Because O.J. Simpson died four days before former President Donald Trump stands trial in Manhattan on Monday, and because this prosecution is being called the trial of the century just like Simpson’s trial was, it’s tempting to reduce the Trump trial to a tabloid headline. Can’t you picture it? “The President, the Porn Star, the Playboy Model, the Door Man and the Fixer.”
But prosecutors see the first criminal prosecution of a former U.S. president as something other than a tawdry tale of Trump, then a presidential candidate, paying off a porn star to keep her mouth shut about the sex she says she had with the married man. New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg insists this trial isn’t about Trump’s reported salacious activities. Instead, he says his team will focus on the seriousness of falsifying business records. Falsifying the Trump Organization’s business records, prosecutors will surely tell the jury, was Trump’s attempt to unlawfully influence the 2016 election, which he went on to win.
New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg insists this trial isn’t about Trump’s reported salacious activities.
The Simpson trial was often called a circus, and in every way was a television event. While Trump’s trial may be the “trial of the century” — at least until his next prosecution begins — it won’t be the same spectacle. And not just because of Bragg’s intention to focus on the Trump Organization’s recording false information on business records, making it a documents case.
“This is the business capital of the world,” Bragg said in April 2023. “We regularly do cases involving false business statements. The bedrock — in fact, the basis for business integrity and a well-functioning business marketplace — is true and accurate record-keeping. That’s the charge that’s brought here, falsifying New York state business records.”
It will also be less dramatic because there won’t be any television cameras in Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom. Also, nobody entering the Depression-era courthouse at 100 Centre St. (as I did countless times as an assistant district attorney in New York) is likely to get excited by the surroundings. It’s a building so dismal that in the opening scenes of the show “Law & Order,” the enthusiastic TV prosecutors we see are coming out of the columned courthouse at 60 Centre St., where criminal cases are never even tried.
Trump’s trial, then, will take place in a courtroom without cameras in a building too depressing-looking for prime-time TV, and it will begin with a long, arduous process of selecting a jury. It took two weeks to seat a jury for the 2020 Harvey Weinstein rape trial, which took place in that same building. And I’d expect the jury selection process for Trump to take at least as long. This is in part because Merchan promises not to convene on any days that might conflict with a juror’s observance of Passover, which starts April 22, and partly because the trial will be in recess every Wednesday, the day Merchan hears motions in other pending cases.
During jury selection, prosecutors often make it a point to put all their cards on the table; that is, they make it a point to acknowledge the weaknesses with witnesses or the evidence in their cases. The goal is to weed out jurors who will see such weaknesses as making it impossible for them to convict. You can be sure that the prosecutor conducting jury selection in the Trump trial will tell prospective jurors that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, not only has a criminal record but also has a history of being less than truthful in his statements to Congress and the courts. That prosecutor will ask prospective jurors whether, based upon that information alone, they would close themselves off to his testimony and side against the prosecutor. They’ll likely ask similar questions about Stormy Daniels’ history as an actor in adult films and as a woman who says she had a sexual relationship with a man she knew to be married. The case also involves a witness associated with the tabloid the National Enquirer.
In the end, jurors and the public will learn about the President, the Porn Star, the Playboy Model, the Doorman and the Fixer. But Alvin Bragg wants jurors to focus on New York law — why that law demands that proper records be kept and why falsification of such records would be a big deal if anybody did it. And why it’s such a big deal if Trump did it. He’s not trying to tell a titillating story, just a convincing one.