Maybe it sounded out of control to you.
A former president, already found by a judge and jury to have raped a woman, heckled her and the judge in court last week as a new jury in a second civil trial was being asked how to hold him responsible.
But Donald Trump wasn’t spinning out in a New York courtroom last Wednesday from an inability to restrain himself.
He was streaming a new episode of “The Trump Show.”
America has been tuning in for two decades to the show that made Trump famous and then made him president and then made him leave the White House in a fury, vowing to be back with a new and more exciting season.
Ty Cobb, an attorney appointed by Trump as White House special counsel in 2017, knows the script.
“Why he’s there at all has to be understood purely as a political exercise to keep his narrative intact and sell his degradation of the judicial process and the Biden administration to his supporters,” Cobb told me when I called to ask about Trump’s courtroom outburst.
To Trump, the outburst was the point. He wasn't sitting in a courtroom to monitor a case that may cost him millions. He was setting the scene, rewriting the lines on the fly to better suit his needs.
Trump has turned his tangle of legal predicaments into a stage for his political ambitions, supplanting the campaign trail, where almost no Republican challenging him for the nomination dared to criticize him for all that.
The one-term president became a celebrity thanks to 15 seasons of his NBC “reality” television show “The Apprentice,” built on the hokum that he was a brilliant businessman.
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Trump told his White House staff to treat every day like a new episode in a television show in which he defeats the terrible forces trying to take him down.
"The Trump Show" didn’t get canceled when he lost his bid for reelection in 2020.
He just jumped platforms. Take away his chance for soliloquies from a podium at the White House, Trump will just find a new stage for the formulaic narrative he deploys to invert liability. That way, he casts any attempt to hold him accountable for his behavior as a devious attack on his fan base.
President Joe Biden, the man who beat him in 2020, will always be portrayed in "The Trump Show" as a villain with two very different sides – a doddering fool but also the mastermind tormenting the show's hero. The arc of that storyline plays from here until the peak of the season on Nov. 5, the general election (and maybe longer.)
The latest episode: a civil hearing where jurors will put a dollar figure on the damage Trump did to writer E. Jean Carroll’s reputation after she accused him in 2019 of rape in the 1990s. Trump’s standardized grift – a play for attention followed by a plea for money – works like this:
First, Trump irascibility pushes way past the standard norms of behaviors for candidates or elected officials (or people facing serious financial penalties for sexual assault).
Here, he grumbled loudly enough in court last week for Carroll’s lawyers – and maybe the jury – to hear him call the case a “witch hunt,” a “con job” and “a disgrace.”
Carroll’s lawyers objected. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan issued a warning that Trump could forfeit his right to be present during the hearings if he continued to be disruptive.
Kaplan, sounding as if he has seen an episode or two of "The Trump Show," added, “I understand you're probably eager for me to do that.”
Trump responded that he would “love it” while taunting that the judge could not control him.
That turned heads. With people starting to tune in, the next step called for Trump to escalate.
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His lawyers used the judge’s very standard enforcement of decorum to cry “hostility” in a failed bid for a mistrial. Trump’s rule of business and politics – ABTV (always be the victim).
With all that brewing, Trump starts to push his narrative fiction in venues where he knows, unlike a courtroom, he will never be challenged for veracity.
Trump’s safest space? His social media platform Truth Social. (Yes, that’s still a thing.)
There he whined about being held accountable, calling the judge “a totally biased and unfair person” who had overseen the first trial last May, when Trump was found liable in a civil case for sexual abuse and defamation of Carroll.
Spoiler alert: The next steps for Trump are to antagonize the judge into action and then use whatever consequence he faces to ask his supporters for even more money.
That's the script Trump followed in October, when he showed up for court to lambaste a different civil action by New York's attorney general, who had already established that he overinflated the value of his businesses. Trump's rhetoric in court about a "sham" trial was quickly converted into a fundraising pitch to supporters.
Trump spent all of 2023 casting himself as a victim of his various legal problems – including a criminal case by the Manhattan district attorney and two federal criminal cases for allegedly prompting the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, and keeping classified documents after he left office.
That phony victimhood was packaged in a relentless stream of fundraising pitches that funneled through his campaign to his fleet or attorneys.
Tens of millions of dollars poured into Trump’s campaign coffers last year. By October, The Associated Press counted more than half that money – nearly $37 million – went to lawyers representing the candidate in his many court cases.
Trump told supporters in Iowa that month that his cases were costing him at least $100 million in legal fees by then.
This means Trump has to keep churning the outrage, squeezing it for cash.
In keeping with that storyline, Trump claimed in his Truth Social post last week that the Carroll case is really motivated by an urgency to keep him from retaking the White House.
“This case is another example of Election Interference at a level never seen before,” was Trump’s take in his post.
Fact-check: Not true.
We have all seen this before. From Trump. For years. It’s a rerun.
Trump returned to court Monday, but a COVID-19 scare shut down proceedings. He was in New Hampshire on Tuesday for that state’s primary and may be on the witness stand this week.
He seems unlikely to help his cause in court if he testifies; the judge won’t sit by as he lashes out. But Trump won’t view the case like a defendant facing serious liability.
His audience is bigger than a judge and jury.
He’s the star of his own show as long as his supporters keep tuning in, and writing checks.
Follow USA TODAY elections columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan
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