The Judge in Trump’s Hush-Money Trial Is Already Sick of Him

Donald Trump is not known for restraint when it comes to social media, particularly regarding people he doesn’t like. And when one of his lawyers tried to deny it during his hush-money trial Thursday, the judge called him out.

Prosecutors warned Judge Juan Merchan that the former president would likely attack the prosecution’s witnesses against him during the trial, noting he appears to have violated his gag order seven times since the start of the week. Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche tried to promise his client would stop posting like that on social media, but Merchan saw right through it.

“That he will not tweet about any witness? I don’t think that you can make that representation,” Merchan said.

Merchan has a lot of evidence to back up that stance: Trump repeatedly attacks his critics on social media, dating back to his days on Twitter (now X). His posts on Truth Social have resulted in multiple gag orders against him, and he’s already attacked the prosecution, Merchan, and Merchan’s daughter in this case. He even posted Wednesday night about a liberal jury conspiracy he heard on Fox News.

The witnesses against him will likely include his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, as well as adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who allegedly received the hush money payment. Trump and Cohen have a long history of animosity, and we all know Trump doesn’t ever hold a grudge for a long time.

Trump already has been told off by Merchan for talking out loud in court, and has to attend a contempt hearing next week for alleged gag order violations. And, regardless of what his former attorneys say, witness intimidation and criticizing Merchan’s daughter are not protected in the Constitution.

During jury selection at Donald Trump’s hush-money trial on Thursday, a potential juror was excused for making an apt comparison: The former president reminded him of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

The man, who is originally from Italy, said it would be “hard to be fair and impartial” because of the similarities.

Berlusconi and Trump do have some things in common: Both were business professionals who went on to be elected to political office, and both faced (and continue to face) criticism for unethical business practices, both in and out of office.

The major difference, though, is that Berlusconi seems to have been far more successful politically, as well as financially. He served as prime minister in four different governments for nine years, and he was the third-wealthiest person in Italy with a net worth of $6.8 billion when he died in 2023. His holdings included real estate (like Trump), the largest media company in Italy, and the soccer club AC Milan.

Like Trump, Berlusconi was also in legal trouble due to his business activities, with a long list of charges including fraud, false accounting, soliciting prostitution, bribery, and defamation. Unsurprisingly, he called these charges “judicial persecution” and said the goal was “subverting the votes of the Italian people.”

Trump, however, has never been upfront about his net worth, remarking in the past that it changes based on his daily mood. Lately, though, it seems to be dropping.

So far, Trump has only been elected to office once, and he didn’t even win the popular vote. And while Trump’s legal cases have only just begun, he can’t pretend to have the wealth and influence that Berlusconi used to skirt any serious legal consequences, regardless of the Republican Party’s influence over the Supreme Court.

House Republicans traded personal barbs on Thursday as disagreements over foreign aid packages to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan threaten to throw the caucus into further chaos.

During a morning huddle around Speaker Mike Johnson, who has struggled to rally his party around the aid bills, Wisconsin Representative Derrick Van Orden got in Florida Representative Matt Gaetz’s face and called him “tubby.” Van Orden later confirmed the insult.

“He felt like he should call me a squish, and I wanted to remind anybody who has not been in combat and held his friend’s hand as they died being shot by the enemy really doesn’t have any business calling someone else a squish. And so, in fact, I did call him tubby and I stand by that,” he said.

Later, on the steps of the Capitol, Gaetz fired back at his Republican colleague who, along with Marjorie Taylor Greene, has called for a motion to remove Johnson from the speakership.

“The only thing I gleaned from [the exchange] is that Mr. Van Orden is not a particularly intelligent individual,” Gaetz said.

Gaetz led the charge in October to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, whom Johnson replaced. While Gaetz opposes the foreign aid packages, he has not called for Johnson’s ouster.

Johnson, physically and figuratively “surrounded by folks who have taken issue with his foreign aid plan,” reportedly “put his head in his hands and shook his head” on the House floor. The image sums up his brief time as speaker of the House. As for Gaetz, this is what he asked for.

Just months away from a presidential election that could decide the future of reproductive rights, congressional Democrats and abortion rights groups are not on the same page.

