Inside court: Listless Trump can only sit in silence while his hush money judge rejects his delays

An imposing neoclassical New York criminal courthouse overlooks a small park that used to be a public sewer. On the building’s 15th floor, Donald Trump was listless, finding himself once again seated between his attorneys with his oversized red tie pressed against the defence table in front of him.

Inside the criminal section of New York Supreme Court in Manhattan on Monday morning, he sat there quietly, leaning back in his chair or hunching his shoulders forward to listen to the lawyers in the room, rarely darting his eyes anywhere else, or fixing them towards nothing in particular.

Behind the courtroom’s doors, the former president can’t interrupt, can’t argue with the prosecutors across the room from him, and can’t argue with the judge in front of him. He can only sit and watch in a crowded room of reporters and other people he calls his enemies and whisper into his attorneys’ ears while a judge guts their arguments.

On the other side, however, Mr Trump lashed out at the “witch hunt,” “hoax,” “election interference,” “voter intimidation,” and “disgrace” against him. After a two-hour hearing, he immediately went to his 40 Wall Street property to give a rambling 21-minute press conference attacking New York Justice Juan Merchan and the Manhattan prosecutor who argued in court against him.

It’s been a familiar scene over the last several months, as the Republican Party’s likely nominee to face President Joe Biden in November uses courtrooms across the country as an extension of his campaign, leveraging media attention to rewrite the narrative of crime, corruption and fraud detailed in lawsuits, judgments and indictments against him.

He uses courthouse settings to cast himself as a victim of political persecution, while