Donald Trump's obsession with control is backfiring on his lawyers in court

Ted Cruz took to Fox News last week to defend a man who once called his wife ugly and suggested that his father murdered JFK.

"There is no person on planet earth that believes Donald Trump has been celibate all his life," the GOP senator from Texas told host Sean Hannity.

Cruz, a graduate of Harvard Law School, knows that Trump is not actually on trial for having sex with adult film actress Stormy Daniels, of course. His bit of dishonesty was in service of hiding the actual charges — which pertain to Trump's efforts to hide his adultery from the public with an illegal cover-up using hush money paid to Daniels — from Fox viewers. But Cruz is also telling a more subtle lie about "no person" being in denial about Trump's sex life.

There is one person who very much is denying the sex with Daniels: Donald J. Trump. Even worse, he's making his lawyers, who are paid for with Grandma MAGA's small-dollar donations, deny it as well. During opening statements, Trump's lead lawyer, Todd Blanche, said Daniels is offering a "false claim of a sexual encounter." In her cross-examination of Daniels, Susan Necheles, another defense attorney, repeatedly accused Daniels of lying, even sneeringly saying, "You have a lot of experience in making phony stories about sex appear to be real." (Daniels' retort: "The sex in the films is very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.")

Perhaps Cruz, who is an experienced attorney, was wishcasting that Trump's lawyers had gone with a better strategy of just admitting the sex happened. By the end of Thursday, Trump's lawyers were likely quietly agreeing with Cruz, as Judge Juan Merchan ruled, yet again, that the Daniels testimony was necessary precisely because Trump's team refuses to concede on the issue of their client's non-celibacy. 

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To translate from legalese to English: If Trump had just admitted he had sex with Daniels, she wouldn't have had to testify. Having forced her to tell her side of the story, he's now whining that it makes him look bad. That's no one's fault but Trump's. He's the one who is making his lawyers stick to this preposterous denial. 

As the reporters at the New York Times recently wrote, "Trump views himself as his own best legal strategist." They also report that he's boxed his lawyers into an "absolutist" defense, to appease a client "who despises weakness and is allergic to anything but praise from the people around him." But, as legal experts told the Times, claiming your client is a perfect angel who has never done anything wrong tends to backfire with juries because it's not credible. Instead, experts explained, attorneys tend to prefer the "My client might not be a nice guy, but he’s no criminal" defense.

Trump's current micromanaging of his defense team certainly cuts against the claims that he would have let his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, arrange hush money payments that ended up costing Trump more than $200,000 without Trump's knowledge. But it's also creating all manner of logistical problems for his defense team, including this most recent screw-up that allowed Daniels to testify at great length. 

For instance, Trump has been angry that prosecutors aren't telling the defense team what witnesses they are calling and when. On Tuesday, he temporarily violated a gag order placed on him by posting, and then quickly deleting, that he had just been "told who the witness is today," and griping there's "no time for lawyers to prepare." (The witness was Daniels.) Of course, the only person responsible for this situation is Trump himself. Typically, prosecutors do give the defense team a heads-up. But, with Judge Merchan's blessing, the Manhattan prosecutors have declined to do so in this case, out of concern that Trump would use social media to intimidate or harass them. By posting this, even if he deleted it 30 minutes later, he justified those fears. 

After Daniels testified, Trump's typing fingers clearly got itchy, because he made his lawyers ask if the judge would suspend the gag order so Trump could "respond" to her. It was a request that perfectly captured his toxic obsession with control and his fundamental cowardice. As Daniels herself reminded Trump, he is free to testify in court, if he actually wants to rebut her story.

But of course, he doesn't want to do that, because the prosecution could challenge his lies. Instead, he wants to hide in his safe space at Mar-a-Lago, flinging abuse at people online while being shielded from any consequences for it. By making this asinine request for their client, Trump's lawyers only further beclowned themselves in front of a judge who is already sick of their antics. 

Most of Trump's browbeating of his defense attorneys is probably not visible to the jury. It's a shame because it would help prove a central point of the prosecution's case: There's no way that Trump was unaware of the hush money scheme. Trump can't let the expensive professionals he hired just do their jobs. Instead, he is constantly managing them, pushing them to do foolish things to flatter his ego. By his own admission, Cohen was a two-bit flunkie who barely worked as a lawyer but more as a "fixer." Of course, Trump was controlling Cohen, and dictating his every move. 

This stuff matters outside of the realm of this sordid court case, as well. Trump is both cowardly and controlling, a toxic combination that leads to his authoritarian politics. He's someone who wants to hide in a bunker while sending out minions to force his will by fiat, which is exactly what happened on January 6, 2021. These kinds of leaders are misleadingly called "strongmen," when in reality, they tend to be weak people who use fascism to hide their own frailty. And, as Trump's management of his defense shows, their egos tend to cause incompetence. Hopefully voters will grasp that a man who can't even understand how to defend himself has no business running the nation.