Trump knows 'when he’s been beaten': Why his latest tantrums signal he’s already lost NY civil trial

02 November 2023

The fact that former President Donald Trump has been amping up his attacks on Judge Arthur Engoron and New York Attorney General Letitia James is a signal that he knows the ongoing fraud trial won't go his way, according to a new column by MSNBC's Hayes Brown.

In a Wednesday morning post to his Truth Social account, Trump unleashed on Judge Engoron — who is overseeing the bench trial and will ultimately be the lone decider of whether Trump is guilty — calling him "crazy, totally unhinged, and dangerous." That came after a separate attack posted roughly an hour before in which the ex-president called Engoron "a political hack who ruled against me before the trial even started."

In his column, Brown argued that the increased frequency and intensity of these attacks is because Trump knows that he's already going to lose and that "the best chance of victory would now come in an appeal."

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"[Trump's] attorneys have opted to use the trial to lay the groundwork for that effort, as his legal team can’t raise any argument on appeal that wasn’t raised at trial. In the meantime, according to Rolling Stone, the game plan has been to 'score some political and public-relations points for Trump, kick up as much dirt as possible, enrage the judge, gratuitously trash some of the witnesses, and turn the process into a media circus,'" Brown wrote. "That strategy dovetails with Trump’s other goal: framing any verdict against him as a political attack on him and his supporters."

Brown added that Trump's claims that he "won against Engoron in the Appeals Court" are only half-true. While Engoron issued a partial summary judgment in September dissolving all LLCs within New York connected to Trump and a judge for the New York Supreme Court's Appellate Division temporarily halted that dissolution from taking effect, that appellate judge also struck down Trump's motion to halt the full trial pending appeal.

"For all his delusions of grandeur, Trump does actually know when he’s been beaten. When he feels cornered, he goes beyond attacking the direct object of his ire," Brown wrote. "The troubling part is that there are now enough people who agree with his claims of persecution that, if given the merest chance, they’ll help him tear down those systems brick by brick."

Several of Trump's immediate family members have been called to the stand to testify in the trial, in which the state is seeking $250 million in damages in response to Trump allegedly inflating the value of his assets to obtain more favorable tax and insurance rates. Donald Trump, Jr. testified on Wednesday, and Trump's other adult son, Eric, is testifying this week. Trump himself is expected to take the stand on Monday.

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