Many Democrats are warning that the right wing plans to revive the Comstock Act, a “zombie” law from 1873 banning the shipment of “every article or thing designed, adapted or intended for producing abortion.” The act could be used as a de facto national abortion ban in the post-Dobbs environment, a move that conservative Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have backed.

Several Democrats are pushing to repeal the law before the election, claiming that leaving it on the books would hand Donald Trump a loaded weapon with which to outlaw abortion nationwide without having an explicit ban on the procedure. But, NOTUS reported Thursday, they’ve received pushback from mainstream abortion rights groups. The organizations warn that passing legislation to repeal the law could cause complications with active litigation they are pursuing to challenge abortion restrictions.

“There’s a lot of litigation playing out that’s specific to this that many of the reproductive rights groups are in the middle of. They’re actually wanting to, they’re not wanting to see [the Comstock Act] change in the middle of that litigation. So that was at the request of Planned Parenthood and other reproductive freedom groups that have been fighting this for a long time,” Democratic Representative Pat Ryan said.

Critics of inaction on Comstock have called this strategy “akin [to] leaving [a potential Trump administration] a nuclear bomb.” Under a government willing to wield it, the Comstock Act could be used to ban birth control, condoms, and even sex toys.

“In this era of abortion winning elections, if Democrats don’t force votes in both chambers—yes, even the House—and campaign on this very out-in-the-open Republican plan to further subjugate women and pregnant people, it will confirm the party’s antipathy to delivering anything of substance on abortion,” Susan Rinkunas wrote for The New Republic in March. “But if Democrats do sound the alarm on Comstock, they might save us all from a Victorian prison—and they could even win in November.”

Trump recently declined to publicly endorse a national abortion ban, instead saying restricting access to the procedure should be left to the states. But in doing so, Trump tacitly condoned every single Republican-backed law on abortion. And the Republican record speaks for itself.

Columbia University brutally cracked down Thursday on ongoing student protests against Israel’s ruthless war on Gaza, sending in city police officers to arrest some demonstrators.

Students at both Columbia and Barnard College have been protesting for months, demanding the university divest from companies doing business with Israel. As part of the protest, students set up an encampment in the middle of campus on Wednesday.

In response, police on Thursday deployed a drone and brought five corrections buses, according to Talia Jane, a freelance journalist at the scene.

Videos of the encampment showed police entering campus on Thursday and beginning to arrest students. Meanwhile, university officials have reportedly barred people visibly carrying food from entering school grounds, in an attempt to prevent protesters from getting supplies.

Another video shows students flooding the streets outside of Columbia’s campus, preventing the corrections buses from leaving with the arrested protesters.

Three students have reportedly been suspended for participating in the protest, and their college IDs were reportedly deactivated. One of the three is student organizer Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Democratic Representative Illhan Omar.

The university’s dramatically heightened response comes a day after university President Minouche Shafik testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on antisemitism on college campuses. Shafik insisted that “antisemitism has no place on our campus, and I am personally committed to doing everything I can to confront it directly.”

The hearing, however, seemed to be more focused on the opinions of college faculty members, with Republicans Elise Stefanik and Tim Walberg specifically asking about disciplinary measures against two professors who made comments that were perceived as antisemitic.

Omar, on the other hand, asked Shafik about protests specifically, pointing out several attacks against antiwar as well as Palestinian solidarity protests, including an alleged chemical attack against pro-Palestinian protesters in January that is still under police investigation, according to Shafik.

Columbia has also been sued by five Jewish students and two student organizations after the university suspended the student groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine in November.

Thursday’s police involvement at Columbia is further evidence that the response to campus protests over Gaza across the country has mostly been one of censorship and hysteria designed to suppress pro-Palestinian activism, as Osita Nwanevu wrote for The New Republic in December. The crowds at protests both on and off college campuses are diverse, with Jews, Muslims, Black, and brown demonstrators. Critics, particularly Republican lawmakers, often hide behind allegations of antisemitism as a way to launch attacks on academic freedom.

Funding for Ukraine and Israel has been hotly contested in Congress. For Marjorie Taylor Greene, it’s just fodder for trolling.

As two separate supplemental aid packages make their way through the House, Greene has proposed a series of outlandish amendments to both bills. For a measure on Ukrainian military aid, Greene submitted amendments requiring members who vote for the aid to “conscript in the Ukrainian army,” and directing President Joe Biden to withdraw from NATO.

