The New Yorker:

At his criminal trial, the ex-President has to sit there while potential jurors, prosecutors, the judge, witnesses, and even his own lawyers talk about him as a defective, impossible person.

By Eric Lach

It’s cold in the courtroom where Donald Trump is on trial. “Judge, is it possible just to warm it up a degree or two?” Todd Blanche, Trump’s hapless lead attorney, asked last week. “We are shaking.” Judge Juan Merchan acknowledged the temperature. “It is cold, there is no question,” he said from the bench. But there wasn’t much he could do. The Manhattan Criminal Courthouse opened in 1941, and its hvac system has two settings: icebox or oven. “I would rather be real cold than sweating,” Merchan said. “And really those are your choices.”

Trump, a fifteen-minute escorted motorcade ride from the gilded comforts of Trump Tower, is feeling the chill. “They’re keeping me in a courtroom that’s freezing,” he told reporters in a courthouse hallway. In Trump’s case, however, this sensation may also be a physiological response to the stone-cold insults directed at him by what feels like nearly every participant in the trial so far. During jury selection, last week, he was forced to sit silently as everyday New Yorkers said infuriating things to his face. “I feel that nobody is above the law, whether it be a former President or sitting President or a janitor,” one prospective juror said, with disdain. In order to weed out anti-Trump bias in the jury pool, Trump’s lawyers went through prospective jurors’ social-media histories. At several points, Susan Necheles—another Trump lawyer—recited negative posts written about her client, as if it were one of Jimmy Kimmel’s “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets” segments. “Stop the election of a racist, sexist narcissist,” Necheles said, standing at the defense table. “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized.” Another post read, “Trump is an anathema to everything I was taught to love about Jesus, everything I was taught about how to live out my faith. His disdain for decency, disrespect toward basic tenets of right and wrong and complete disregard for the most vulnerable among us could not be more fundamentally un-Christian.” As Necheles read these words out loud and into the record, Trump sat just a few feet from her, his face scrunched into a frown.

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