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      How the Media Is Covering Justice Merchan in Trump’s Criminal Trial

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      Conservative media has been preoccupied for weeks with Justice Juan M. Merchan, the New York judge presiding over the Manhattan criminal trial against former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Trump has long attacked Justice Merchan and his family in social media posts and on his campaign website. But Justice Merchan did not earn a starring role in conservative media until after he issued a formal gag order against the former president, forbidding attacks against various people involved in the trial, including jurors and witnesses.Since then, right-wing commentators, most prominently on Fox News, have condemned the judge nearly daily in their coverage of the trial. They have painted Justice Merchan’s rulings as biased, decried small donations he made to Democrats in 2020 and suggested that his connection to his daughter, a Democratic political consultant, made him unfit to oversee the case. Liberal outlets have focused less on Justice Merchan, instead centering their coverage of the trial on the charges against Mr. Trump and the figures in his orbit. But some smaller outlets have praised Justice Merchan for clamping down on Mr. Trump.Here’s how it has played out:FROM THE RIGHTBreitbartIn addition to covering the trial as straight news, Breitbart has devoted significant attention to what Republicans see as Justice Merchan’s pro-Democratic bias.Justice Merchan donated $35 to groups that supported Democrats during the 2020 election, including $10 to a group called “Stop Republicans.” That, along with his daughter’s role as a consultant for Democratic candidates, has prompted Mr. Trump to call on the judge to recuse himself. (A state ethics panel last year dismissed a complaint against Justice Merchan with a warning over his donations. Justice Merchan has denied any wrongdoing.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Giuliani and Other Trump Allies to Be Arraigned in Arizona Election Case

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      A total of 50 people, including former President Donald J. Trump, are now facing charges in four states related to efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power after he lost in 2020.Rudolph W. Giuliani and 10 other allies of Donald J. Trump are scheduled to be arraigned on Tuesday in an Arizona criminal case that charges them with trying to keep Mr. Trump in power after he lost the 2020 presidential election.A total of 50 people — including Mr. Trump, who has locked up the Republican nomination in the 2024 presidential race — now face charges related to election interference in four states. A number of Trump allies have already pleaded guilty or reached cooperation agreements in cases in Georgia and Michigan.Mr. Giuliani, who was served a notice of his indictment on Friday, was expected to appear at his arraignment virtually, while most of the other defendants were due to appear in person Tuesday at a courthouse in Phoenix. The other defendants include Christina Bobb, a Trump campaign adviser in 2020 who is now the election integrity counsel for the Republican National Committee, and Kelli Ward, a former head of the Arizona Republican Party.All of the defendants in the Arizona case are charged with conspiracy, fraud and forgery. Others will be arraigned next month, including Boris Epshteyn, who is one of Mr. Trump’s main lawyers, and Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff.The first to be arraigned in the case was John Eastman, a lawyer who helped hatch a plan to deploy fake electors for Mr. Trump in swing states that he lost; Mr. Eastman was arraigned in Phoenix last week and pleaded not guilty.Mr. Trump has not been charged in the Arizona case. He is listed as “Unindicted Co-conspirator 1” in the indictment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Calls ‘Apprentice’ Biopic at Cannes ‘Garbage’ and Plans to Sue

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      The director of “The Apprentice” was unfazed by the threat to the film, which covers the ex-president’s relationships with his first wife and the fixer Roy Cohn.The day after the Cannes Film Festival premiered “The Apprentice,” a biopic of Donald J. Trump, the former president hit back at the movie, calling it “malicious defamation” and threatening legal action.“This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign.Directed by Ali Abbasi and written by the author Gabriel Sherman, “The Apprentice” follows Trump (Sebastian Stan) as an ambitious young man seeking to establish himself as a real estate magnate. He finds a mentor in the wily lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) and a first wife in the fashion model Ivana Zelnickova (Maria Bakalova), though Trump is willing to discard both once they’re no longer of use to him.The film is hardly a flattering portrait of the former president, and includes scenes where the business mogul goes under the knife for liposuction and a scalp procedure to fix his bald spot. In its most controversial sequence, the Trump character sexually assaults his wife after she criticizes his looks. (Ivana, who died in 2022, accused Trump of rape in her divorce deposition, though she disavowed the claim later.)Cheung said the Trump team plans to file a lawsuit “to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.”Though the threat could affect the release of “The Apprentice,” which currently has no distributor, Abbasi sounded unfazed at the film’s news conference on Tuesday.“Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people,” the director said. “They don’t talk about his success rate, though.” More

