It may turn out that the one thing Donald Trump cannot get away with is sleeping in court.

As a young prosecutor, I was part of a legal team on a case presided over by a judge who kept falling asleep during the trial. The judge would often shout for all the lawyers to “Get up here!”—meaning we were to all go up to the bench for a side-bar out of earshot of the jury. There, the judge would berate one or all of us for not performing well.

However, sometimes by the time we got there the judge had fallen asleep. The lawyers would stand around awkwardly, while the judge’s clerk stared at us, silently daring one of us to try and awaken the sleeping jurist. Once the judge woke up, he carried on as though nothing had happened and proceeded to berate us. I learned, too, that the judge’s sleeping habits were a well-known secret around the courthouse. A secret which no lawyer or staff spoke about, likely out of fear of getting on the judge’s bad side.

Judges get that kind of wall of silence, sometimes, and Donald Trump has benefitted from a similar kind of wall of silence around him for most of his life.

A wall of silence around rumors of his alleged draft-dodging, lack of intelligence, paying........

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