Jail Donald Trump

Justice Juan Merchan has no choice now, and shame on Democrats, particularly the powerful ones representing New York, for not standing up for the rule of law.

I woke up this morning thinking to myself, how do you get a New York state criminal court judge to watch an MSNBC segment. More specifically, I thought, How do you get the judge not to pretend the segment escaped his notice?

Here’s the segment in question. It’s relevance will be obvious to many of you, but I’ll elaborate below.

The panel is talking about the Republicans in Congress and in the MAGA diaspora who’ve made the journey to New York to “support” Donald Trump through his criminal trial, but really to stand outside the court and say things that Trump is barred by gag order from saying himself.

On Tuesday, a whole phalanx of dignity-deprived loyalists assembled to pick up where Trump left off a few weeks ago by singling out Justice Juan Merchan’s daughter—something the gag order expressly prohibits Trump from doing.

The unseemly parade of Republicans acting as passthroughs for Trump’s contempt has naturally fueled speculation that Trump himself might be scripting their diatribes, which would constitute a gag-order violation in and of itself. That order prohibits Trump from “making or directing others to make” comments about witnesses, jurors, most court officers, and their families, including Merchan’s daughter, Loren.

But the setup gave Trump plausible deniability—Speaker Mike Johnson and Vivek Ramaswamy and all the others aren’t gagged in this case, after all, and there was no hard evidence that they were taking instruction directly from Trump. Maybe they just intuited all the things he wanted them to say?

Not so says journalist Andrew Rice. He witnessed Trump annotate their talking points. Merchan may not want to jail Trump, but what choice has Trump left him?

MASTER OF PUPPETS

Trump can’t even really hide behind the distinction between “directing” and “suggesting.”