Certain wonders you can only appreciate once you’ve seen them with your own eyes. Thursday, in a Manhattan courtroom, I spent three hours observing the back of Donald Trump’s head. I’ve seen him many times, of course, but never so close, with him so still, for so long. His lawyers were giving their closing arguments in a civil-fraud lawsuit, making their fine legal points and plumping their client’s savvy and net worth. (“President Trump is worth billions …”) But I couldn’t stop staring at Trump’s pinkish scalp. His famous sallow blond combover, thinner than it once was, started as a part on the left and flowed like a river eastbound and down until it merged with another cataract of hair cascading behind his opposite ear. Little tufts sprayed off the sides and stuck out over his bunched-up jacket collar. The former president was hunched forward, elbows on the table. You didn’t need to see his face to know he was glowering.
Trump emanates distractive energy like a magnetic field. The civil case, brought by the office of the New York State attorney general, should have been a humiliation for him. It strikes at his business, his family, and the heart of his original identity as a New York real-estate tycoon. And yet, at a crucial juncture in the race for the Republican nomination, he had decided to pull himself away from the campaign. You can’t face justice without turning your back. Trump was complaining that his many trials were keeping him off the trail, but in fact his attendance at this closing argument was not required. He was perfectly willing to sit through the undignified process.
In comparison with the four criminal cases he faces, the stakes in the civil case are smaller but only when compared to a prison sentence. The AG’s office has asked Judge Arthur Engoron to impose $370 million in penalties on the Trump Organization and to impose sanctions that would bar Trump from the New York real-estate industry for life. (It’s also asking for five-year bans for his sons Eric and Don Jr., who currently run the company day-to-day.) Over the course of a more than three-month trial, the state’s lawyers had presented mountains of evidence to show how Trump routinely fudged numbers — property values, cash reserves, even the square footage of his triplex penthouse in Trump Tower — for profit and vanity. In so doing, they had managed to accomplish a feat that eluded generations of financial journalists, biographers, and political antagonists. Trump may never have been the billionaire business genius that he played on TV, but until this case, no one had ever been able to definitively prove he was a phony.
The courtroom was packed with reporters, many of whom have been following Trump around on his tour of the courtrooms of America. This was his second court date in a week on the heels of an appeals-court hearing in Washington, D.C., that went south when his attorney couldn’t categorically assure a judge that Trump could be held criminally accountable for ordering a political assassination as president. During these proceedings, as at the one on Tuesday, the reporters in the gallery registered his every twitch, scribble, and whisper. Trump frowned for the cameras when Engoron brought in a group of pool photographers for a photo shoot. He addressed the cameras in the hallway during bathroom breaks.
Earlier in the week, sources close to Trump had publicly floated the idea that their client might give a portion of the summation in his civil trial himself. Reporters and their editors got very excited, perhaps imagining that Trump, a big fan of The Godfather and other ’70s classics, might do his own version of Al Pacino’s courtroom harangue in And Justice for All. (“You’re out of order! The whole trial is out of order!”) In the end, though, the balloon seemed to deflate over Engoron’s demand that Trump, like any attorney, confine himself to the facts of the case.
“Take it or leave it,” the judge emailed on Wednesday to Trump’s lead attorney, Christopher Kise, who did not respond.
So the final arguments proceeded like a normal hearing, or as close to normal as anything is when Trump is involved. (The New York Times reported shortly before the argument began that police had been called to Engoron’s home that morning to investigate reports of a bomb threat.) Attorney General Letitia James — who had been repeatedly attacked by Trump both inside and outside the courtroom — sat in the front row of the gallery, watching the defendant like everyone else. Kise and two other Trump attorneys spoke first, addressing their arguments directly to the judge (like many civil proceedings, it was a bench trial, so there was no jury to persuade).
“This entire case is a manufactured claim to pursue a political agenda,” said Kise, describing the proposed sanctions as the “civil death penalty.”
In a brief filed after testimony was complete, the attorney general’s office had outlined its version of the facts established in the course of the case. The details are complicated, involving sophisticated concepts like real-estate capitalization rates and incremental differences in construction-loan interest rates, but basically, James’s case came down to this: Donald Trump allegedly lied to lenders about how rich he was in the 2010s, and that allowed him to borrow money that he wouldn’t have otherwise had to spend, which resulted in dishonest profits. Trump’s legal team countered that real-estate valuation was inherently subjective and that even if some of the numbers were off, none of the lenders involved complained about it. In fact, some of the bankers had testified that they had been more than happy with Trump as a client. “They rolled out the red carpet,” Kise said, “and they’re dragging President Trump through the door.” But a victim was not required for Trump to have broken the law. In pretrial decisions, Engoron had already indicated he was ready to come down hard on Trump for breaking the rules, saying that “in the defendants’ world,” rent-stabilized apartments were valued like market-rate ones, development “restrictions can evaporate into thin air,” “square footage [is] subjective,” and illegal acts can’t be punished.
“That is a fantasy world, not the real world,” Engoron wrote.
The judge had already appointed an independent monitor, a retired federal judge, to keep an eye on the Trump Organization’s financials, and in a September decision, he indicated his intention to essentially dissolve the company as a business entity under a vast but rarely invoked power in New York law. The practical meaning of such steps is a little murky, and Engoron will likely revise or elaborate on them in his final ruling, which is scheduled to be delivered at the end of the month, and then it will certainly be appealed. But in the meantime, the trial presented Trump with what would seem, on its face, to be a formality. His guilt was presumed, and the question was whether the judge would go through with dispossessing him.