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      A Tongue-Lashing for a Defense Witness Isn’t Great News for Trump

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      Eight times a day during his felony trial, a former president of the United States must stand and honor 12 jurors and six alternates as they walk past, eyes straight ahead or down, casting no glances at him. It’s inspiring to watch these ordinary citizens as sovereign soldiers for justice.On Monday this calm processional was disrupted, as jurors were forced to hurry out after a witness for the defense mocked the authority of the court. Moments later, Justice Juan Merchan ordered the courtroom immediately cleared, and reporters fled in a frenzy.The reason for all of this was the testimony of Robert Costello, an astonishingly arrogant former federal prosecutor who has defended the likes of George Steinbrenner and Leona Helmsley, borrowing a little of his nasty affect from each.Michael Cohen testified earlier that Costello and Rudy Giuliani were assigned by Donald Trump to open a back channel to Cohen to keep him in the Trump fold.Costello testified before a friendly House subcommittee last week that Cohen was a liar. This apparently impressed Trump and — presto! — Costello was the first important witness the defense called after the prosecution rested.On direct examination, Costello did next to nothing for the defense beyond landing a few more mostly irrelevant blows on Cohen.On cross-examination by the prosecution, however, you could almost see steam coming out of Costello’s ears. The temerity of this lowly local female prosecutor asking him questions! Merchan ruled earlier that Costello could testify only on certain subjects. When Merchan sustained several objections from the prosecution and struck a couple of Costello’s answers from the record, Costello decided to play judge.He muttered “ridiculous” and “strike it” after disliking a question. An enraged Merchan excused the jury and said sharply, “I want to discuss proper decorum in my courtroom.” He continued, “You don’t say, ‘Geez,’ and you don’t say, ‘Strike it.’ And if you don’t like my ruling, you don’t give me side-eye and roll your eyes.”Merchan apparently didn’t want reporters to hear the rest of his tongue-lashing and cleared the courtroom.None of this was good for the defense, which struggled all day to build on Thursday’s success in making Cohen seem he was lying about the purpose of his calls to Trump in late October 2016. Cohen looked bad admitting he passed $20,000 in cash in a paper bag to Red Finch, a tech firm that uses algorithms to rig online polls. But Trump looked even worse by directing Red Finch to cheat his way onto CNBC’s list of the most famous business leaders of the 20th century. Classic Trump.Jurors may conclude that the whole bunch of ’em are liars and reasonably doubt every word out of all of their mouths. At this point, that may be Trump’s best hope of avoiding conviction. More

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      How Trump’s Hush-Money Case Failed to Capture America’s Imagination