And for Israel, Greene, far from requiring aid to be conditioned on Israeli compliance with international law, played one of her old hits: She proposed that funding in the bill be allocated to “the development of space laser technology on the southwest border,” a callback to her previous antisemitic remarks about “Jewish space lasers,” with a bit of gratuitous eliminationist rhetoric about migrants.

There are plenty of good reasons to oppose military aid to Israel, and opposition to arming Ukraine has become a signature position of the hard right. But Greene appears to have no interest in engaging with the subjects on their merits at all. Instead, the amendments are part of Greene’s campaign against House Speaker Mike Johnson, whom she has threatened to oust for bringing aid bills to the House floor.

Johnson has struggled to get his caucus behind the aid packages; it’s the reason why he divided up the countries into separate bills. Greene is one of the faces of Republican resistance to Johnson’s leadership, but hard-line GOP dissatisfaction with Johnson dates back to his first days as speaker.

Greene’s opposition to aid for Israel puts her in the minority of her party, while Ukrainian aid has divided the Republican Party, prompting senior members to declare that their colleagues are repeating Russian propaganda. Greene has come under fire recently for praising Vladimir Putin and suggesting that Ukraine is waging a “war on Christianity.” But her latest stunt, emblematic of a distinctive style of conservative politics, suggests that her positions aren’t particularly principled. She’s just happy to get off a few jokes.

A Republican representative has a new conspiracy about the January 6 insurrection, and despite the GOP’s laundry list of theories about the attack, this might be one of the strangest yet.

Representative Greg Murphy floated the idea Wednesday night that Donald Trump’s secretary of the army “slow-walked” the deployment of National Guard troops to the Capitol on January 6 “in order to allow more chaos to occur” so that he could get a job in the Biden administration.

“They were ready to act, and they were slow-walked by the Secretary of the Army, apparently with some thoughts that he was going to join the Biden administration,” Murphy told Newsmax. “I don’t have first-hand knowledge of that, but that’s one of the general working diagnoses is, as we say.”

This is an incredible theory, to say the least. If anyone is guilty of delaying a response to the riots, it’s Donald Trump. Those close to the president that day even claim that he wasn’t interested in any swift action. This is coupled with the fact that many of those arrested in connection with the riots say that they were answering a call to action from then-President Trump himself.

Republicans have repeatedly downplayed the attack, insisting that it was full of fake Trump supporters who arrived on “ghost buses,” that the government instigated the whole thing, and even that rioters were just taking a walk.

For a party with a reputation of pushing military pride and “support the troops” rhetoric, Republicans have engaged in baseless attacks against U.S. military leaders in the post-Trump era, from holding up military promotions to attacking “supposed wokeness” within the armed forces. Murphy’s new theory really goes to show that to MAGA Republicans, no American institutions are considered off-limits if you can use them to score political points.

Just days after a former federal prosecutor warned that publicizing information about potential jurors in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial could put them in danger, an outed jury member came forward to express concern about being identified.

“Juror number two,” a nurse, explained that friends and colleagues were able to identify her based on personal details revealed during the screening and selection process.  

“I definitely have concerns now … about being in public. Yesterday alone, I had friends, colleagues push things to my phone questioning my identity as a juror. I don’t believe at this point that I can be fair and unbiased and let the outside influences not affect my decision to be in the courtroom,” she said.

Judge Juan Merchan, the Manhattan Supreme Court justice presiding over the case, allowed her to be excused. Merchan then took extra measures to protect the identities of jurors, asking journalists not to report on jurors’ places of employment, a detail included on the questionnaires filled out during selection. 

“There’s a reason why this is an anonymous jury and we’re taking the measures that were taken. And it kind of defeats the purpose of that when so much information is put out there that it is very, very easy for us to identify who the jurors are,” Merchan said.

“I’m directing that the press simply apply common sense and refrain from writing about physical descriptions. It’s just not necessary. It serves no purpose,” he continued. “There’s no need for anyone to mention that one of the jurors had an Irish accent. I don’t see how that advanced any interest whatsoever.”

Fox News host Jesse Watters had revealed information about the juror, including her and her fiancée’s occupations, during a segment about the trial on Tuesday night. “I’m not so sure about juror number two,” he said.

