Is it possible to conduct a successful campaign for president from a criminal courthouse?
Another day in paradise at the courthouse!” Jason Miller told me. A former aide to Rudy Giuliani, Miller was a Republican operative well known in New York and Washington, D.C., when he became a senior communications adviser on Trump’s first presidential campaign. Since then, he has floated in and out of official roles with a stint in the middle at Gettr, a rival to Trump’s own Truth Social. For the 2024 campaign, he holds the vague title of senior adviser; in practice, he is more like Trump’s shadow, his status in the campaign hierarchy confirmed by his fixed proximity to the candidate. On this occasion, he was speaking from a holding room adjacent to the 15th-floor courtroom where Trump now spends most of his weekdays captive to the whims of a judge. From roughly 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, the court maintains custody of the candidate. On Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, the campaign gets custody of the defendant. Donald J. Trump for President 2024 has, by necessity, moved its operational headquarters from Palm Beach to the criminal court at 100 Centre Street.
While the area outside the courthouse has become an open-mic lounge for MAGA sycophants and Republican leaders who have determined they must convincingly mimic the behaviors of those political animals to survive in Trump’s kingdom, the holding room is where Miller and other campaign officials monitor trial proceedings as they tend to the business of trying to install Trump back in the White House. “We can listen and watch what’s going on, and we can do important things like call you back,” Miller said in his perma-ironic lilt. “He’s full time in the courtroom, and he’s somehow full time on the campaign trail. We are maximizing every single minute the president has. If we can’t be on the campaign trail, we’ll bring the campaign trail to President Trump.”
It’s The Campaign Trial.
Some Trump 2024 campaign staff began their migration back to New York in April when jury selection got underway. In 2016, the campaign was run from a studio on the fifth floor of Trump Tower, where The Apprentice was once filmed, and the 2020 reelect was based in a sleek building in Rosslyn, Virginia, across the Potomac from the White House. But unlike on most campaigns, the real nerve center of the operation was always the area directly surrounding the candidate; to work in an office and out of Trump’s sight was to run the risk of falling out of the loop or an internal rival getting in his ear and killing you off. Trump was — is — simply too vulnerable to influence and too inclined to chaos. As his 2016 rally schedule became more grueling, with the 757 crisscrossing the country throughout the week, senior leadership kept themselves at his side and on the road. Whenever possible, Trump would fly back to New York, preferring to spend his nights in his own bed. History’s greatest extrovert is, paradoxically, a homebody, and his residences — Trump Tower, the White House, Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster — are always also his places of business. For Trump 2024, a rotation of staffers travels with the candidate wherever he goes, forming a roving satellite campaign that, until the verdict is in, finds itself stationed mostly in lower Manhattan. Adapted to Florida heat, Trump had trouble adjusting to the initially freezing temperatures inside the courtroom, which is now quite warm (though Trump and his disciples, even as some of them visibly sweat while seated behind their leader during the proceedings, insist it’s still cold).
With the candidate out of control of his own whereabouts on trial days, the campaign must be run from wherever the defendant to be. Often, that means the motorcade on the way downtown to the courthouse in the morning or back uptown at the end of the day. “We use things such as traveling on the plane, even traveling from Trump Tower to the courthouse,” Miller said. It was “fake news,” he added, when asked if it was true that Trump fell asleep in the car. “Sometimes we’ll meet with him in his office in Trump Tower on the 26th floor. Sometimes there’ll be meetings in the personal residence. It’s a balance because he’s been forced to essentially be full time here in the courtroom.” When he’s in the courtroom, the campaign hums along elsewhere in the building, making it a kind of co-working space for Team Trump and the other defendants who await their own court appearances in literal jail cells on adjacent floors.
During trial proceedings on May 13, Trump appeared to be most awake and alert while reviewing polling numbers as others around him — a roomful of lawyers and a jury who will decide whether to make him the first former president in American history to be convicted of a crime — focused on the case. A Trump assistant reportedly travels with a portable printer for the purpose of keeping him updated on news related to his existence in analog, his preferred medium. “It’s the staff’s job to keep him informed of what’s happening while he’s in the icebox,” Miller said.
