Donald Trump is no stranger to answering questions under oath. But as regular readers know, these Q&As never seem to go well for him.
Follow MSNBC’s live blog coverage of Ivanka Trump’s testimony here.
In 2021, for example, a court ordered the Republican to testify under oath in a lawsuit brought by protestors who were allegedly roughed up by his security guards outside Trump Tower in New York. During his deposition, the former president said he feared protesters would hit him with “very dangerous” fruit, declaring — in apparent seriousness —that “you can be killed if that happens.”
Trump also gave a deposition in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case, which went even worse for him. According to his testimony, which was featured during the trial, Trump considered himself a star, and he believed it’s “largely true” that stars have been able to get away with assaulting women “over the last million years … unfortunately or fortunately.”
In the same deposition, Trump confused Carroll with his second wife — undermining his indefensible rhetoric about his “type” — and struggled to remember the details of his adulterous past.
A month earlier, the Republican falsely claimed during a deposition that, during his White House tenure, he successful averted a “nuclear holocaust” with North Korea.
Taken together, a picture emerges of a defendant who, in a rather literal sense, can’t seem to help himself under questioning. His latest appearance offered fresh evidence of the larger pattern. NBC News reported:
An often-irate former President Donald Trump testified Monday in the high-stakes $250 million civil fraud trial in New York that could lead to the dismantling of his sprawling business empire, and used his time on the stand to engage in several blistering attacks against the judge and lawyers in the case whom he maintained were “unfair.”
After his time on the witness stand, Trump told reporters, “I think it went very well.” It really didn’t.
The former president performed for the media. He lashed out at the judge, the state attorney general, and the process. He made highly dubious claims despite being under oath.
He also, at one point, was asked if he’d received copies of the Trump Organization’s financial statements in 2021. “I was so busy in the White House with China, Russia, and keeping the country safe,” Trump replied. It fell to Kevin Wallace, a lawyer in the New York attorney general’s office, to remind the former president that he wasn’t in office in 2021. But most importantly, Trump’s testimony plainly didn’t help his defense in this highly important civil case. On the contrary, as my MSNBC colleague Lisa Rubin explained, it was the state attorney general’s office that benefited most from the Republican’s time on the stand. Trump’s elder daughter, Ivanka Trump, is scheduled to testify Wednesday (tomorrow). The defense will begin laying out its case soon after. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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