Judge Engoron slam dunks Donald Trump over gag order

| 2:33 pm EDT October 20, 2023
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After Donald Trump made a social media post attacking Judge Engoron’s clerk, the judge ordered Trump to immediately delete it, and issued a gag order barring Trump from even so much as mentioning any court officers going forward. Then this week someone noticed that the same post was still intact on Trump’s official website.

This felt like an unintentional thing; the Trump handlers who deleted the social media post probably didn’t know it had also been auto-posted to his website and thus didn’t know to also delete it. But today Donald Trump received an ugly reminder that as a criminal defendant awaiting trial, his rights are so constricted that even an unintentional violation of a gag order can still get him in serious trouble.

Today Judge Engoron slam dunked Donald Trump, informing him that sanctions including pretrial incarceration will come down against him if this happens again. There are a lot of folks who are demanding to know why Trump wasn’t simply thrown in jail today. But as I’ve tried to explain from the start, while punishments for pretrial misbehavior are severe, they’re handed out incrementally and in proportion. This judge wasn’t going to throw Trump in jail over what was likely a mistaken failure to take down a syndicated version of the offending post.

But unintentional or not, this was likely Donald Trump’s very last chance with this judge. At this point it’s a matter of seeing whether Trump totally cowers for the rest of this trial for fear of getting locked up, or if Trump blows it and ends up in a cell.