Miller denied that the campaign is run from the courthouse war room where he admits he now spends many of his weekdays running the campaign. “Far from it,” he said. “Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita run the campaign from our headquarters in West Palm Beach.” But senior campaign officials have been spotted filing into the two rows of benches on the left side of the courtroom, behind the defendant, including Wiles herself, who made an appearance seated next to Eric Trump, the only immediate member of the family who has attended the proceedings so far. “I don’t think he wants us there,” Eric’s wife, Lara, now the nominal president of the Republican National Committee, told me last month at a Saturday-night cocktail party in Washington. “I think he wants to keep us away from that.” Of the trial itself, she added, “I mean, I think it’s ridiculous.” I told her it seemed lonely in the courtroom for her father-in-law. “And cold. And boring,” she said. Eric showed up for the first time soon after and has been a regular presence ever since, alongside Boris Epshteyn, an adviser recently indicted in Arizona for his role in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and Andrew Giuliani, whose father, Rudy, was indicted in the same Arizona case. On Monday, Senator J. D. Vance attended the proceedings, a development that suggested Trump’s vice-presidential selection process had moved to the courthouse too. On Tuesday, Vance’s act was followed by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (though only in the hallway), Vivek Ramaswamy, and Governor of One of the Dakotas Doug Burgum. Lara showed her face for the first time too — an admission that her initial read of her father-in-law’s desires was wrong or that those desires are evolving as the trial wears on. Thursday’s hearing brought a flock of eager Freedom Caucusers, including Representatives Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert.
At the courthouse, I was thinking about Aristotle. Not because the law is reason free from passion but because he theorized that eels spring into existence through a kind of mud metamorphosis. Scientists now believe the European eel is spawned in the Sargasso Sea, then swims across the Atlantic, and when it reaches maturity, it migrates thousands of miles back there, to the location of its birth, to spawn and die. There is a similarly disorienting circular quality to Trump’s current stint in New York.
What year is it? From his penthouse in Trump Tower, the candidate’s relationship to his phone is compulsive and his output on social media is prolific. He calls in to Hannity, his picture frozen onscreen as he offers rolling commentary on a breaking-news event in his familiar rasp. He fires off a post in which he says an MSNBC personality “looks like shit.” He emerges through the gilded doors of the Fifth Avenue high-rise dressed in his uniform of too-big Brioni suit and too-long red tie, trailed by security and yes-men and a beautiful assistant. He boards an idling SUV. He delivers a winding campaign speech with asides about Chris Christie, Hillary Clinton, and Frank Sinatra, and in exchange for the entertainment, his fans charge his life force with their attention. Miller is around. Dan Scavino too. So is Omarosa. And Hope Hicks. And Stormy Daniels. I’m on the phone with Sam Nunberg. I’m texting Michael Cohen, Kellyanne Conway, and Steve Bannon. Roger Stone is not speaking to me, and it’s anyone’s guess as to what he’s upset about this time. I’m sure he’ll get over it, whatever it is. He always does.
The experience for many of those people is very different today, of course. Hicks is not his spokeswoman but a witness for the prosecution; when she arrived on the stand, she hadn’t seen Trump in about two years. Cohen is no longer his fixer but a witness, too. Daniels is not defined by her bought-and-paid-for silence but by her testimony. And Omarosa is still on television, as God intended, but when she sits down next to me for one of CNN’s Last Supper panels, it’s to spin against Trump, not on his behalf.
For all witnesses, the experience of reliving the 2016 campaign has been blurring. Much was made of Hicks crying on the stand. Pundits speculated that the tears were the result of a realization that her testimony had damned her former boss. Yet just before she broke down, Hicks, a crier by nature, had been talking about February 2018, an era defined by her relationship falling apart and tabloids hounding her and 17 people getting shot to death at a high school in Parkland, Florida; at the time, she had to remind Trump to tell the victims’ families “I hear you.” She quit her job (for the first time) six weeks later. When the defense began cross-examination, Hicks was asked about the very start of her time with Trump — a man she had helped elect president of the United States; a man she maintained great personal affection for until he finally made that impossible as he squandered the presidency through his narcissism and sociopathy; a man who was now sitting feet away from her as a criminal defendant. Almost ten years earlier, when she accepted a casual invitation to fly with him to Iowa, she could not have imagined this was where she would land. Call her naïve, but she had been so hopeful then.
Or take Cohen. He had lived much of his life in service to Trump. He was a company man, snapping up real estate in Trump buildings. Even now, after he had served time in prison for lying on his boss’s behalf and spent the ensuing years in what amounted to a protracted public-therapy session, trying to figure out why he had fallen victim to what he had come to see as a cult, he still lived in a Trump building on Park Avenue. In the weeks leading up to the trial, he was nervy and anxious. He lost sleep. He lost weight. He wanted to be a good witness. And he wanted revenge, definitely. But he also wanted something he knew he would probably never get. As he readied himself for this most cinematic of betrayals of his former boss — serving as the star witness in his criminal trial — he was desperate to understand how Trump had been able to betray him. Really, this was another way of asking if a man he once loved had ever loved him back.
In the nine years since he began his unlikely political rise, Trump was elected president, impeached, voted out of office, and impeached again after he tried and failed to overturn the results of the election he lost and his supporters staged a violent attack on the Capitol. There were also innumerable outrages and absurdities that at any other time would have upended an administration and outright ended the political career of its leader.
