What It’s Really Like Inside Trump’s Trial

The stakes couldn’t be higher for Donald Trump. As he stands trial in Manhattan in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a U.S. president, stuck in a courtroom four days a week, he’s also running a reelection bid that, if successful, could effectively save him from his various criminal prosecutions.

Meanwhile, the gritty lower-Manhattan courtroom at 100 Centre Street where Trump is spending his days remains something of an enigma to the public. There are no cameras, and much of the trial proceedings have been withheld from public view thanks to New York’s antiquated court system and some unusual practices that the judge has adopted, like concealing certain court filings.

To get a peek inside the black box of the proceedings, I gathered four POLITICO writers who have been closely reporting on the Manhattan prosecution and its political ramifications: Erica Orden and Ben Feuerherd, who have been in the courtroom and in the courthouse covering this historic proceeding; Natalie Allison, who has been tracking the Trump campaign’s strategy for handling the trial; and Kyle Cheney, who has deeply reported on Trump’s criminal cases since their inception. Their insights offer a rare window into the trial that could shape the 2024 election — and politics as we know it for many years to come.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Erica, as we get started here, can you set the scene — talk about what it’s like getting into the courtroom every day and what it’s really like on the inside?

Orden: One of the curious things about this is that, unlike federal court, there aren’t really rules or guidelines in place to handle this sort of situation, where there’s a massive amount of media interest and Secret Service involved and components that are just not normal in federal court.

There’s much more security than on a regular basis. They’ve had to put a lot of measures in place that are specific to this trial. So when you get there, for reporters, there’s been an arrangement where there’s essentially one seat per outlet that’s reserved in the main courtroom, and if you have one of those seats — which thankfully I do — you line up in advance to go in in the morning.

When you go in, there’s two layers of security. There’s one on the ground floor, and then you have to go through another security screening on the 15th floor, which is where the courtroom is. It’s a somewhat onerous process, but we’ve gotten used to it over the last a week and a half.

And then there’s an overflow room, which Ben has largely been in and I was in for jury selection. In the main courtroom, most of the seats are taken by reporters. There’s a couple of rows in the front that have additional people from the District Attorney’s Office, Secret Service, a few other people from Trump’s defense team that are not his lead attorneys. But that’s pretty much it.

In the main courtroom, we’ve also seen some other people who are not newspaper or other daily reporters — for example, the author Michael Wolff has been there a couple of days so far, some cable news hosts who I don’t regularly see at trial proceedings, people like that.

There was a very tragic incident last Friday in which a man lit himself on fire outside of the courthouse. Has there been a visible increase or adjustments to security?

Orden: Not really. It took a little bit longer to get into the courthouse the day after that, but that didn’t necessarily seem to be connected. It’s hard to say.

They’re very restrictive about when people can leave the courtroom after Trump leaves. I’m not totally sure why. Because to be honest, there’s not a huge difference between this trial in terms of the operations of the trial and the civil fraud case, which I also covered, which was in a courtroom one block away, which Trump also attended almost every day.

Ben, you’re participating in the press pool, in which some reporters agree to share notes and material with reporters from other outlets as a way to limit the media presence. So you get to be in the hallway outside the courtroom, which most people can’t see. What’s that like?

Feuerherd: The advantage is actually getting to see Trump when he’s in the hallway, and how he speaks to the press, and his mannerisms and the whole atmosphere around him. The court officers have set up a pen of metal barricades where he will stand probably 15 feet away from the cameras and then just speak to the cameras.

It’s obviously not the sort of atmosphere that you would see Trump in normally. You’d typically see him in front of a big crowd or rally, but now he’s literally in a pen of metal barricades that were erected by court officers, speaking to a handful of cameras that are so far away. The person who takes audio has to use a big microphone boom to capture his voice.

At the same time, when he walks in between the courtroom and another courtroom where he stays during breaks, a handful of reporters will pepper him with questions. It’s not like he’s addressing an actual press conference. We’re yelling short, direct questions and maybe get a rise out of him or get some sort of brief response.

Is he responding to the questions? It seems like he’s just saying whatever he wants to say.

Feuerherd: He basically comes up, mostly ignores anything shouted at him, and then gives a spiel — sometimes for 10 minutes, sometimes for five minutes.

Is he prepared? Does he have notes and stuff?

Feuerherd: My sense is he sort of has an idea of what he’s going to riff on when he goes up there. Tuesday, there was the big contempt hearing in the morning, and then after court had ended, I shouted, “What do you think about the gag order?”

I think that was the exact question he wanted. He spoke about the gag order for 10 minutes.

I want to talk about the jurors very briefly. There was a lot of unease last week, including on my part, candidly, about how much information was being made available about them. Those of us who weren’t there, we can only just read their comments, but what is your perception firsthand? Are they getting acclimated to this? Is this comfortable for them? Can you tell?

