Trump Can’t Bluster His Way Through Court
Shortly after announcing his indictment last Thursday, Donald Trump posted a video to Truth Social complaining about persecution. Over the course of four minutes, he claimed multiple times that he’d won his reelection bid, asserted his innocence, called the Russia investigation a plot engineered by Hillary Clinton, and insisted that every investigation into his conduct was “a hoax and a scam.” His speeches over the weekend featured a torrent of false claims.
During his arraignment yesterday, in contrast, the former president said nothing. According to reporters, he sat silently with his arms crossed while his lawyer entered his plea of not guilty. There would be more bombast yet to come at a speech later that evening. But for that brief period in court, the lies ground to a halt.
Trump has built a political juggernaut out of shameless lying. Or perhaps not even lying. It’s practically a cliché at this point to refer to the philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit, which Frankfurt describes as distinct from, and worse than, a lie, in that the bullshitter doesn’t even care whether or not what he’s saying is true. Trump is a consummate bullshitter—but the courtroom is an inhospitable place for that sort of bluster. It’s an environment designed for careful, systematic evaluation of meaning and argument. In court, Trump is no longer on his home turf. In that sense, the Mar-a-Lago indictment represents the latest collision between the legal system and Trump’s insistence on defining the terms of his own reality.
Trump’s own accounts of what happened with the classified documents he allegedly brought to Mar-a-Lago are characteristically fantastical. Often, he says that he declassified them before leaving office—a claim for which there’s no evidence. Sometimes, he insists that his enemies are unjustly persecuting him despite their own supposed record of absconding with sensitive materials. (There’s no evidence that they’ve done so deliberately, much less that they’ve then refused to return them.) Recently, many of his posts on Truth Social about the case have appeared in all capital letters, as if he’s shouting through the computer screen.
The indictment, in contrast, is a quiet, controlled document. It walks through the case against Trump and his aide, Walt Nauta, with brusque efficiency: Trump took government papers that didn’t belong to him; he lied and refused to give them back when the government came calling; and in doing so, he put the country at risk. At times, the indictment punctures Trump’s bluster by using his own words. In one exchange reproduced by Special Counsel Jack Smith, Trump tells a staffer that “as president I could have declassified” a document, but “now I can’t”—a direct rebuttal to the many times Trump has claimed in public that he declassified the records in question during his time in office. Elsewhere, the indictment repeats paragraph after paragraph of comments made by Trump during his campaign and presidency, insisting on the importance of protecting classified information. The indictment is a refusal to yield to Trump’s desire to shape the world around whatever truth he happens to like best at the time.
Trump, Smith alleges, ignored laws about the handling of classified materials because he didn’t want them to exist—and when the government came looking, he repeatedly tried to rewrite the facts by hiding additional documents away and encouraging the people around him, including his lawyers, to lie to government investigators. “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” he said, according to his lawyer’s notes. “Well look isn’t it better if there are no documents?”
Just like Trump’s lies about winning the 2020 election, these suggestions were an effort to reshape reality to his will. By refusing to relinquish control of materials that he could legally access only when president, he was also maintaining the fantasy that he still holds that office by right.
The government, though, was unimpressed. The indictment makes it clear: “At 12:00 p.m. on January 20, 2021, TRUMP ceased to be president.”
For all that Trump loves to file lawsuits against those he claims have wronged him, the courtroom represents a space perhaps uniquely hostile to Trumpian falsehoods. Lawyers can’t lie before a judge or make assertions with no grounding in law or fact. They have to set out the reasoning behind their claims, instead of just insisting that something is correct because they say so. As the philosopher Jeremy Waldron puts it, law represents “a mode of thoughtfulness that allows rival and competing claims to confront and engage with one another in an orderly process … without degenerating into an incoherent shouting match.” It’s hard to think of something less Trumpian.
Already in the Mar-a-Lago investigation, this aspect of the law has limited Trump’s ability to lie. Shortly after the FBI searched the Palm Beach, Florida, estate in August, Trump sued to prevent the Justice Department from accessing the seized materials. He was employing a familiar tactic, buying himself more time by throwing up legal barriers for his opponent to surmount. But in doing so, he also provided the government with a platform to set out its case against him. In a preview of this month’s indictment, the Justice Department responded with a lengthy, devastating account of how Trump and his team repeatedly hindered the government’s efforts to take custody of sensitive information. Trump, meanwhile, had to hold back in court from claiming that he’d declassified the documents in question, as he and his legal team insisted on television and social media. He couldn’t make that argument before a judge, because it wasn’t true.
That was far from the only time the Trump team has arrived in court unable to substantiate the former president’s wild claims. Over the course of efforts to challenge and overturn the 2020 presidential election, lawyers representing the Trump campaign or sympathetic groups made arguments about supposed election irregularities on television and social media that failed to hold up. “While there are many arenas—including print, television, and social media—where protestations, conjecture, and speculation may be advanced,” wrote one judge, “such expressions are neither permitted nor welcomed in a court of law.” Many of the lawyers who chose to advance such speculation anyway, including Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani, are now facing ethics investigations.
Elsewhere in the legal system, litigants are using defamation law as a tool to undercut the Big Lie of 2020 election fraud; Dominion Voting Systems, for example, was able to secure a hefty settlement from Fox News. “The truth matters. Lies have consequences,” said a Dominion attorney after the settlement was announced. Trump, too, has faced this strategy, in the context of E. Jean Carroll’s successful civil case against him for sexual abuse and defamation after he denied her claim that he’d attacked her in a department-store dressing room.
So United States v. Donald Trump will not be Trump’s first confrontation with what we might call the anti-bullshit properties of the judicial system. It may also not be the last, as Smith continues to investigate Trump’s potential legal culpability for the January 6 insurrection. On the state level, there’s the potential of charges in Georgia for the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election there, as well as the New York State indictment of Trump for coordinating hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels in advance of the 2016 election. It’s tempting to look at that list and see the possibility of a resounding victory over Trump’s blather, a triumph of accountability that insists that facts matter and words mean what they say.
But Trump has a Houdini-like ability to extract himself from legal and political traps. The special counsel had an early stroke of bad luck in the judge appointed to oversee the case—Aileen Cannon, who also oversaw Trump’s lawsuit to hamstring the Justice Department’s investigation last year. Cannon botched that case so thoroughly, upending normal legal principles in service of an outcome favorable to Trump, that the conservative judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit were forced to step in and set things back on track. If Cannon handles the prosecution of Trump like she did his earlier suit, she’ll have an enormous amount of discretion to make the special counsel’s life difficult in prosecuting the case.
The story of Trump’s confrontation with law is also the story of his confrontation with various rule-bound institutions: the Justice Department; two special counsels; judges in black robes; and, during both impeachments, the House and Senate. Cannon’s presence, though, is a reminder that Trump was able to reshape many of those same institutions during his time in office. She is one of many judges appointed by Trump in his successful quest to remake the federal bench. In this respect, there’s an irony in how the courts and the law have been celebrated by some progressives and Trump opponents as a space privileging truth, even as Trump’s alliance with the conservative legal movement has pulled the federal judiciary sharply to the right and precipitated a growing crisis of public trust in the courts.
Trump has folded the indictment into his quest for reelection, demanding a chance to deal out retribution against those who have wronged him. Cannon’s role in the courtroom suggests another way to understand the stakes of a second Trump presidency. Given another four years, he’d be able to further refashion institutions in his image—and, in doing so, limit their ability and willingness to hold him to account again.