Former President Donald Trump took the witness stand in his New York civil fraud trial on Monday, during which he snapped at state attorneys and denied wrongdoing while bragging about his net worth in a case centering on his alleged systemic false valuations of Trump Organization properties.
All of this is par for the course from the former president, wrote Trump-skeptic conservative commentator Charlie Sykes for The Bulwark on Tuesday morning.
"The former president of the United States strutted his hour (actually several hours) on the witness stand. In this case, Donald Trump’s rage testimony actually signified quite a lot," wrote Sykes. "Here was the former president under oath in a trial that threatens to unravel his empire of fraud. And it went about as you might expect: the belligerent vitriol, bravado, grievance, and insults; the filibustering, logic-rapes, tangents, boorishness, bulls---, and, of course, the lies. Trump seethed and exploded."
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During the course of the trial, Trump also proclaimed the judge didn't understand his business, blasted Attorney General Letitia James as a "political hack," and at times confused state attorneys by seeming to claim his properties were overvalued and undervalued at the same time.
"Yesterday we got the whole show, the one we’ve been living through for the past eight years and a glimpse at our collective futures," wrote Sykes. Trump was, in short, showing off "lizard brain in full" on the witness stand.
The upshot, Sykes concluded, is that "Trump is going to lose this case. But yesterday’s testimony gave us a taste of how his criminal trials might go, if his attorneys are reckless enough to let him testify under oath again."
