Size has always mattered to Donald Trump — be it that of a luxury condominium tower, his hands relative to those of a political rival, or his bank account.
So a strong reaction was to be expected when the former president appeared in a Manhattan court this week, both star and spectator, for a trial in which his claims about the magnitude of his net worth — and, therefore, his business genius — were under public assault.
Trump marched into the courtroom on Monday morning looking as though he had swallowed a hornet and maintained a scowling mien throughout the proceedings.
Arms folded across his chest, he whispered occasionally to his lawyer, Alina Habba. Then, during breaks in the action, he would step into a lobby filled with television cameras to lash out at his antagonists. Judge Arthur Engoron was “a rogue judge” and “Trump hater”, he declared. Letitia James, the New York attorney-general who filed the civil suit, and who is black, was “a racist”.
On day two, Trump moved on to an unexpected target: the judge’s clerk, Allison Greenfield, whom he called “[Senate majority leader Chuck] Schumer’s girlfriend” in a post on his social media network. He published Greenfield’s picture online, too — prompting a gag order from the judge.
In Trump’s antics, Michael Cohen, his erstwhile personal lawyer, detected signs of strain under the weight of American justice. “This is the first occasion the public is seeing Donald for an extended period of time in the courtroom,” Cohen said. “All other occasions were brief surrender appearances where he rolled up under police escort like a celebrity.”
Ken Frydman, a communications consultant and onetime spokesman for former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, saw both political performance and authentic emotion.
Trump was “trying to make lemonade out of lemons”, Frydman noted, using the courtroom to appeal to supporters who are receptive to his claims of mistreatment by the justice system. His rants have come equipped with fundraising emails offering Maga merchandise.
But, Frydman added: “His ego and identity are validated by his real estate. If Trump is stripped of Trump Tower, he’ll shrivel into the foetal position.”
This civil suit, in which Trump is accused of overstating his wealth — by as much as $2.2bn per year to gain favourable loans and other benefits — does not carry the threat of jail time unlike the pending criminal cases stemming from his conduct around the 2020 election.
But to some veteran Trump-watchers its questioning of his wealth appears to have touched a nerve. It is an attack on the Trump myth launched with his 1987 autobiography, The Art of The Deal, burnished by his reality television programme, The Apprentice, and validated by his White House victory in 2016.
Trump has always been vigorous in defence of his account of his success. He sued journalist Tim O’Brien for libel for claiming in a 2005 book that his wealth was less than it seemed. Trump lost.
He sparred with Forbes magazine when it questioned the claims underpinning his ranking on its annual billionaires list. This week, Forbes appeared to have the last word, kicking Trump off its list of the 400 wealthiest Americans.
The New York case has had a strange dramatic arc since Engoron issued a surprise bench ruling on the eve of the trial, in which he concluded that Trump had committed persistent fraud with valuations of his triplex apartment and other properties that defied reality.
Still, much remains in play. Based on the trial, Engoron will decide whether Trump should pay damages of up to $250mn and be stripped — along with his adult sons, Donald Jr and Eric — of the right to do business in New York, the city where Trump was born and built his legend.
For Trump’s lawyers, led by the courtly Floridian Christopher Kise, the trial is also an opportunity to unleash a carpet bomb of objections and prepare the ground for an appeal.
If Trump is the combative star of the show, the 74-year-old judge, with a shock of (undyed) white hair, has served as his dramatic foil. Engoron has a smooth jazz demeanour and a fondness for bad jokes. He has made digressions about New York history for the benefit of Kise. “Despite my lame attempts at humour, I take my job very seriously,” he assured the parties at one point.
On Wednesday evening, Trump jetted to his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach. In his absence, the atmosphere in the courtroom had noticeably softened on Thursday morning, as if a volatile weather system had passed. The focus shifted from the former developer, president and reality television star to a slog over accounting practices and an examination of Excel spreadsheet cells.
At the centre of the slog was Jeffrey McConney, the former Trump Organization controller, who for years prepared the statements of Trump’s wealth that are at the heart of James’s case.
Through hours on the stand, McConney resisted a seemingly straightforward proposition put to him by prosecutor Andrew Amer: that the sale price for a luxury apartment was a better base of comparison for an appraisal of Trump’s penthouse than the asking price.
This came after McConney testified that he had boosted the stated value of Trump’s unit by $100mn from 2011 to 2012 after a Trump broker sent him a new estimate based on the asking price of a Saudi prince’s apartment. That apartment eventually sold for 40 per cent below the asking price.
“There are many ways to come up with estimated current value,” McConney told Amer at one point. In doing so, he appeared to be hewing to the central contention of Trump’s lawyers: that accounting is less science than art.
“This is the whole point of the case,” Kise said. “There is no right way.”
To which Engoron replied: “I think any high school student knows the right way.”
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