Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan liked to talk about the concept of “defining deviancy down.” Donald Trump has been a master of doing so — numbing the public to behavior that in a different era would have been considered not just deviant but criminal.
On Tuesday, before the jury filed in, Justice Juan Merchan held Trump in contempt of court on nine counts. In his ruling, he fined him but added that he must consider “whether, in some instances, jail may be a necessary punishment.” On Thursday morning, the judge indicated he would probably again hold Trump in contempt on at least one additional count.
Now imagine this had happened to any other American president. We would have seen banner headlines and stop-the-presses coverage. In this case, the contempt citation wasn’t even the biggest story of the day from the courtroom. It was a bit overshadowed by the important testimony of Keith Davidson, which continued on Thursday.
Contempt of court is rare, but recently defendants ranging from Roger Stone to Sam Bankman-Fried have been cited for it. In 1969, when I was a 12-year-old Chicagoan following the now legendary Chicago 7 trial, Judge Julius Hoffman ordered Bobby Seale, the Black Panther co-founder, bound to a chair and gagged for disrupting the courtroom. He sentenced Seale to four years in prison for contempt, a decision overturned on appeal.
Merchan would never do anything that drastic, and not just because Trump’s violations of his gag order are taking place outside the courtroom. But the judge made it clear that Trump’s conduct is verboten in a criminal trial.
“He spoke about the jury. He said the jury was 95 percent Democrats,” Merchan said on Thursday. “The implication was that this is not a fair jury.”
Holding Trump in contempt over what he said about Michael Cohen, the key witness, is a tougher call, given Cohen’s often profane taunts of Trump on social media. The judge has warned Cohen that he, too, must zip it, and for the past week or so Cohen has.
But Merchan is so concerned about Trump attacking any witness during a trial that he may yet find Trump in contempt for other unprovoked insults directed at Cohen, as he did on Tuesday.
Merchan also said today from the bench that he didn’t care as much about Trump saying last week that he hoped the witness David Pecker would be “nice” to him. The judge may not have yet read the full text of Trump’s interview with a local TV station. (Merchan was given nearly 500 pages covering various insults). I found the line — “This is a message to Pecker: Be nice” — to be threatening, but the judge may not agree.
The rest of what the former president of the United States has done to disrupt this trial is apparently deviant enough.