Attorney: Trump's court theatrics for his MAGA base are "not wise from a legal perspective"

Donald Trump’s testimony in his New York civil fraud trial may have convinced his lawyers to avoid having him testify again as the former president devoted a majority of his time attacking the New York attorney general who brought the case and the judge overseeing the trial.

For four hours, the ex-president tested the patience of Justice Arthur Engoron, repeatedly dragging out his answers and spending his time on the stand engaging in a heated back-and-forth with the judge. At times, Engoron even told Trump’s lawyer Chris Kise to “control your client” and threatened to have Trump removed as a witness. 

“The judge was clearly frustrated with his unwillingness to answer the question posed, and instructed him multiple times to answer the question,” Gregory Germain, Syracuse University law professor, told Salon.

Trump's rhetoric occasionally even resembled his speeches on the campaign trail with his language attacking Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the $250 million civil fraud case against Trump, his adult sons and officers in the Trump Organization. 

“He called me a fraud and he didn’t know anything about me…It's a terrible thing you’ve done. You know nothing about me,” Trump said during his testimony. “You believe this political hack back there, and this is unfortunate."

James' lawsuit accuses Trump of grossly and fraudulently inflating the value of the holdings for decades to get better terms for loans and insurance policies. The attorney general’s office is seeking to bar him from doing business in the state. 

While Engoron has already ruled Trump and his co-defendants were liable for fraud, the attorney general’s office said they will rest their case after Ivanka Trump’s testimony on Wednesday, according to CNN. 

“Trump generally believes that speaking helps his cause,” trial attorney Bernard Alexander told Salon. “It might not be wise from a legal perspective, but the receptiveness of Trump’s true audience defies logic."

Trump at one point during his testimony even acknowledged influencing the valuation of several of his properties – a key issue that lies at the center of the case against him.

But despite his admission, Engoron would have found that Trump influenced the valuations, Germain said. There was “plenty of evidence” that Trump told his employees that the valuations were too low and that they needed to find a way to increase the valuations, and he signed off on the statements, he added.

“So his admissions add nothing to the compelling evidence of his involvement in overstating his net worth,” Germain said. 

Executives within the Trump Organization, including Trump's two eldest sons who provided testimony last week, have mostly sought to distance themselves from the financial statements and have blamed the accounting firm responsible for creating them.

Trump's primary defense revolves around the assertion that his financial statements featured “very, very powerful” disclaimers making them unsuitable for use by financial institutions or insurance companies, Politico reported. This is a stance he has maintained since the beginning of the trial and also repeated during his testimony.

“While Trump's testimony certainly did not help his legal case, it may have helped his political case in the eyes of his supporters,” Germain said. “Indeed, Trump's claim that the attorney general's case is politically motivated resonates with people who do not even support Trump. Many observers recognize how extraordinary it is for an attorney general to charge a developer with misleading sophisticated lenders and insurance companies with unverifiable self-serving opinions regarding the value of his properties.”

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The attorney general's evidence that the sophisticated lenders and insurance companies reasonably relied on Trump's false valuation opinions, and were harmed by them, “is very weak,” Germain argued.  

The attorney general's key witness, Michael McCarty from Deutsche Bank, testified that he knew the values in Trump's statements were overstated, though he couldn't “quantify the extent of the inflation,” he said. 

“While I have no doubt that Trump greatly inflated his net worth, I am very doubtful that a fraud charge will hold up on appeal without strong evidence of justifiable reliance,” Germain said. “The unusual nature of the charges, and the weakness of the showing of justifiable reliance and harm, support Trump's claims that he is being unfairly targeted for political reasons. The polls are showing that the politically-charged case is backfiring in the eyes of the public.”