Team Trump told everyone the former president would take the stand again. We shouldn’t be surprised that he isn’t.
It was late Sunday afternoon when the news broke: Donald Trump confirmed — at the tail end of an all-caps, two-post rant on Truth Social — that he would not be testifying for a second time in the New York attorney general’s civil fraud trial against him, his adult sons and others.
I have long predicted this was how the defense case would end, not with a bang, but an expert. (Trump’s purported silver bullet of an expert witness, New York University accounting professor Eli Bartov, has already testified over two trial days, and Tuesday, as he concludes his testimony, he will be the defense’s ultimate witness.) But others, from savvy lawyers to longtime Trump chroniclers, were surprised.
Respectfully, they shouldn’t have been — and for at least three reasons:Trump has never been a reliable or helpful witness in his own defense
As my colleague Steve Benen wrote the morning after Trump’s Nov. 6 trial testimony, Trump claimed well before the first of E. Jean Carroll’s defamation and sexual assault cases was tried last May that his infamous “Access Hollywood” hot mic moment was a historical truth — and even worse, mistook an old picture of Carroll for his ex-wife, Marla Maples. His latter action all but conceded that Carroll was, in fact, exactly his type.
One year prior, in his testimony in a personal injury lawsuit brought by protestors injured at Trump Tower in 2015, he attempted to justify a prior, public instruction to security at a political rally to “knock the crap” out of protestors on grounds that those throwing tomatoes were wielding dangerous, even killer, fruit.Trump’s gag order likely played a role
As I explained on “Morning Joe” last week, Trump’s failure to resolve, much less, escalate his further appeal of the New York gag order before his scheduled testimony was the first sign he could not testify.
