Donald Trump Won’t Stop Posting. The Courts May Not Be Prepared for That.

First Amendment law isn’t as clear around gag orders. “Most people don’t try to piss off their judge,” one litigator said of the unprecedented nature of Trump’s conduct in trials.

Trump Hush Money
Judge Juan Merchan ruled last Tuesday that Donald Trump will have to pay $9,000 for gag order violations. Justin Lane/AP

Donald Trump’s day in court Thursday began the same way it began on Tuesday: with his lawyer appealing to the judge that the former president’s posts about some key witnesses were not in violation of the court’s gag order.

Prosecutors in the New York criminal hush money case highlighted four posts Trump made this week, two aimed at former lawyer Michael Cohen and two at media executive David Pecker, who testified in the case just last week.

Trump and Pecker have “no animosity,” Todd Blanche argued to the judge. Cohen, on the other hand, has been “inviting and almost daring” the ex-president to respond to his public remarks, he said, arguing that witnesses like Cohen and Stormy Daniels do not “need to be protected.”