Former President Donald Trump has decried the gag order against him in his Manhattan criminal court trial as “unconstitutional,” a claim professors say could be working to galvanize his base.
Trump earlier this week was fined $9,000 by Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over the trial that accuses Trump of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to a porn star in order to deride damaging allegations in the final weeks of his 2016 campaign.
College professors told the Washington Examiner that while gag orders are “rare,” they are still legal and may ultimately help the former president further his claims that the trial is “election interference.”
“It does appear that Trump has been able to both ignore aspects of the order and flip it to his advantage,” said Roy Gutterman, a director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University.
“Now, he is cleverly using it as a campaign tool, talking about and complaining about being gagged,” Gutterman added.
At the end of a seven-hour day in court on Thursday, Trump told members of the press, “I’m not allowed to testify because this judge, who’s totally conflicted, has me under an unconstitutional gag order.” On Friday, Merchan sought to correct the record about Trump’s comments, explaining that the gag order “does not prohibit you from taking the stand” and that it “only applies to extrajudicial statements.”
The gag order prevents Trump from making public statements about witnesses, jurors, and some family members of prosecutors and court staff members.
‘Very rare’ but not illegal
Donald Nieman, a Binghamton University professor who specializes in teachings on U.S. legal history, conceded that “gag orders are very rare” but not illegal.
“It’s not just high-profile people that you might have a gag or against, but it’s people who defy the norms of justice and of legal process,” Nieman said while acknowledging that Trump’s claims about his gag order are an effective way of drawing sympathy over his legal plights.
“It just goes into the narrative that he’s being persecuted. And then he transforms that into [a message] that because he represents the everyday American, they’re being persecuted too because the person they really want to be president is being denied a fair chance to run his campaign,” Nieman added.
However, some experts have said the gag order does go too far, such as the fact that key witnesses such as former Trump attorney Michael Cohen and porn star Stormy Daniels have been allowed to speak freely about the former president while he is unable to even utter their names.
“Even more ridiculous, while Trump was slapped with sanctions for commenting on Michael Cohen’s dubious credibility, Cohen has run a media machine mocking Trump and rallying for his conviction, with nightly livestreams, even featuring a Trump impersonator,” former federal prosecutors Andrew Cherkasky and Katie Cherkasky wrote in a New York Post op-ed.
Trump on Friday agreed to pay the $9,000 for violating the gag order but vowed to put up a fight against Merchan’s decision to hold him in contempt for violating the order. Defense attorney Todd Blanche said he took issue with Merchan’s penalties for online social media reposts, instances in which Trump shared someone else’s post with his followers on Truth Social.
Meanwhile, prosecutor Chris Conroy this week claimed Trump is doing everything in his power to intentionally violate the gag order to bring chaos into the trial. He said there is no question that Trump continues to violate his gag order willfully, stating that such violations are “part of the plan.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“The defendant thinks the rules should be different for him,” Conroy said.
Although gag order violations aren’t meant to work in favor of defendants, Trump on Friday gained a small victory after Merchan declined prosecutors’ request to cite his recent gag order in the event that Trump takes the witness stand in the trial. Merchan asking questions about Trump’s violations would be “so prejudicial it would be very, very difficult for the jury to look past that.”
