Good morning. It’s Monday, and we’ll look at the kickoff of Donald Trump’s trial in Lower Manhattan and what it may be like to cover the proceeding.
Donald J. Trump’s scheduled appearance in a New York courthouse on Monday will mark a stunning turning point in American political history: He’ll become the first former U.S. president to stand trial on criminal charges.
The presumptive Republican nominee in the 2024 election, Trump has been accused of falsifying business records to cover up a sexual encounter with a porn star. He denies the encounter ever took place.
Trump faces 34 felony charges and up to four years in prison.
With the country entering such uncharted territory, I spoke to Jonah Bromwich, a reporter for The New York Times covering criminal justice in New York, about what we should expect.
Even before the trial begins, in your eyes how monumental of a moment is this in American history?
This is massively, historically significant. This is going to be the first time that a presidential election — and this is a consequential one — has as a major subplot a trial of one of the candidates. We don’t know what that means. We don’t know what that looks like. We don’t know what an acquitted candidate looks like, and we don’t know what a convicted candidate looks like. It has profound implications for our politics, for our government, for our society.
I’ve heard commentary about this being the weakest of the four criminal cases Trump is facing. Where does that idea come from, and how do you see the severity of these charges?
When someone talks about this trial as, say, the “runt of the litter” — which was coined memorably in a Washington Post story and has kind of taken on a life of its own — they could be referring to the actual consequences for Trump. We think he could only serve up to four years in prison for this, maximum. So that’s, relatively, a slap on the wrist.
And then there’s also the nature of the charges. These charges at their core are about falsifying records to disguise a transaction, to disguise a hush-money payment. And so people say, “Oh, that’s sordid, that’s petty.”
I think that the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, has made a strong argument looking at the case in a slightly different way, which is as the original election interference case — that Trump not once but multiple times sought to hide information from the public as it was about to go to the polls. And the Stormy Daniels hush-money payment is just the last and most chargeable example of that kind of fraud on the people. So it’s just up to them whether they buy it or not.
Time is of the essence in an election year. What sort of timeline do we expect for this trial?
People have been saying the trial proper will last six weeks, and the jury selection is expected to last two weeks or more. So I think the safe low-end bet is eight weeks. But it could go longer.
What do we know about the nature of the penalties Trump could face — and the consequences he could face politically?
So the simple legal answer is up to a four-year prison sentence.
One of the many, many unknowns here is where that sentence would be served — whether there could be some sort of elaborate form of house arrest, or he’d be on an Army base or, in fact, he could be in some New York prison. That’s a question that’s up in the air.
And the hardest part is the effect on the election. Polling months ago showed that a conviction could sway some voters against Trump. That’s not out of the question, but I’m far from confident of that. I think this is such a complex thing. I think what happens in the event actually matters. So it may well have political consequences, but those to me are impossible to predict.
The interest in this will be huge. How much access will the general public have to the trial as it unfolds? And how will you be approaching your coverage of it?
There are not going to be cameras. So people following are going to be relying on the various media covering it. It makes my job fun and challenging, because my basic task is to provide minute-by-minute updates of a couple of different aspects of what’s going to be happening in the courtroom.
The first is the case as it unfolds. I’m essentially a play-by-play man. I also have to pay attention to Trump. Everything he does is consequential. So if he’s berating his lawyers or trying to make a connection with a juror or storming out of the courtroom, all things by the way he’s done in the past, that’s something that I have to communicate to our audience. And then, third, I think my job is to really bring people there. I want to make it so you can almost see it, so you can follow along and draw your own conclusions.
Weather
Enjoy a sunny day in the low 70s. The evening is mostly clear, with temperatures dropping to 50.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until April 23 (Passover).
METROPOLITAN diary
Homeric
Dear Diary:
I got on the last car of an uptown No. 1 train at Columbus Circle on a midweek evening. Squeezing into a seat next to a tall man, I opened the book app on my tablet and began reading where I had left off earlier.
“Are you reading ‘The Iliad’ on the subway?” the tall man asked in a tone of slight disbelief.
I said yes and explained that it was the Emily Wilson translation, which had recently been released to great acclaim. “But how did you know what I was reading?” I asked.
“I saw a few of the names,” he said. “It couldn’t be anything else.”
“I’m a hopeless monoglot,” I told him. “Do you know it in the original?”
He nodded. “I had three years of Homer in graduate school.”
“Really? Do you have any left now?”
He cocked his head and quoted the opening lines, the ancient tongue sounding as smooth as flowing water.
I laughed out loud at the beauty of it, and at the unlikelihood of hearing ancient Greek spoken on the subway.
