by claiming someone’s family member is biased or that the jury pool is tainted because the majority of Manhattan voters are Democrats.) 5/

— Lisa Rubin (@lawofruby) April 5, 2023

Trump is, at best, an animal in a trap trying to chew his leg off. He's not a strategic genius 10 steps ahead of the rest of us, playing a game only a chess supercomputer could keep up with.

And meanwhile, the publicity surrounding any gag order could dwarf noise about the charges themselves and might aid in arguments that the jury pool has been poisoned. 7/

— Lisa Rubin (@lawofruby) April 5, 2023

Well, that's probably why Merchan hasn't issues a gag order sua sponte. He's letting Trump dig his own legal grave, in fact. All of those tweets and speeches can be used against him to show his contempt for the process and his contempt (state of mind, hem-hem) for cheating the state of New York (Taxes!) and cheating on his business records (what, you think Bragg saying twice yesterday this was about the integrity of the "financial capital of the world" and the financial system thereof was just puffery?). Trump wants a change of venue and wants a new judge EVEN AS he poisons the jury pool. As I said before, he wants to plead mercy because he's an orphan after being caught killing his parents. This is obvious to me AND I NEVER EVEN PRACTICED CRIMINAL LAW!

What did Trump say yesterday in MAL he hadn't said already before the arraignment, or didn't say immediately after he got on Perp Force One?  Merchan is not an idiot; one can presume he knows the score.  Had he not warned Trump at the hearing, it would have been harder for him to show Trump was "on notice" (as the judges say) if he later issues even a protective order (as requested by the DA's office).  These things have to proceed in steps, or you will win an interlocutory appeal.  Could there be such an appeal anyway, as Rubin suggests?  I seriously doubt it, especially in a criminal case.

Trump took the documents case to the appeals level on interlocutory appeal because it concerned the status of those documents and his relationship to/interest in them.  It was the core of the case, basically, and still it required an extraordinary showing just to seek that relief (again, how the courts put it).  Can a criminal defendant appeal a "gag order" in the course of a criminal trial?  Really depends on the order, and on Trump's actions.  If Trump pushes far enough to make an order necessary for the administration of justice, I don't think his appeal gets very far.  Courts protect their dignity and province jealously.  Judges tend to get slapped down for courtroom behavior after the trial, not before.  If Trump pushed so hard Merchan had to take away his phone (metaphorically speaking) and Trump appealed that on 1st Amendment grounds, I expect the courts would slap shit out of him, and back the judge.

Is Trump clever enough to have gamed this out?  Or is he just a feral animal pushed into a corner?  My guess is Merchan is going to give Trump enough rope he hangs himself.  I also don't think Trump's attacks on the judge and the jury pool and the judge's family are going to sit well with jurors if the DA can find a way to bring those statements into evidence.

The real concern here is the protective order on evidence the DA has and doesn't want Trump tweeting to the world.  There's plenty of evidence in the public record that he'd happily consider any such documents "his" to do with as he pleases.  I think the court is far more concerned with not letting that happen.

And I think Trump is about as strategic as a thrown plate of french fries covered in ketchup.

Besides, his "strategic maneuver" before the hearing that everyone was afraid of, came to nothing:

If Trump couldn't rile up a mass protest over his first indictment it doesn't bode well for playing that threat over his second, third, and fourth.

— Schooley (@Rschooley) April 5, 2023

To be fair, Lisa Rubin's take isn't as bad as this:

It’s actually not a win to get all the attention when you’re getting arrested and arraigned on multiple felony indictments. I don’t pretend this is a great insight. But a lot of people don’t seem to understand it. pic.twitter.com/8VCw5yirUB

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 5, 2023

And she didn't publish it in the pages of the "newspaper of record." Where, you know, supposedly responsible editors decide what gets the newsprint.