Trump is under a gag order which says that he’s not allowed to publicly attack witnesses in his upcoming trial. Mark Pomerantz and Michael Cohen are both witnesses. Will anything come of it? Probably not. He seems to have achieved immunity from judge’s orders. He’s still letting fly.
This article by Politico’s legal editorJames Romoser discusses just how unusual that is:
A firebrand politician named Donald is about to stand trial. Just a few days before jury selection, he goes on TV to slam the charges as baseless and biased.
“The FBI and the Justice Department,” he insists, have “targeted” their political opponents in a burst of partisan persecution.
The rhetoric sounds familiar, but this is not a story about Donald Trump. It’s about a man named Don Hill, a former Dallas City Council member who was facing bribery charges 15 years ago.
The telltale clue that this isn’t about Trump is what happened next: The judge, upset by the attempt to taint the jury pool, slapped the politician-turned-defendant with criminal contempt and ultimately sentenced him to 30 days in jail for violating a gag order.
Today, Trump routinely spouts invective far more inflammatory than anything Hill said. He denigrates prosecutors. He lies about his cases. He vilifies the judges overseeing them — and then vilifies their wives and daughters, too. Yet Trump has never faced the swift repercussions that were imposed on Hill — and are routinely imposed on other defendants in America.
Instead, Trump gets special treatment.
“I can’t imagine any other defendant posting on social media about a judge’s family and not being very quickly incarcerated,” said Russell Gold, a law professor at the University of Alabama.
As Trump prepares to begin his first criminal trial on Monday in New York, the tolerance of his tirades is perhaps the most glaring sign of the judicial system’s Trump exceptionalism. But it’s far from the only example. Over the past year, in ways large and small, in criminal cases and civil ones, Trump has consistently been given more freedom and more privileges than virtually any other defendant in his shoes.
He notes that judges are bending over backwards to avoid the appearance of interfering in the election — something Trump knew very well would help protect him when he announced for president.
Some judges in Trump’s cases may have afforded him unique leeway in hopes of avoiding any appearance that they are meddling in the 2024 campaign. Indeed, Trump’s role as a presidential candidate — one who is always eager to play the martyr — complicates the task of prosecutors and judges eager to lower the temperature of the proceedings. Penalizing Trump before he’s ever convicted of anything could stir a backlash and trigger more heat, not less.
Trump supporters surely bristle at the notion that he’s getting any preferential treatment. After all, he is facing dozens of felony counts across four criminal cases, and a series of massive civil judgments has damaged his reputation and his wealth.
But the fact is that no other person in America — if charged with the diverse panoply of malfeasance that Trump has been accused of — would enjoy the same procedural and structural advantages that Trump has harnessed, to great effect, as his legal troubles reached a fever pitch over the past 12 months.
There may be good reasons for some of those advantages. A former president and current candidate is no ordinary criminal defendant. But special treatment carries a hefty price: It shatters the American lore that everyone is treated equally before the law.
The result, ironically, is a partial confirmation of one of Trump’s favorite grievances. He’s enmeshed in a “two-tiered system of justice,” he often says — and he’s right. There are two tiers. But Trump frequently has been the beneficiary, not the victim.
Of course he has. I urge you to click over and read all the ways in which he’s done it. It’s mind-boggling.
I believe the main reason underlying all of it is the fact that he has many thousands of armed lunatic cult members and he’s already demonstrated that he’ll deploy them. They are terrified that if they treat him the way they would treat anyone else in the country that his followers will blow up the country. I’m not sure they’re wrong. But it’s making a mockery of the legal system.
