Up until Sunday afternoon, Donald Trump was about as buoyant as we’ve seen him over the last several years. After the Supreme Court and Florida federal judge Aileen Cannon handed him significant legal wins in rapid succession, he also survived an assassination attempt so brazen (and preventable) that scores of allies declared Trump had been touched by the divine — and then went on to bask in the adulation of the MAGA-faithful at the Republican National Convention last week.
But the more relaxed, subdued Trump disappeared almost as quickly as he came, as NBC News’s Vaughn Hillyard observed after watching Trump’s first, post-convention rally. And judging by his social media posts, one topic that has him especially exercised? His legal proceedings, three of which he mischaracterized in a series of Truth Social posts on Wednesday.
First, Trump touted his “big win” in a “high Florida court” against ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos, which Trump claimed is a “powerful case” that will force the news media “to start telling the truth.” But Trump’s description of that development is misleading at best.
The ruling Trump was referencing came down Wednesday from a federal trial court — or, in other words, the lowest level of the federal court system — and merely determined that Trump’s defamation case against ABC News and Stephanopoulos, which stemmed from the latter’s March interview with GOP Rep. Nancy Mace, cannot be dismissed now, at the outset of the litigation.
These distinctions, important as they are, will be lost on those who hang on Trump’s every word on Truth Social.
In his lawsuit, Trump claims that Stephanopoulos’ repeated statement that a judge and two juries held Trump liable for raping author E. Jean Carroll was both false and malicious. But in its effort to have the case thrown out, ABC argued that Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over Carroll’s two trials, had already determined, in a written opinion, that the first jury “implicitly” found that Trump had “‘raped’ [Carroll], albeit digitally rather than with his penis,” and therefore, that Trump could not dispute that conclusion. In a July 2023 ruling, Kaplan determined that “[t]he finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
ABC also argued that even if Kaplan had never made that ruling, his underlying reasoning was sound and should apply because Stephanopoulos’ descriptions of the jury’s verdict were “substantially true”— and therefore could not constitute defamation. (In delivering their verdict, the jury in the first Carroll case did not find Trump liable for rape, as that term is defined under New York law, and instead held him liable for sexual abuse.)
Trump is right that Judge Cecilia Altonaga rejected both of those arguments, allowing the case to continue. But she also made plain that Trump’s purported “big win” was hardly the final word, explaining that she was “not reaching the merits of [Trump’s] claims. [ABC and Stephanopoulos] may very well convince a reasonable factfinder” — meaning a jury — “to follow Judge Kaplan’s reasoning or to adopt other reasoning leading to the conclusion that Stephanopoulos’s statements were not defamatory.” That, however, “is not the issue before the Court now,” Altonaga clarified.
Within hours, Trump was crowing about yet another legal victory, albeit just as inaccurately. “I got out of my Documents case,” he posted, invoking the recently dismissed Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, “by WINNING against the FULL FORCE AND POWER of the U.S. Department of Justice.”
Yet Cannon’s dismissal of that case rested solely on her determination that special counsel Jack Smith, who has not been subject to day-to-day supervision by the Justice Department, was appointed and funded in violation of certain provisions of the Constitution. Put another way, as MSNBC Legal Analyst Andrew Weissmann has noted, she dismissed the case because Smith — who was not confirmed by the Senate, as is required for “principal officers” of the executive branch — was functioning too independently of the attorney general and the DOJ. She didn’t dismiss the case because Smith was backed by “the FULL FORCE AND POWER” of the DOJ, as Trump claimed, much less acting in concert with the department’s leadership.
But Trump’s third distortion of a judicial decision was Wednesday’s charm. For the first time, Trump — who complained constantly about the gag order in his New York criminal case during that trial — asserted that the order is now “interfering” with his campaign against Vice President Kamala Harris and was engineered by Manhattan criminal court judge Juan Merchan “to benefit my Democrat Opponent.” (Harris, of course, wasn’t yet running for president during the trial in April and May.)
Trump failed to mention, however, that the gag order has never encompassed any statements about President Joe Biden, Harris or anyone in their administration. Instead, by its plain terms, it was entered to protect discrete and small groups of people key to the trial: known and foreseeable trial witnesses, jurors, lawyers and court personnel directly involved in the case, their family members, and finally, after a raft of threats, the families of both the judge and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (but not the judge or Bragg themselves).
Moreover, since late June, Trump has been relieved from the gag order’s provisions about trial jurors, whose names and addresses still may not be revealed, and witnesses, who can be discussed in any and all respects. It’s hard to see, therefore, how what remains of the gag order — namely, prohibitions on statements about the lawyers, courthouse staff, their families, and the families of the judge and DA — could impede Trump’s presidential campaign, much less constrain any core political speech.
These distinctions, important as they are, will be lost on those who hang on Trump’s every word on Truth Social. But where it comes to legal proceedings, Trump has never played nice — and even a brush with death is unlikely to change that.
