Donald Trump on the stand? What could possibly go wrong, besides everything, because he’s a lying pantload of a screaming toddler who can’t handle being told no?
It’s going as you’d expect.
Arriving at court in his civil fraud trial in New York, he bitched and moaned that he was being election interferenced, and his brain ejaculated the lines it’s memorized about how Mar-a-Lago is worth one jillion gabillion thousands of million dollars, according to the current Zillow Zestimate. (Which, come to think of it, is probably low if you really think about how many hostile dictators would be willing to bribe Trump for some of the sweet state secrets he knows.) Make America Great Again!
You know, the usual.
Here is Trump’s stupid face sitting the courtroom, shortly before they called him to the stand:
Poor little ball of rage.
It sounds like he proverbially pulled his pants down and started showing his ass from pretty much the get-go. Trump has been saying things like this:
“You and every other Democrat … coming after me from 15 different sides … all haters,” Trump complained to his questioner, Kevin Wallace. He later complained that “people don’t know how good a company I built because people like you are going around demeaning me and I think it’s hurting America.” He also blasted James as “a political hack” and said the case “is a disgrace.”
Uh huh. So impressive, the Trump Organization. Real companies are definitely impressed by what a great company it is. You betcha.
Here are some more moments:
After [Judge Arthur] Engoron chided him for giving nonresponsive answers, Trump said, “The judge will rule against me because he will always rule against me.” Engoron said that comment was not true, and asked Trump to “please answer the question. You can attack me all you want but just answer the question.”
After more tangents, he told Trump’s lawyers, “I beseech you to control” him. “This is not a political rally,” he said. He warned that if Trump failed to answer questions, “I will take every negative inference that I can.”
Trump later appeared to completely lose his cool about the judge, going off on a tirade from the stand. “He called me a fraud and he didn’t know anything about me!” Trump yelled, referring to the judge’s ruling allowing the trial to proceed.
Apparently after that rant, the assistant attorney general asked Trump if he was done yapping. “Done,” Trump replied.
The full quote where Engoron begged Trump’s lawyers to control him — which is admittedly not a task any human has mastered save for perhaps Vladimir Putin — makes it sound even more damning: “Mr. Kise, that was a simple yes or no question. We got another speech. I beseech you to control him if you can. If you can’t I will. I will excuse him and draw every negative inference that I can."
If you can’t I will. I will excuse him and draw every negative inference that I can.
So if Engoron ends up having to hold Trump in contempt, nobody can say they weren’t warned.
This man, Donald Trump, was president of the United States. It is a miracle he didn’t cause America to shoot its entire dick off in a gender reveal accident during his presidency.
And a significant minority of white Americans is fine with this. Because they’re too dumb to know any better, many of them, and others are just greedy nihilists who don’t care if the country burns as long as they got theirs. (SIDE NOTE: We really don’t put hardly any stock in horse-race polling right now, or probably ever again, because how many times are we going to play this shocked game when Democrats wildly outperform the polls, while fully refusing to acknowledge the demographic changes happening with the electorate? That said, it’s truly obscene the number of people still willing to vote for this obvious con man and criminal.)
But we digress!
Back to the trial, Trump has also spent an inordinate amount of time in the courtroom whining about the Mar-a-Lago valuation in the ruling against him, same way he does when he’s mugging for the cameras outside the room. The case is about so much more than that, but he’s too stupid to really grasp the enormity. At one point, apparently for no reason, Trump babbled that the “tennis court is worth more than 18 million,” even though they weren’t talking about that right then.
Also worth eleventy batrillion dollars? Trump’s brand.
“The most valuable asset was the brand value,” he said. “If you look at the companies, the brand value is a very big part of the asset value of the company.”
“If I wanted to build up a statement,” Trump said, “I would have added brand value here. and I would have increased it 10s of millions of dollars”
“It’s an asset,” he said of his brand. “Coca-Cola has it, and other big companies, public companies” have it.”
“I became president because of my brand,” Trump also said. “I sell books at levels that are incredible because of my brand.”
His brand, so incredible, his brand.
So it sounds great so far! CNN has a good running tick-tock of the day’s proceedings, which as we are writing this, have broken for lunch and will come back at 2:15 ET. So do ABC News, Kaitlan Collins and a number of others.
Follow along this afternoon if you feel like it, let’s see how much he can piss the judge off before the day is out.
[NBC News / Guardian / video via Acyn]
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To be fair, that tennis court could be worth $18 million, depending on who’s buried under it.
The former president says “it went very well” for him, but also called it a “very sad day for America”.
Trump said he wanted to be in court today “because it’s a scam”, and he went on to say his testimony was “very conclusive”.
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Yeah, your testimony was pretty damn conclusive, but not quite in the way you think, Señor PAB