Donald Trump is scared

| 6:30 pm EDT September 3, 2023
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Over the past two weeks Donald Trump’s social media posts on “Truth Social” have been more frequent and even more unhinged than ever. He’s been so cartoonishly over the top, it’s easy to overlook what’s been missing from his ranting and raving.

For all of his thousands of social media posts and all of his dramatic online meltdowns over the past couple weeks, Trump has largely steered away from attacking the prosecutors and judges in the criminal cases against him. This comes after the judges in those cases warned him of escalating and accelerating legal consequences for him if he kept making such posts.

It’s a good reminder that Donald Trump is, at his core, a hapless coward. His entire time in politics, in and out of office, has consisted of tepidly waiting too long to make a decision, ending up doing nothing at all, and then trying to rabidly overcompensate for it once he realized it was too late to make a difference. We’re seeing it again. Trump has been told that judges will crack down on him if he keeps making inappropriate posts, and instead of making a decision about whether to defy it or not, he’s trying to find some pointless middle ground by attacking everyone but the people he’s not allowed to attack.

Of course Trump is still loudly attacking New York Attorney General Letitia James and the judge who’s overseeing James’ civil probe into the Trump Organization. But that’s a probe where Trump hasn’t yet been explicitly told he has to shut up about. If and when that warning comes down, Trump will probably go quiet about that case as well, at least for a time.

It’s anyone’s guess as to how Trump stays quiet about the people he’s legally barred from attacking. In the E. Jean Carroll case, Trump spent the first morning of the trial attacking her, only to be immediately warned by the judge that he could be locked up for contempt. From there Trump went entirely silent until the day after he lost the trial. So there’s certainly precedent for Trump remaining quiet for the entire length of a trial. But Trump is so wishy washy in his decision making, it can be tricky to predict what he’ll end up doing.

In any case, to borrow a phrase from an excellent entertainment industry column published over the weekend, what stands out right now is that Donald Trump is afraid. If he thought he could get away with attacking the prosecutors and judges in his criminal cases, he’d be attacking them. But he’s now gone multiple weeks without such attacks, making clear that he’s afraid of what will happen to him if he dares to try it.

This is notable because a big part of Trump’s strategy is to viciously attack everyone who’s coming after him, in order to fire up his deranged base and get them to pay for his legal fees. But he’s afraid that if he keeps doing that, the criminal justice system will silence him sooner. Trump is in a no win situation, and he knows it.