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, 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.