Trump elevated Watters’s segment the following day, claiming that “Liberal Activists” were trying to sneak onto the jury and bias the outcome against him.

As critics have pointed out, enough information on the lives of the jurors has already been reported to identify many of them, potentially putting them in danger. Judges presiding over January 6–related cases have faced right-wing intimidation and harassment campaigns. Fears of similar mob-like tactics being employed against jurors, particularly in Trump’s myriad lawsuits, are well founded.

Judge Lewis Kaplan warned jurors in E. Jean Carroll’s January defamation suit against Trump to “never disclose that you were on this jury.” If juror number two’s experience is indicative, staying silent may not be enough.

Melania Trump is not happy with her husband for mentioning their son Barron’s high school graduation in court, according to a new report.

Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary under Donald Trump, told The Daily Mail that she thinks Melania wasn’t happy that her husband would be bringing unwanted attention to their son.

“He talked about missing Barron’s graduation to the cameras and then again on TruthSocial because it caused a lot of coverage about that, and it’s just not something she would have liked,” Grisham said.

The former president complained at his hush-money trial earlier this week about not being able to attend his youngest child’s graduation. In fact, the judge has yet to decide whether to grant him an exception. Donald Trump is required by New York state law to attend every day of his hush-money trial over his alleged paying off of adult film actress Stormy Daniels to cover up an affair. Judge Juan Merchan said granting the exception would depend on whether the trial is running on schedule—something that hinges largely on whether Trump continues to try to delay proceedings.

Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer and lawyer, dismissed Trump’s complaints as “comical” in an interview with the MeidasTouch, saying that he “wasn’t aware” that the former president had attended the graduations of any of his four other children. Cohen also recalled how Trump’s requirements caused Cohen to miss his own family events.

“I missed my twenty-fifth anniversary and my wife’s fiftieth birthday because I was in Otisville, in part because of things that I had done at the direction of and for the benefit of Donald Trump,” Cohen said.

“So, before I start shedding a tear for him, for Barron, and I’m sure Melania is extremely excited he’s not going to be there,” Cohen continued. “Rest assured, I’m not losing any sleep, nor am I going to shed a tear that Trump can’t go to Barron’s graduation.”

There’s no love lost between Cohen and the former president. Trump’s ex-attorney will be a key witness in Trump’s hush-money trial, as he allegedly set up the illegal payments to Daniels.

“He should be worried about the Manhattan district attorney, the district attorney of New York prosecutors, he should be worried about the documentary evidence, he should be worried about all of the witnesses that are going to be coming into that trial simply because, as others have also appropriately put it, this is a simple case,” Cohen told MSNBC in March.

Donald Trump’s disregard for the law seemingly knows no bounds. His latest violation? A judge-mandated gag order.

On Wednesday, Trump, facing trial in Manhattan in his hush-money case, appeared to violate—again—Judge Juan Merchan’s prohibition against making public statements about prospective jurors. He echoed comments made by Fox News host Jesse Watters, who accused jurors of hiding left-wing sympathies during jury selection so as to stack the jury against the former president.

“‘They are catching undercover Liberal Activists lying to the Judge in order to get on the Trump jury,’ Jesse Waters,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

There is, of course, no evidence for the claim that jurors are smuggling in their anti-Trump beliefs. The screening process, which included a questionnaire that asked jurors about their media consumption habits, has turned up potential jurors who have expressed distaste for Trump, but nothing suggests that these jurors have been specifically selected to serve. Trump has maintained, also without evidence, that he cannot receive a fair trial in Manhattan, and has pushed to move the trial to Staten Island, the only New York City borough Trump won as a presidential candidate.

Merchan’s gag order against commenting on jurors is hardly the first imposed on Trump. Merchan has already expanded the gag order after Trump criticized his daughter and ruled that Trump must attend a contempt hearing next about his various alleged gag order violations. Prosecutors have asked Merchan to fine Trump $3,000 for disparaging witnesses.

Trump’s struggle appears not to be with Merchan specifically, but with the very concept of a gag order. Judge Tanya Chutkin imposed one on him in his D.C. election interference trial. So did Judge Arthur Engoron, who presided over his civil fraud case. Trump’s legal team has its work cut out for it: Their client faces a total of 91 felony counts and has already lost the civil fraud case. The least they can do is tell him to stay off his phone.