Donald Trump is threatening the judges presiding over his trials — and their families. This disgraceful conduct is nothing new.
Trump learned how to game the courts from his mentor, the unscrupulous lawyer Roy Cohn. He taught Trump how to play the system, how to threaten reprisal, how to attack, how to delay — and how to get away with it.
Trump later added a few chilling ingredients to the recipe: threaten the judge, his family, even his law clerk, with the veiled innuendo of political violence.
This is not a left/right issue. Threatening judges and their families, and exposing them to violence, crosses a red line in any civilized society.
In his criminal case in New York, involving a payoff to a porn star, Trump’s extrajudicial comments have warranted a gag order because, as the trial judge Juan Merchan put it, Trump had a history of issuing “threatening, inflammatory denigrating” remarks about participants in his various cases.
Under the order, Trump can’t target witnesses or jurors. He can’t talk about court staff, the district attorney’s staff or the staff of any of the lawyers. And he can’t talk about the lawyers, whether his own or assistant DAs. The notable exception is that he can talk about District Attorney Alvin Bragg himself, with the loophole that he can trash the judge and the judge’s family. The DA is seeking clarification of the order to make it apply to families of participants in the case.
Last year, during Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York State court, Trump went after the wife of Justice Arthur Engoron for what he claimed she had posted on social media. Engoron said his wife’s purported social media account was not, in fact, her own — it was hacked.
When Trump speaks, the crazies listen. In January, Engoron received a bomb threat to his home, hours before closing arguments were set to begin. When Trump targeted Engoron’s law clerk, a court security official reported she was subject to constant threats and harassment that were “serious and credible and not hypothetical or speculative.”
Trump has now trained his sights not only on Judge Merchan, who will preside over his New Yok criminal trial, but on Merchan’s daughter Loren, who has nothing to do with the case.
Trump has repeatedly and maliciously attacked the daughter on social media. Trump’s attack on Merchan’s daughter represents the fourth time in three days that he has singled her out — and exposed her to potential harm.
The Trump attacks have a particularly ugly flavor: “Judge Juan Merchan is totally compromised, and should be removed from this TRUMP Non-Case immediately. His Daughter, Loren, is a Rabid Trump Hater, who has admitted to having conversations with her father about me, and yet he gagged me.”
He also had made a claim — later debunked by court officials, and evidently abandoned by Trump — that Loren had posted a social media photo showing Trump behind bars. A court system spokesperson stated this week that her Twitter account was apparently hacked.
The possibility of violence stemming from such attacks is not chimerical. Judges today are fearful for their lives and the lives of their families.
Judge Scott McAfee in Fulton County, Georgia delayed his ruling on the Trump defendants’ request to disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis until the judge could get security in place for his family and himself.
A Texas woman was prosecuted for threatening Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding at Trump’s DC criminal trial. She called the judge’s chambers: “Hey you stupid slave n----- ... You are in our sights, we want to kill you.”
We know that Trump’s social media posts can incite violence. They did so on Jan. 6, when his followers stormed the Capitol. They did so in August 2022, when a Trump-inspired gunman attacked an FBI office in Cincinnati, only to be killed by police shortly thereafter.
Senior District Judge Reggie Walton for the District of Columbia, appointed by George W. Bush, just sounded an alarm. Walton made an unusual-for-a-judge TV appearance last week. He said threats against him were rare for most of his time on the bench, but increased after he began hearing cases against Jan. 6 defendants.
“We do these jobs because we’re committed to the rule of law,” Walton said. “We believe in the rule of law and the rule of law can only function effectively when we have judges who are prepared to carry out their duties without the threat of potential physical harm.”
In 2021, the 20-year-old son of Judge Esther Salas, a federal judge in New Jersey, was murdered at her home by a man who intended to assassinate her. The assailant, Roy Den Hollander, who subsequently killed himself, left a pro-Trump paper trail.
Salas recently said: “We need to protect judges. We need to make judges feel protected. Judges need to be able to do their jobs without fear of retaliation, retribution and death.”
Trump professes to have great respect for the police, seeing them as the protectors of law and order. His concern for the police and his respect for law and order is a charade.
140 police officers were injured by Trump’s mob on Jan. 6. He has never praised them for their service. He has never called any of them or their families. He didn’t visit a single one of them in the hospital. Instead, he has promised on his first day in office to pardon the people who beat and injured the police.
Will Judge Merchan now expand the gag order, issue new prohibitions or take any other measures? Probably not. Trump would undoubtedly appeal such a ruling, and the public would risk a further delay of the criminal trial, set to begin April 15. Meanwhile, the threats and the attacks on the judiciary continue.
James D. Zirin, author and legal analyst, is a former federal prosecutor in New York’s Southern District. He is also the host of the public television talk show and podcast Conversations with Jim Zirin
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