Orden: It doesn’t seem particularly comfortable for them. When they enter the courtroom, none of them look at Donald Trump. I don’t think that’s highly unusual in any criminal trial. You have to imagine that jurors are a little bit uncomfortable coming that close or face-to-face with a person that they’re going to potentially have to convict. I haven’t seen any of them look at him when they walk right past him.

Obviously, a number of them have said that they feel uncomfortable with the media attention. I’ve been thinking about this, and the judge could have put a number of measures in place to help them — to escort them to and from the court every day.

I covered both of the [E. Jean] Carroll trials. That is what happened in both of those trials. The judge ordered them to be transported to and from the court every day so that they didn’t have to do what these jurors do, which is walk into court by themselves. I’m not tracking where they go in and where they go out, but there’s a huge number of news cameras and reporters outside the courtroom every day, and if they’re coming in — again, I don’t know what entrance they’re coming in — but if they’re getting anywhere near the courthouse, which of course they are, they’re going to encounter some of that. And I don’t blame them for being uncomfortable.

Natalie, we’ve been talking about the legal side so far, but obviously, there’s a whole parallel process on the campaign side grappling with this truly unprecedented electoral variable. Have there been any surprising responses to the trial that you’ve seen so far from Trump world?

Allison: Going into this, we knew that they were not stoked about the fact that he was going to be on trial.

There were potential silver linings, and we have seen that. He has days where his fundraising goes up depending on the onslaught of emails and texts he can send about him storming in and out of the courtroom.

He is to some degree able to keep his base engaged, but he is off the campaign trail for most of the weekend. He wasn’t spending every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday traveling around campaigning, so it’s not like this dramatically impacted his weekday schedule. But obviously sitting in a courtroom does keep him from being able to talk on the phone to his donor friends and just enjoy himself and relax and gear up for his weekend campaigning.

This past weekend, that was a really big letdown for him. I was there in Wilmington, North Carolina waiting for Trump to take the stage for his rally. It was going to be his first chance at a dose of normalcy since his trial started, where he was gonna have thousands of adoring fans in front of him, cheering for him.

That got canceled because of a storm. There were bolts of lightning and some thunder. About half an hour before he was supposed to take the stage, Trump called in to the rally — and it had to be Trump, because if he didn’t call in, these people probably wouldn’t have left — and said everyone needs to go home, seek shelter. Those people had been standing out there, some of them as long as four or five hours waiting for this to start. So for him, that was a big blow. It was something for him to look forward to after this week of being confined to a courtroom, but ultimately he was deprived of the sense of affirmation and his loyal supporters.

It’s not like he necessarily could turn around and do that again, another day. This week, he’s still on trial. This coming weekend is not a great rally weekend in terms of getting media coverage for him. I guess that’s why they didn’t schedule one, because of D.C. reporters going to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He keeps running into these barriers to being able to have a normal weekend rally.

Kyle, you and Erica wrote a great piece over the weekend about how unusual this court proceeding is — how much of it has actually been withheld from public view in comparison to the standard court case. You’ve covered the Jan. 6 cases and the Trump prosecutions closely for years now. What do you think about whether and to what extent this lack of transparency might have an effect on the public’s confidence in the outcome?

Cheney: Every one of Trump’s criminal cases has had shortcomings with the public’s ability to [engage] if they want to be engaged with it, if they want to be fully apprised of what’s happening.

The New York case is unique because the state court processes — the docket, the ability to access public filings — is just so unbelievably restrictive. As we noted in the story, the judge himself, Justice [Juan] Merchan and the DA, have imposed additional restrictions on the timeliness of filing. There are important fights that are happening, sometimes for days or weeks before we find out about them. It [creates] sort of a distorting effect. Something that might be very important to Donald Trump or his lawyers three weeks ago — we don’t learn about until now, and it’s sort of like living through a time warp in the trial.

As you just heard Erica and Ben describe what it’s like in the courthouse, their view of the trial can be very different than Americans’ view of the trial. That’s sort of a baseline. That’s normal for every New York state court case. There’s not cameras in the room for the most part. With the exception of Georgia, the other Trump cases as well have no cameras, so you’re starting from a position of limited view.

Then when you have these sort of time-distorting effects and redacted filings — and again, as we mentioned, email correspondence between the judge and the lawyers that are off the books, that may never be on the books. The judge has said, if you think they’re important, put them on the docket, but what’s important to the lawyers may be different than what’s important to the public.

Orden: It seems that only Trump’s lawyers are seeking to do that. So even if they were responding to that, you would only be getting what Trump’s lawyers deem important. It’s not like there’s a restriction on the DA’s office from doing that, but they don’t seem to be doing it.

Cheney: There doesn’t seem to be this sense of heightened responsibility to the public here. There may be a sense of prosecutorial and judicial restraint. They don’t want to disclose more than they would in the normal case. … The court system itself has started to post some of the exhibits and the transcripts, which is unusual, but even with that, there’s still not this heightened sense of, “We need to make sure that the public has confidence in this process by seeing more of it than they normally would.”