Even so, Trump came to the closing arguments. Another day, another opportunity for grievance. Sometimes it seemed his lawyers were speaking more to their client, and maybe a more sympathetic appellate court, than to the judge in front of them. The state presented evidence that Trump would decide what his net worth was each year and then leave it up to his underlings to “reverse engineer” the number on an annual document called a “statement of financial condition,” which was provided to lenders. Kise replied that no one knew what Trump was worth better than Trump himself. “You would expect a developer of the president’s experience to know what something’s worth,” the attorney said. “That’s why he has made billions and billions of dollars. He has that acumen.”
Another one of Trump’s lawyers, Alina Habba, paced theatrically in front of the lectern, performing like a TV lawyer. “Three years you’ve been saying there was fraud!” she shouted and went on to contend that the banks that relied on the statements of financial condition had done their own due diligence and, anyway, had ended up making “millions, millions” from their involvement in projects like Trump’s golf courses in Florida and Scotland and his renovation of the Old Post Office Building in Washington, which became the Trump International Hotel.
“Some fraud,” Habba said. “What a fraudster.”
She occasionally turned her back to the judge to speak directly to the gallery, shooting glances at her client, whose sarcastic tone she was channeling. Habba decried a supposed “political agenda,” earning a reprimand from the judge, who had cautioned against speechifying. (“I totally disagree on that, and I have rules on that,” Engoron said.) But that didn’t stop the attorney from later launching an odd broadside against James. “I turned around this morning, and her shoes were off,” Habba said, derisively adding that she was drinking “a Starbucks coffee.” The relevance of the attorney general’s informality was hard to figure, but a moment later, Habba turned around with a look of satisfaction and seemed to catch Trump’s eye.
As lunchtime neared, Kise asked the judge if Trump could in fact address the court for a few minutes. “I think under the circumstances you ought to hear from him,” the attorney said. “I think all these people back here” — meaning the press — “want to hear from him.”
“This is not how this should have been done,” Engoron said. Then he asked Trump whether, if given a chance to speak, he would abide by his rules and limit his comments to the facts.
“I think, your honor,” Trump said without rising from his seat, “that this case goes outside of just the facts.” The laptop keyboards in the gallery started to clatter, and Trump began to give his speech. “The banks got all their money paid back. The banks are as happy as can be.” He picked up momentum. “This is a political witch hunt that should be set aside. We should receive damages for what we’ve been through, for what they’ve taken this company through … I am an innocent man and I have been persecuted. This is no fraud. This is a fraud on me.”
Trump began to riff and free associate, referring to himself in the third person. “The person in the room right now hates Trump, and uses Trump to get elected,” he said, referring to James. He attacked the law that he was being sued under, calling it “vicious,” and complained that public officeholders didn’t appreciate the millions of dollars in corporate taxes his companies paid. “They don’t want me anymore. They say let’s get rid of Trump.” Eventually, he got around to going after Engoron himself, complaining that he wasn’t allotted his desired amount of time to speak. “You have your own agenda, and I can certainly understand that,” Trump said. “You can’t listen for more than one minute. This is persecution.”
“Control your client,” Engoron sternly instructed Kise.
The judge held up his phone to show Trump his time was up. The former president, staring daggers, turned on his heel and walked out of the courtroom, appearing to mouth the words “thank you” to his supporters in the gallery, who included his son and co-defendant Eric and his legal counselor, Boris Epshteyn. He brushed past James without a glance as he walked out into the courthouse hallway. The attorney general took a great big swig from her coffee.
Trump then went on to his building at 40 Wall Street, one of the allegedly overvalued properties, where he had previously announced plans to address the media. Having said his piece, he was not going to stick around to hear the attorney general’s counterarguments, and his competing event served to siphon off a fair number of reporters. The courtroom in the afternoon was comparatively sedate. A lawyer from James’s office, Kevin Wallace, brought up Trump’s comments as evidence that indicated the likelihood that he would continue to commit fraud. “Nothing is his fault,” Wallace said. “Everything that is being done to him is a conspiracy. He’s the victim.” In reality, Wallace argued, Trump had benefited immensely from his fraud.
Rather than damages, the attorney general’s office was asking the judge for “disgorgement” — fines meant to reflect the amount of money the Trump Organization had made through its illegal conduct. The attorney general’s theory of the case held that the favorable loan terms that Trump had secured by exaggerating the values of his personal assets had in turn allowed him to save hundreds of millions in interest payments. This had allowed his company to remain profitable, at least on paper, at a time when it was “burning cash,” because it had taken on ambitious projects like leasing and renovating the Washington hotel. Had it not been for those savings, Wallace contended, the Trump Organization might have shown losses some years, causing banks to call in their loans. Instead, it was able to keep spending on investments, some of which — like the Washington hotel — yielded big payoffs. And Trump could afford to take other kinds of risks, like running for president in 2016, which his banks estimated cost him around $60 million.
For a moment, I allowed myself to consider an alternative history in which the Trump Organization was scrupulous with its accounting, and its boss never had the extra spending cash to run for president, and he stuck to running hotels, selling condominiums, and marketing his brand of luxury to saps. But then a universe where Donald Trump does things by the book? That’s a fantasy world.
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
