Trump and the Indignities of Being a Regular Joe
A dispatch from Manhattan Criminal Court
I’m not sure what I was expecting when I walked into criminal court in downtown Manhattan this week, to hear opening statements in the criminal trial of Donald J. Trump, but somehow it was something a bit more grandiose. This was the most important trial in American political history. Shouldn’t it have looked a bit more impressive than a dingy DMV?
But as Trump's lawyers argued in their opening statements on Monday, Trump is not merely the former president and presumptive Republican nominee — one who happens to be accused of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. “He is also a man, he is a husband and a father. He's a person, just like you and just like me,” one of them said. It was an attempt to humanize him — and yet all I could think, in that dreary courtroom, with a sour smell and a broken overhead clock, was that this is going to drive Trump mad.
For the next six weeks, four days a week, seven hours a day, including meals and coffee and bathroom breaks, Trump — a man known to value control — will be treated like an ordinary New Yorker, forced to sit in a 17-story municipal building at 100 Center Street that is so perfectly drab I couldn’t have written it.
They used to call the complex where the criminal court is housed “the Tombs,” because in addition to the city’s courts and police facilities, it held one of the most decrepit prisons in city history — of whose “indecent” and “disgusting” cells Charles Dickens once wrote “would bring disgrace upon the most despotic empire in the world.” The Tombs have long since been demolished, but the title feels apt, and not just because what replaced that wing is attached to the court by an elevated skywalk known as the “Bridge of Sighs.”
Today the court where Trump sits, one of the busiest in the country, is covered in scaffolding. Its Art Deco granite and limestone facade, designed in the late 1930s by Harvey Wiley Corbett and Charles B. Meyers (Corbett helped design Rockefeller Center) is shrouded in green plywood and metal, casting much of the building in shadows. It overlooks a large pile of rubble, the remains of the Manhattan Detention Complex, which is being demolished to build a new jail but is now stalled by conflict.
Inside the court, the chairs are uncomfortable. My back hurt against the hardwood benches. It was so cold that reporters in an overflow room were bundled in wool coats and scarves, though hats were not allowed. (Trump wasn't wrong when, squeezing his arms to his chest, he complained to an aide last week, “It’s freezing.”) The speckled, green linoleum floors were drab, the boxed fluorescent lighting was harsh, the rumpled shades were drawn. It was hard to see and hear, I felt my eyes drooping. I had to pee.
For some strange reason, the window in the Ladies Room was propped open, so we all shivered during a break. There was one soap dispenser for two sinks. One of the courtroom artists propped an image on a trash bin to take a photo of it.
There are strict rules in court: No eating, drinking, chewing gum, reading or sleeping (ahem). Cell phones must be off and there are absolutely no cameras — not even an iPhone camera turned around to check your makeup, a court marshal warned as he kicked out a reporter for having hers out.
Trump has called the courthouse “an armed camp,” but in reality it has remained open to the public, including oddball spectators who want to attend the trial, like the young man in a beer sweatshirt who, on his way to work, decided to join the end of the press line and peppered a young woman with questions. “Maybe they'll let me in, I have a blog,” he said confidently, as she directed him to the line for members of the public. Hours later, I passed him in the hallway.
Court let out early on Monday, after the judge explained that an alternate juror had a dental emergency. You could just imagine Trump seething at the thought of his time being dictated by some regular Joe in need of a root canal. But I was grateful to get out of there early — and satisfied by the thought that he would be there every day.
Last week, one of the dismissed jurors, who gave her name as Kara, told NBC News that seeing Mr. Trump in person was “very jarring” — until she realized he was just “another guy.” Is this what schadenfreude looks like?
Thank you for my morning giggle!
Jessica! I was working on the other Trump trial just down the hall....