Yet despite or perhaps because of that, one of America’s two major political parties was fully remade in his image. The ideological topography of the country is now defined by a fault that splits it with about half the population convinced that he’s a savior and about half convinced that he belongs in jail for any number of the crimes he is alleged to have committed across 88 counts in four criminal indictments. Never mind the civil trials. And never mind the crimes against good taste.
When Miller calls from the Trump courthouse war room and strikes an upbeat tone as he yaps about how he loves Diet Coke, the preferred beverage of his boss, so much so that he travels to the trial with his own supply of the stuff, it is tempting to laugh because, well, the campaign is being run from a criminal courthouse. (Trump must suffer without a steady hit of aspartame, however. “Nobody is allowed to bring Diet Cokes into the courtroom,” Miller said. Trump drinks it instead during lunch breaks — “he doesn’t have to request it. We have it there already,” per Miller — where he adheres to The Standard Trump Diet. McDonald’s, Miller said, is “one of our many menu options we have in rotation for court days.”)
And yet despite or perhaps because of all this, it is possible and maybe even likely that Trump will become president again. Most general-election surveys show the former president functionally tied with President Joe Biden. When independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is factored in, the tie becomes a Trump victory of more than four percentage points. “President Trump’s numbers just keep going up,” Miller said. “I don’t think this is having the effect that Biden and the Democrats hoped that it would.”
From the perspective of the Trump campaign, the past few weeks have gone pretty well. If it feels like 2016 again, great. That was the election they managed to win, after all, even if the alleged means by which they achieved the outcome are the reasons they find themselves working from the courthouse today. “The excitement level feels like we’re in the home stretch of 2016,” Miller said. “The major difference this time,” he added, is not that the campaign is being run from a criminal courthouse but that the candidate is more experienced at running for president on his third attempt. “He knows exactly what he wants to say. So it’s really kind of the best of both worlds.”
How could things be going better? If the candidate goes to jail for contempt, he’s a martyr. “I don’t mind being Nelson Mandela because I’m doing it for a reason,” Trump said. If he is found guilty, it’s a witch hunt, like he’s always said, and he’ll appeal. If he gets off, he was always right when he said, as he always has, that he did nothing wrong.
Just as it was strangely true that each successive indictment seemed to make Trump a stronger candidate in the Republican primary, it is also the case that the trial is making him a better performer on the trail. At after-court stops and onstage at rallies, he has become a kind of SuperTrump, a monstrously turbocharged version of the original model. Quicker and noticeably happier. He even smiles.
After court, Trump has made the most of his drives back uptown, stopping at bodegas and construction sites. On May 2, a campaign official told me to arrive at a fire station at 51st and Third by 3 p.m. Although Trump would be in court for another hour at least, a crowd of security and press formed across the street from the station. Half a dozen men dressed like mini-Trumps paced back and forth with purposeful expressions on their faces. At 5 p.m., Trump arrived by motorcade. He stepped out of his SUV holding two pizzas, which he raised in the air in the self-congratulatory manner of anyone arriving anywhere holding pizzas.
He is, it seems, newly appreciative of his freedom, even as he repeatedly violates a gag order on the understanding that further violations of the gag order could land him in jail for contempt. “The Constitution is more important than jail,” he said, after a recent warning from the judge.
In ads, he says, “They wanna take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom… They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you and I just happen to be standing in their way, and I will never be moving.” Outside the court, he sometimes answers questions from reporters but always makes good on his lifetime commitment to the cameras, the object with which he maintains the most important relationship in his life.
At first I didn’t understand how he could be sleeping — or “closing his beautiful eyes,” as he says — through the events in court. Trump’s sleeplessness, revealed through at-all-hours social-media posts, was essential to his character. He bragged about needing only four hours a night.
I thought back on the beginning of the trial, when news of a self-immolation came just as court broke for lunch. At the park across the street, the air was hot and hazy with burning flesh, which I now know is not just a smell but a texture. Reporters scrambled for information, and the NYPD arrived for a press conference. Before it started, we were due back inside with the defendant. The manifesto made clear that the man chose to set himself on fire at the trial because of the concentration of cameras but that he was not protesting Trump or Trump’s prosecution. It was a good bet the press would care about his display, which aired live, in part, behind reporters on CNN. But he was wrong. He died later that night. We barely ever talked about it again. A man had set himself on fire, but it wasn’t about Trump so it didn’t matter.
After he lost in 2020 and before he was on trial in 2024, Trump worried about his relevance. He was very sensitive on the subject. “I’ve always been relevant,” he told me then. “Like, I’ve been in the mix.” Inside the courtroom, he never has to worry that our attention might drift away from him. Trump on trial is Trump at peace. Of course he can sleep easily.
