The Week That Muzzled Donald Trump

For decades, Donald Trump has operated in a consistent fashion: If you cross him, expect a counterattack that’s disproportionately more brutal and unrelenting than anything you did to him.

But after Justice Juan Merchan delivered a stern warning at the beginning of the week that if he keeps violating his gag order he’ll land himself in jail, Trump finds himself in an unfamiliar position: Bubbling over with rage and without a good outlet to let some of it fly. The real threat of jail — no matter how insistent he is that he’d proudly walk into Rikers — has thus far made him largely respect the gag order this week.

The timing of Merchan’s warning came at an especially inopportune time for Trump. On Tuesday and Thursday, the former president was forced to sit and listen to explosive and at times lewd testimony from Stormy Daniels, who described in some detail the sex that they had. Trump defense attorney Susan Necheles also brought up some of Daniels’ former public insults directed towards Trump, sure to make the former president’s blood boil, including “I don’t owe him shit and I’ll never give that orange turd a dime.”

While sitting through testimony from Daniels that sounded at times designed to humiliate him — Necheles at one point brought up Daniels’ comments that when she saw Trump in his underwear she almost fainted — Trump was visibly huffing and puffing, shaking his head, and shifting in his seat. At one point, he seemed to mouth “bullshit,” behavior demonstrable enough that Merchan instructed his lawyers to get him to cool off.

That request might be categorically impossible to fulfill. Since he burst onto the political scene, Trump’s appeal to Republicans was precisely his attack dog mentality — leave no slight unpunished, no rival unbruised, and always exact revenge. In his 2007 book “Think Big,” he explained his first rule of business: “Always get even. When you are in business, you need to get even with people who screw you.”

Charting his political career, it’s easy to see that mentality playing out in real time. He’s purged the Republican Party of his detractors, insulted and disparaged his skeptics, and driven out of office some of the GOP’s most prominent politicians. Of the ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after Jan. 6, only two remain in Congress — in no small part due to his efforts.

Trump’s scorched earth strategy has made him one of the most polarizing presidents ever to hold office, but it’s also propelled the unshakable loyalty that many of his supporters have for him. In court this week, however, his political superpower — the willingness to launch shock-and-awe, no-holds-barred personal attacks on his foes — was neutralized.

He’s been forced to rely on surrogates without the charisma or the killer instinct to deliver his message.

“What’s happening in this courtroom is clearly criminal. It’s being led by political thugs,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) put it in an appearance outside the Manhattan courtroom on Thursday.

While Trump shared some of Scott’s comments on Truth Social, he notably didn’t include the point he wanted to convey the most — his belief about the criminality of the trial, as that would have been a violation of his gag order.

Merchan’s crackdown this week has put Trump in a position with which he’s never before had to contend — even visible fuming in his chair can rise to the level of contempt, as the judge reminded Trump and his lawyers in the midst of Daniels’ testimony on Tuesday. When the adult film star returned to court on Thursday, Trump was a bit more cowed. At some point, soon, though, he might no longer be able to contain his frustration.

Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said Friday that there are likely only two witnesses remaining in the prosecution’s case-in-chief. “It’s entirely possible that we will rest by the end of next week,” Steinglass said.

Even so, it’s a week that’s likely to test Trump like no other. One of those witnesses, currently likely to appear on Monday, is Michael Cohen, who is both the key witness in the prosecution’s case and Trump’s old fixer-turned-foe.

Once an instrument of Trump’s fury, Cohen’s break with Trump is so complete that Merchan has had to instruct prosecutors to get Cohen to stop discussing the case on TikTok.

Trump’s animosity toward his former associate is by now well-known. In early April, Trump called Cohen and Daniels “two sleaze bags who have, with their lies and misrepresentations, cost our Country dearly!” That’s just the latest of many insults that Trump has thrown at Cohen since 2018, when Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance crimes related to Trump.

And Cohen has fired right back, calling Trump “VonShitzInPantz” on X (formerly Twitter), a nickname that Trump attorney Todd Blanche read aloud in court to complain about Cohen’s social media activity.

Trump’s legal case rests on his lawyers’ ability to discredit Cohen’s testimony, in what is sure to be a fiery cross-examination. In the near term, though, thanks to Merchan’s gag order, Trump’s ability to stay out of jail may rest on whether he can continue to suppress his natural instincts to attack. It won’t come easily.

This article first appeared in POLITICO Nightly.