'Old And Tired And Mad': Rachel Maddow Describes Trump's Courtroom Demeanor
After hours in the courtroom with Donald Trump on Monday, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow described what she saw as the former president’s criminal hush money trial got underway.
Reporting from Manhattan, Maddow noted that Trump’s back was toward observers, but from what she could see, “he seemed basically inert.”
She said his shoulders were slumped, and at times throughout the proceedings, he did not appear “particularly animated.”
“I’ve seen him in person in my life a few times. I would say, seeing him go up and down the aisle — I was sitting on the aisle — and seeing him walk right past me, in the aisle, in and out of the courtroom several times, including the recess, I would say that he seems thinner than I have seen him in the past, he seems considerably older, and he seems annoyed. Resigned, maybe angry.”
“He seems like a man who’s miserable to be here,” she continued. “I’m no body language expert, this is just my observation, but he seemed old and tired and mad.”
“And I probably would seem that way too if I was looking at this kind of a proceeding,” she added.
On MSNBC on Monday night, Maddow shared more tidbits from the courtroom, which she said “smells like old soup and stale breath.”
“The courtroom is bare bones,” she said. “It is not large. It is inelegant. It has unflattering lighting. Like I said, it does not smell good, and everybody is very tense.”
Monday’s proceedings included opening statements from the prosecution and Trump’s defense team.
The prosecution accused Trump of falsifying business records to obscure the true nature of illegal expenditures intended to suppress damaging stories to undermine the 2016 election.
Trump’s lead attorney, Todd Blanche, said Trump is innocent.
The court also heard testimony from the first witness for the prosecution, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, who allegedly bought the rights to stories that would be harmful to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and then buried them as part of a “catch and kill” scheme.