Orden: Not only is this a historic trial, but it’s a trial of a defendant who is claiming that he is not getting a fair trial. The way to evaluate that is by greater transparency, and instead here, we have even less transparency than you normally would get.

Kyle, do you see any strategies that Trump is deploying here? Obviously there’s the delay strategy; we all know that’s working pretty well for him so far. But do you see any defense strategies emerging or being introduced at this trial that Trump might deploy in other cases?

Cheney: I think it’s more of the political strategies, which is what Natalie can talk about. It’s this idea that he’s being railroaded, and pushing that narrative at every possible turn. When he steps into court, he simultaneously sends a fundraising [email], and it’s to ensure that whatever the outcome is here, that somehow a loss for him is some kind of a win. Because with his base, that’s a large, sizable chunk of the population that won’t accept the outcome no matter what. That’s a familiar strategy for him as well, in addition to the delay tactics.

The defense strategy is, “These are some minor bookkeeping errors or misjudgments that weren’t worthy of charging a former president of the United States” — the gravity, the enormity of that decision to charge him over what they say is this minor paperwork error is the actual defense in the courtroom. But I think his real defense is just conditioning the public to not trust the outcome.

Natalie, can you talk a little bit about that — how that strategy is working, and is it really working?

Allison: Well, the answer to your second question: TBD.

But the Trump campaign, they’re seeing this as an opportunity not only for him to energize his base, but to pick up new voters — and particularly, they claim, Black voters who are going to feel like they see themselves in Donald Trump somehow because of his involvement in the criminal justice system being, as he would say, wrongfully prosecuted in this case. They’re certainly trying to spin it not only as this base-motivating effort going into November, but claiming that they will be able to pick up a new subset of voters.

The polling on it sort of says different things. We are seeing all kinds of polls where people claim if Trump is convicted of a felony, they would be less likely to vote for him. We’re seeing other polls specifically about this New York trial there. I’m thinking of an Associated Press one in particular, released last week, saying that people don’t really care about this trial, that they think his other cases are serious, but that this case actually isn’t legitimate.

So we’re seeing some mixed data points on that. But certainly, the Trump campaign playbook on this is to continue to cry “witch hunt,” and to try to spin this on Biden and Alvin Bragg and Democratic city and state leaders everywhere across the country: “They are disregarding their own problems, and the Democrats at large are behind this effort to go after Trump.” That’s their playbook.

But it really is unclear how much of an impact this trial — or the other cases in the coming months — is going to have on him. To some degree, a lot of the Trump scandal is baked in. We’ve known that. And the question is: How much of a difference will it make come November? Is what is happening in the legal system going to actually move swing voters, the small subset of voters who are actually going to decide this election?

Cheney: For all his umbrage at being forced to sit in court in New York, he does seem to me at times to be much more focused on his criminal case in Washington, D.C., and even as we speak, he’s “truth-ing” on Truth Social about the immunity argument at the Supreme Court, which he’s mad he can’t even attend.

He attended the appeals court argument. It’s conceivable that he would have gone for the spectacle of it, but it’s a bit silly to request that in the middle of a criminal trial.

He seems more focused on that as the more acute threat to him from both a political sense and maybe even a legal sense as well. Part of the strategy, too, is to make the New York case seem like an afterthought or unimportant.

There’s this piece of conventional wisdom that holds — particularly among some Democrats or some liberals — that when Trump is covered closely in the news, a critical mass of people will remember the things that they do not like about him and potentially turn away from him in November.

But I want to talk about the Republican side of this. Do people in Trump’s orbit have a position on this question — his over-exposure in this particular context — whether it’s actually helpful or not helpful to them, and how they might manage him being in this fixed position for the next few weeks?

Allison: Maybe to some extent, it’s Republican cope, but by and large, there is this sense that free earned media is good for him, and he’s always thrived off of it.

He has learned to master it. You’re hearing that from a lot of people. Trump himself keeps posting on Truth Social, this clip of Harold Ford Jr. on [the Fox News show] The Five — the Democratic panelist — calling Trump a political athlete. Trump clearly liked that and keeps posting it himself.

I think the prevailing sentiment is that all of this media is good for him at a time where his campaign is really cash-strapped.

Orden: I can’t speak to whether this is good or bad for Trump, but him being in court every day, as with the civil fraud trial, does give him this opportunity to walk out in the hallway and see Ben and speak his mind and have that broadcast by cameras and reported by people. It does afford him that.

I don’t know, ultimately, whether that’s good for him or not, but he certainly is taking advantage of it.

Feuerherd: It’s stark to see Trump specifically in 100 Centre Street, which is a very gritty place — where even before his trial starts for the day, you can see people getting walked in with handcuffs. You’ll see people waiting for criminal arraignments in handcuffs.

It’s very much not the sort of grand courthouses that he has appeared in [in other cases].

Orden: I completely agree with that. It is a very, very, very strange circumstance to see him in.