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      If I’d pictured Donald Trump’s first criminal trial a few years ago, I’d have imagined the biggest, splashiest story in the world. Instead, as we lurch toward a verdict that could brand the presumptive Republican nominee a felon and possibly even send him to prison, a strange sense of anticlimax hangs over the whole affair.In a recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll, only 16 percent of respondents said they were following the trial very closely, with an additional 32 percent following it “somewhat” closely. “Those numbers rank as some of the lowest for any recent news event,” wrote Yahoo News’s Andrew Romano. When people were asked how the trial made them feel, the most common response was “bored.” TV ratings tell a similar story. “Network coverage of Donald Trump’s hush money trial has failed to produce blockbuster viewership,” Deadline reported at the end of April. Cable news networks, Deadline said, saw a decline in ratings among those 25 to 54 since the same time last year. At the courthouse last week, I met news junkies who’d lined up at 3 a.m. to get a seat at the trial and maybe score selfies with their favorite MSNBC personalities, but it felt more like wandering into a subcultural fandom than the red-hot center of the zeitgeist. A block or so away, you wouldn’t know anything out of the ordinary was happening.Perhaps the trial would have captured more of the public’s attention had it been televised, but lack of visuals alone doesn’t explain America’s collective shrug. The special counsel Robert Mueller’s report didn’t have images, either, but when it was published, famous actors like Robert DeNiro, Rosie Perez and Laurence Fishburne starred in a video breaking it down. I’m aware of no similar effort to dramatize this trial’s testimony, and I almost never hear ordinary people talking about it. “Saturday Night Live” tried, last weekend, to satirize the scene at the courthouse with a cold open mocking Trump’s hallway press appearances, but it ended with an acknowledgment of public exhaustion: “Just remember, if you’re tired of hearing about all of my trials, all you’ve got to do is vote for me, and it will all go away.”It wasn’t a particularly funny line, but it gets at something true that helps explain why this historic trial doesn’t seem like that big a deal. When Trump was president, his opponents lionized lawyers and prosecutors — often in ways that feel retrospectively mortifying — because liberals had faith that the law could restrain him. That faith, however, has become increasingly impossible to sustain.Mueller punted on the question of whether Trump obstructed justice in trying to impede the Russia probe. The jury in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case found that he committed sexual abuse, but it had little discernible effect on his political prospects. A deeply partisan Supreme Court, still mulling its decision on his near-imperial claims of presidential immunity, has made it highly unlikely that he will face trial before the election for his attempted coup. A deeply partisan judge appointed by Trump has indefinitely postponed his trial for stealing classified documents. With the Georgia election interference case against Trump tied up in an appeal over whether District Attorney Fani Willis should be disqualified over an affair with a member of her team, few expect that trial to start before 2025 — or 2029, if Trump wins the election. And should he become president again, there’s little question that he’ll quash the federal cases against him once and for all.In theory, the delays in Trump’s other criminal cases should raise the stakes in the New York trial, since it’s the only chance that he will face justice for his colossal corruption before November. But in reality, his record of impunity has created a kind of fatalism in his opponents, as well as outsize confidence among his supporters. In a recent New York Times/Siena poll, 53 percent of voters in swing states said it was somewhat or very unlikely that Trump would be found guilty. That included 66 percent of Republicans but also 42 percent of Democrats.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Former Leader of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Gang Joins Trump in Court

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      An entourage of more than a dozen supporters who joined President Donald J. Trump in a Manhattan courthouse on Monday included a former president of an outlaw motorcycle gang in New York City who spent years in prison on drug charges.The man, Chuck Zito, helped found in the early 1980s the New York Nomads chapter of the Hells Angels, the infamous club that started in California. The Justice Department described the organization as a criminal enterprise and linked the New York chapter to the Gambino crime family. Mr. Zito later left the biker group to try become a movie star in Hollywood.Mr. Trump has long shown an affection for macho bikers, and addressed a rally of them in Washington in 2016 before the election. (“Do we love the bikers? Yes. We love the bikers,” he told the crowd.) A group called Bikers for Trump took part in several so-called Stop the Steal rallies after Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election.Mr. Zito was joined in the courtroom on Monday by several Trump allies who have been charged with crimes.They included Boris Epshteyn, a legal adviser indicted in an Arizona case related to attempts to keep Mr. Trump in power after the 2020 election, and Bernard Kerik, the former commissioner of the New York Police Department, who was imprisoned for tax-related charges and later pardoned by Mr. Trump. The entourage was so large that Mr. Epshteyn helped coordinate seating.Mr. Zito has experience with the criminal justice system, having served a prison term from 1985 to 1991 on drug conspiracy charges. In recent decades, he has created a new career as a stuntman and occasional actor, starring most prominently as Chucky “The Enforcer” Pancamo in the HBO prison drama “Oz.”Mr. Zito is also something of a professional tough-guy-about-town with many acquaintances in New York and Hollywood. He once served as a boxing trainer for the actor Mickey Rourke, and when the mob boss John Gotti died of cancer in 2002, Mr. Zito was one of the few non-Mafia members to attend the wake at a funeral home in Queens. More

