Donald Trump has booked a one-way ticket to jail, and the judge overseeing his ongoing New York criminal trial on Monday said he’s ready to send him there at any moment.
New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan started the fourth week of Trump’s trial with a speech that’s more than a year in the making, explaining why he hasn’t yet thrown the politician into the slammer—making what he called his final warning to the former president.
“I’ll find you in criminal contempt for the tenth time,” Merchan said in a stark tone. “It appears that the $1,000 fines are not serving as a deterrent. Therefore, going forward, this court will have to consider a jail sanction. Mr. Trump, it’s important to understand the last thing I want to do is put you in jail. You are the former president of the United States, and possibly the next one as well.”
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Trump keeps ignoring the judge’s order forbidding him from speaking publicly about witnesses and jurors in a menacing way, something the former president keeps doing anyway on social media. Merchan last week fined Trump $9,000 for nine separate violations of a previous gag order—a step he only took after making repeated warnings.
But the American public has continued to wonder where this judge will draw a line. At Trump’s bank fraud trial last year, a civil judge whose courtroom is just a block away similarly punished the politician several times for ignoring a gag order and continuing to make threats against that judge’s law clerk. But in that separate case, Justice Arthur F. Engoron kept threatening to send Trump to jail temporarily but never did so.
However, the stakes in Merchan’s courtroom are much higher. The former president faces 34 felony counts and up to four years in prison. Allowing him—or any defendant—to threaten witnesses, jurors, court staff, and prosecutors sets a shocking precedent for the country’s justice system.
And that’s exactly why Merchan detailed his reasoning during a speech in court Monday morning, explaining the monumental considerations at play when considering whether to be the first judge ever to send a former American president to jail without even waiting for a guilty verdict from a jury.
“To take that step would be disruptive to these proceedings… I also worry about the people who would have to execute that sanction: the court officers… the Secret Service detail and others. I worry about them... I’m also aware of concerns about the broader implications of that jail sanction. The magnitude of that decision is not lost on me. But at the end of the day, I have a job to do, and that job is to protect the dignity of the judicial system,” Merchan said.
Trump’s incessant outbursts and violent rhetoric outside the courtroom, Merchan stressed, “constitute a direct attack on the rule of law. I cannot allow that to continue. So as much as I do not want to impose that jail sanction... I want you to understand that I will if necessary and appropriate.”
Later on Monday Merchan also asked for the first time for an update on when prosecutors planned to wrap their case up—to which they responded sometime during the week of May 20.
That means the former president’s first criminal trial will probably last through the entire month of May—keeping the leading 2024 Republican presidential candidate off the campaign trail longer than he’d hoped.
