Especially since Jan. 6, much has been written about the call-and-response dynamic between Donald Trump and his supporters.
But since the beginning of the Manhattan district attorney’s criminal trial against Trump last month, a different feedback loop has been on display: After the media makes observations of the former president’s courtroom arrangements and behavior, Team Trump appears to make noticeable tweaks in response.
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After the press noted that Trump was sitting alone during sidebars, when the lawyers meet with the judge, we saw a shift. Now, at least one lawyer stays back at the defense table to chat with Trump and keep him company.
After the press reported that the presumptive GOP presidential nominee appeared to be falling asleep in court, he started toting a large stack of press clips to and from the courtroom every day, as if his team had devised a strategy to keep him engaged and awake.
And after the press observed that there was nary another Trump in attendance despite the defense’s characterization of the former president as a family man, one Eric Trump strode into court behind his dad on Tuesday and took a seat in the first row, aside Trump campaign chief Susie Wiles.
On one hand, Donald Trump’s third child, and current co-head of the businesses bearing the Trump name, is the family member many would have pegged as the one most likely to show up. After all, he is known among reporters for his quiet loyalty to his dad, often placing a gentle hand on his father’s shoulder or back. And he also is recognized, even among some of Trump’s sharpest critics, for his manners and his calm; during the civil fraud trial prosecuted last fall by New York Attorney General Letitia James, in which Eric was also a defendant, I saw him approaching James and shaking her hand with apparent sincerity. The contrast between Eric’s practiced politesse and his father’s constant complaints about the AG was not lost on me.
Yet Eric is equally insistent that the Trump family businesses, as well as his father alone, have been unfairly persecuted. And while not as comfortable in the media’s glare as older brother Don Jr., Eric increasingly has taken on a more public-facing role in defending his dad. And while not as comfortable in the media’s glare as older brother Don Jr., Eric increasingly has taken on a more public-facing role in defending his dad. And it’s his embrace of that role that made a stray moment in the courtroom striking. On Tuesday afternoon, as prosecutor Joshua Steinglass led witness Keith Davidson, a lawyer who once represented Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, through a series of text messages, emails and contractual agreements related to the Daniels hush money payoff, I witnessed Eric looking not at Davidson or Steinglass, but up at a monitor to his left on which the evidence was displayed. And at that moment, the monitor displayed an email between Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and Davidson attaching the Daniels deal documents, including the secret side agreement that revealed that Peggy Peterson and David Dennison, the pseudonymous parties to the nondisclosure agreement, were really Daniels and Trump. As Davidson read from that email and recalled Cohen’s “highly unusual” insistence that only Cohen could retain a copy of that agreement, Eric Trump didn’t much seem like a Trump to me. Instead, in that moment, he was neither the heir to an American real estate dynasty nor a second-generation fraudster. He was simply a criminal defendant’s son who seemed to be seeing, for the first time, key evidence of the alleged conspiracy that, according to prosecutors, would turn garden-variety fake business records into 34 felony counts. (The elder Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges and denies that he had a sexual relationship with either Daniels or McDougal.) The defense wants the jurors to believe that Trump is someone, just like any of them, with a spouse and kids he adores. But watching Eric absorb the details of the Daniels deal, not to mention his reliving the underlying allegations, I saw only one dutiful family man — and his name was not Donald Trump.
Lisa Rubin is MS NOW's senior legal reporter and a former litigator.
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