Donald Trump may have stupidly put himself in contempt of court again today without even trying to
Donald Trump was held in contempt of court on Friday and fined $5,000 for failing to delete a syndicated version of an already-deleted social media post that he probably didn’t even know was still there. It was clear that Judge Engoron was out of patience, and didn’t care that Trump violated the gag order by mistake, and is just waiting for Trump to step in it again before dropping a far bigger hammer.
Today Trump called Judge Engoron a “lunatic” on social media. Some folks are already holding this up as supposed proof that Trump is just going to do whatever he wants and get away with it all. But in reality, what we’re seeing is that Trump is a dummy who lacks proper legal representation.
When Judge Engoron issued the gag order several days ago, it was in response to Trump’s social media attack against the judge’s clerk. The judge stated that the gag order applied to all officers of the court. The judge was clearly trying to protect the clerk, the bailiff, and the other civil servants who aren’t in position to defend themselves. After all, they can’t just throw Trump in jail, like the judge can.
But here’s the thing: the judge himself is also an officer of the court. So if the judge was including himself in that gag order, then Trump did indeed violate it today. It would be yet another example of Trump not understanding how any of this works, mistakenly thinking the gag order only applied to people like the clerk, and not having a decent lawyer to explain to him that the gag order might also apply to the judge.
The thing is, we don’t know if the judge was including himself in this gag order. If he wasn’t, then nothing will come of today’s “lunatic” outburst, because Trump won’t have violated the gag order. But if the judge was including himself in the gag order, then you can bet he’s going to hit Trump hard over this.
As I said yesterday, Trump used up his one “oopsie” when he mistakenly violated the gag order by failing to take down a duplicate copy of a social media post that he didn’t know was still up. If Trump now goes back to the judge and argues that he didn’t know the judge himself was included in the gag order, the judge is going to say “Too bad, if you weren’t sure you should have asked for clarification, I gave you the benefit of the doubt on this last one but you’re not getting it on this one.”
Again, it’ll all come down to what Judge Engoron intended when he issued the gag order. The dangerous part for Trump is that this kind of thing is all at the judge’s discretion. If Judge Engoron was indeed including himself in the gag order, then he’ll punish Trump in whatever manner he sees fit – and there will be nothing Trump can do about it. Trump can appeal any pretrial punishment, but the appeals court wouldn’t want to get involved unless it’s unusually over the top. Donald Trump is simply powerless at this point. This is a guy who now has to worry that his every word might get him locked up. And that’s going to continue to be the case until he is ultimately locked up.
