Donald Trump appears to have lost his cool during adult film actress Stormy Daniels’ testimony in his criminal hush money trial on Tuesday, cursing as she began describing the an alleged sexual encounter between the two, prompting a rebuke from Judge Juan Merchan.
“I understand that your client is upset at this point, but he is cursing audibly, and he is shaking his head visually and that’s contemptuous,” Merchan told Trump attorney Todd Blanche during a sidebar, NBC News reported, citing court transcripts.
The sidebar conversation came as Daniels was describing an encounter with Trump at a Lake Tahoe golf course that was sexual in nature, testifying that she spanked Trump with a rolled-up magazine in his hotel room.
Trump, on trial for allegedly falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 hush payment to Daniels, is barred by a gag order from speaking about witnesses outside the courtroom. Merchan said he would not tolerate any such behavior inside the Manhattan courthouse, either.
“It has the potential to intimidate the witness and the jury can see that,” Merchan told Blanche. “I am speaking to you here at the bench because I don’t want to embarrass him.”
Merchan instructed Blanche to speak with his client, stating that Trump had also “uttered a vulgarity” when Daniels began speaking about “The Apprentice,” testifying that the former president repeatedly dangled an opportunity to appear on the show.
Merchan’s warning comes a day after he found Trump in contempt for a 10th violation of his gag order. To date, Trump has been fined for each violation, but Merchan said that jail time will be considered if he violates it again.
Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to postpone a trial in Donald Trump’s classified documents case could actually make it easier to move ahead with the former president’s other criminal proceedings, legal experts say.
According to Neil Katyal, former acting U.S. solicitor general, Cannon’s decision could, in particular, allow special counsel Jack Smith to press ahead with the Jan. 6 case against Trump. The former president has been charged with plotting to overturn the 2020 election, a case that is being handled by a federal judge in Washington, DC.
“The one thing I will say that’s a positive is that if the Supreme Court allows Jack Smith’s other trial of Trump and Jan. 6 to go forward, Judge Cannon’s decision today has now cleared the docket for Trump,” Katyal said in an interview with MSNBC’s Alex Wagner.
Katyal added that he believes it’s now “more possible” that a trial over January 6 could go forward, pending a Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity. That case, which centers on Trump’s alleged conspiracy to use a mob to stop the certification of the 2020 election, had been set to begin trial in March, before the Supreme Court took up Trump’s claim of immunity.
Criminal defense attorney Bradley P. Moss, in a post on X, argued that Cannon’s decision indeed has “a silver lining” for other Trump trial efforts.
“She isn’t blocking the DC or Georgia election cases from resuming in the late summer/early fall, pending SCOTUS ruling on immunity,” he wrote. The Georgia case, delayed by allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, likewise deals with Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss.
It appears unlikely, though, that the documents case itself moves forward. Katyal noted that Cannon has already had 11 months to begin a trial; in the same amount of time, federal prosecutors tried and convicted Sam Bankman-Fried. That’s “atrocious,” Katyal argued, but unlikely to be enough for prosecutors to have Cannon removed.
Even though humans are experiencing the hottest months in recorded human history, and scientists warn our species is living on “borrowed time,” a recent poll found a notable dip in the number of people who view climate change as an urgent issue.
In the latest poll by Monmouth University, less than half (46%) of the American public perceives global heating as being a very serious problem. While this is still higher than the figure from nine years ago (41% in 2015), it is also lower than more recent polling, which had the figure at over half (54% in 2018 and 56% in 2021). Concern about the urgency of addressing climate change — characterizing it as “very serious” — has dropped among all political groups: Democrats (85% to 77% since 2021), Republicans (21% to 13% since 2021) and independents (56% to 43% since 2021). Voters today by far are more worried about issues like inflation, immigration and reproductive rights.