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      This Is What Worries Me About the Trump Trial

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      I can’t remember when I’ve been more disturbed by a criminal trial than I have been by the Manhattan trial of Donald Trump. The prosecutors are painting a vivid picture of Trump as a vile and dishonest person, and the daily pilgrimages of Republican politicians to the Manhattan courthouse, in spite of horrific testimony against Trump, demonstrates that the party has a broken soul.At the same time, the underlying legal theory supporting the prosecution’s case remains dubious. The facts may be clear, but the law is anything but — and that could very well mean that the jury convicts Trump before the election, an appeals court reverses the conviction after the election, and millions of Americans, many of them non-MAGA, face yet another crisis of confidence in American institutions.Let’s first discuss the dreadful facts. Stormy Daniels’s testimony crystallized, better than that of any other witness, the prosecution’s theory that Trump ordered Michael Cohen to pay off Daniels to save his campaign and then fraudulently disguised the reimbursements. It helped answer a key question: Why would a known playboy, a person who has boasted of his affairs with his friends’ wives, suddenly be so keen to suppress details of his encounter with a porn star?Consider the timeline. On Oct. 7, 2016, the “Access Hollywood” story broke. The Washington Post released the infamous recording in which Trump told Billy Bush, one of the show’s hosts, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” Trump went on, saying he could grab women by the genitals. “You can do anything.”The next day, a representative for Daniels told The National Enquirer that Daniels was willing to talk on the record about her encounter with Trump. We now know from Daniels’s sworn testimony that her story was going to essentially affirm the “Access Hollywood” tape. Trump used his star power to draw in Daniels and then exploited her.At trial, she did not testify to a frivolous or joyful encounter with Trump; she testified to something far more distressing. He invited her to his hotel room, and after she went to the bathroom, she walked out to find Trump on the bed in just his boxers and a T-shirt. She did not claim he forced himself on her, but she said she left “shaking” and testified that she was ashamed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Seven Theories for Why Biden Is Losing (and What He Should Do About It)

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      It’s not Joe Biden’s poll numbers that worry me, exactly. It’s the denial of what’s behind them.Among likely voters, Biden is trailing Donald Trump by one point in Wisconsin and three points in Pennsylvania. He’s ahead by a point in Michigan. Sweeping those three states is one route to re-election, and they’re within reach.Still, Biden is losing to Trump. His path is narrowing. In 2020, Biden didn’t just win Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. He also won Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. Now he’s behind in those states by six points, nine points and 13 points in the latest Times/Siena/Philadelphia Inquirer poll. Have those states turned red? No. That same poll finds Democrats leading in the Arizona and Nevada Senate races. The Democrats are also leading in the Senate races in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.National polls find Democrats slightly ahead of Republicans for control of congress. The “Never Biden” vote now looks larger than the “Never Trump” vote. The electorate hasn’t turned on Democrats; a crucial group of voters has turned on Biden.This week, the Biden team appeared to shake up the race by challenging Trump to two debates. One will take place early, on June 27. The other will be in September. Biden’s video was full of bluster. “Donald Trump lost two debates to me in 2020,” he said. “Since then, he hasn’t shown up for a debate. Now he’s acting like he wants to debate me again. Well, make my day, pal. I’ll even do it twice.”Biden, it seemed, was calling Trump’s bluff. He wanted the fight. But Biden wants fewer debates, not more. On the same day, he pulled out of the three debates scheduled by the Commission on Presidential Debates for September and October. He rebuffed the Trump campaign’s call for four debates. “I’ll even do it twice” is misdirection. He’ll only do it twice.This is bad precedent and questionable politics. Debates do more to focus and inform the public than anything else during the campaign. Biden is cutting the number of debates by a third and he’s making it easier for future candidates to abandon debates altogether.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More