Trump was indicted Tuesday on 34 felony counts. The judge overseeing the case declined to impose a gag order but there was much speculation on the part of the talking heads as to why the arraignment was taking so long. CNN anchors and expert commentators suggested that it was because the judge was either admonishing Trump about curbing his inflammatory rhetoric or at least setting some guardrails to his bloviating.
In the end, the judge did not impose a gag order—for now. And he did not formally admonish him either.
But he did express concern about his use of social media, where the former president has warned of “death and destruction” over his prosecution and directly attacked the man in charge of it. To many, this seems to be a repeat of his January pleas that stoked the violence at the Capitol.
Speaking to reporters, Joe Tacopina, an attorney for Trump, acknowledged that Judge Juan M. Merchan had discussed the former president’s use of social media. But he insisted that Merchan, who also oversaw the tax fraud case involving the Trump Organization, did not “admonish” the defendant.
Tacopina looked the camera straight in the eye and claimed that Trump’s posts had been taken out of context—there was never any threat implied.
On his own social network, Truth Social, Trump had posted a news story, for example, that showed him wielding a baseball bat next to a photo of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Tacopina, who previously acknowledged that Trump’s posts about the case were “ill-advised,” argued that the post was not meant to constitute a threat from the former president. Incredibly, Tacopina wants us to believe, that, “That is a picture of him showing off an American-made bat”.
Only in Trump World could such a claim be taken seriously.
In a separate example of ill-advised communication on social media, while his father was in the arraignment, Don Jr. tweeted that Judge Merchan’s daughter works for the Biden-Harris re-election campaign, clearly implying bias on the part of the Judge. He claimed that his father was being subjected to a “hand-picked Democrat show trial.”
The former president did no better in exercising good judgement right after he had been warned by the judge. He, himself, then attacked the judge and his family during his Tuesday night speech to supporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate, also pointing out how his daughter worked for Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I have a Trump hating-judge with a Trump-hating wife and family whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris and now receives money from the Biden-Harris campaign,” he said.
