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Vintage Trump remarks after convictions renew dilemma for news media and voters alike
Donald Trump at Trump Tower on Friday responds to his 34-count conviction in the “hush money” trial.
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Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump stood in the lobby of Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan Friday morning looking somehow ill at ease in his own building.
He wore his signature suit, shirt and tie and stood alone at a lectern with five American flags and a cold stone wall behind him. Gone was the usual human backdrop of flag-waving supporters seen at MAGA rallies. He stood alone, without script or teleprompter, armed only with two sheets of paper and a look of barely controlled rage.
It was billed as a press conference to respond to the jury verdict that had convicted him on 34 charges the day before. But it was more a speech than a press conference. A contingent of reporters with cameras stood a few yards away, but Trump spoke without interruption and took no questions.
Not far off, a small crowd of supporters including some family members applauded and cheered at intervals. Trump never quite settled on which group he was addressing, connecting only sporadically with the live TV broadcast camera. Some of the TV news channels eventually cut away while he rambled on for a total of 33 minutes.
It was the same location Trump spoke from nine years ago this month when he descended “the golden escalator” to the same lobby and announced his first campaign for the Republican nomination for president. The scene that day featured Melania and Ivanka Trump, both all in white, and a forest of cameras held aloft beneath Trump’s elevated stage. Everything about those theatrics described a different time in a different world.
Trump would recall that occasion on Friday when he almost immediately started attacking immigrants, as he had in 2015.
But first, he had to deal with the moment — and the reason he was here.
“This is a case where if they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone,” Trump said, referring to the prosecutors and Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg. “These are bad people. These are in many cases, I believe, sick people.”
It was an echo of Trump’s frequent claim to his rally crowds that they and not him are the targets of all his legal woes and political adversaries.
But Trump reserved most of his vitriol for Judge Juan Merchan, who would not move the trial out of New York and denied most of the motions filed by Trump’s attorneys.
“We just went through one of many experiences where we had a conflicted judge, highly conflicted. There’s never been a more conflicted judge,” Trump said.
Trump has long tried to make an issue of Merchan’s total of $35 in contributions to Democrats in 2020 and the Democratic ties of the judge’s daughter. At Merchan’s request, both issues had been reviewed by the New York Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics and his refusal to recuse was upheld on appeal.
But Trump was back at it on Friday, and the accusations of bias were just getting started.
“As far as the trial itself, it was very unfair,” said Trump. “We weren’t allowed to use our election expert under any circumstances.”
Merchan actually did allow that expert to testify with the stipulation that the prosecution could also bring in its own expert. At that point, Trump’s team decided not to call the witness.
“You saw what happened to some of the witnesses that were on our side, they were literally crucified by this man,” Trump said, again referring to the judge.
“He looks like an angel but he’s really a devil,” Trump said of Merchan. “He looks so nice and soft.”
Hearing Roy Cohn in Trump’s words
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a news conference at Trump Tower on Friday following the verdict in his hush-money trial in New York City.
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Trump’s weeks of vituperating Merchan recall the maxim he had received half a century ago from a lawyer named Roy Cohn, who was known for saying: “Don’t tell me what the law says, tell me who the judge is.”
Cohn had a career matched by few in the legal profession. The son of a judge, he graduated from both Columbia and Columbia Law School at the age of 20 and went to work for the Justice Department. He helped to convict Julius and Ethel Rosenberg of helping the Soviets steal nuclear secrets. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover then recommended Cohn to Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who hired him to help with his hunt for communists in the government.
Cohn went on to spend 30 years representing many of the biggest names in New York, including athletes, entertainers, a cardinal and organized crime bosses. In the 1970s he represented Trump’s family real estate business when it faced federal charges for racial discrimination.
Trump himself continued to rely on Cohn for years thereafter. Even after reaching the White House in 2017, he complained that none of his many lawyers fought for him like “my Roy Cohn.”
Trump’s well-worn playbook of false statements
Trump did not let his most recent court reversal take up all his on-camera time on Friday. With live TV coverage rolling, at least for a while, he veered off his latest court reversal to attack the man he wants to replace in the White House in November.
Calling Election Day Nov. 5 “the most important day in American history,” Trump blamed Biden for all his legal travails. He said the trial in New York had been orchestrated “in Washington” to protect the incumbent administration, which he called “a fascist state.”
Trump has made these accusations before, offering no form of evidence, as he again did not on Friday. But he used the allegation of Biden involvement to pivot to attacking Biden on immigration.
It was a kind of reprise of what might be called Trump’s greatest hit. In his speech in this same venue in 2015, he had stunned the political world with his language about immigrants at the U.S. border with Mexico: “They’re not sending their best … they’re bringing drugs, they’re rapists.”
Trump on Friday broadened his assault to include a number of other specific countries and nationalities sending “millions” who were “pouring in” unchallenged across “open borders.” He mentioned Congo in Africa and China in particular.
He said the prisons of Venezuela had been “emptied out” and that countries were sending people from their mental institutions.
He offered no evidence or sources for any of these statements.
And while some of his assertions took the form of casual, unproven superlatives such as “record numbers of terrorists” entering the country, some were downright false statements starkly at odds with the facts.
Early in his Friday remarks, when he criticized the Manhattan district attorney, he had said crime was “rampant” in the city and painted it in apocalyptic terms. Crime statistics in New York City are actually much lower today than in the 1990s, a decade in which Trump ally Rudy Giuliani was elected to his two terms as mayor. Shootings and homicides are down in particular in the past two years.
But this species of misstatement or disinformation has been part of the Trump arsenal for some time. He often raises rhetorical questions and makes sweeping statements that seem to have sprung from an alternative reality.
His talent for selling his own version of reality posed a challenge to the news media as far back as his years as the star of a TV “reality show” called The Apprentice. Trump was in the middle of his 14 seasons with the show when he began publicly questioning whether President Barack Obama had been born in the U.S.
It was just this kind of falsehood — picked up and promoted by countless commenters on cable TV, websites and social media — that made Trump a political force before he was an actual candidate. And when, in the fall campaign of 2016, he informed the world that he had himself laid to rest the “birther” issue (which he blamed on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign), it forced many in the mainstream media to reexamine their longstanding aversion to the word “lie.”
By the end of Trump’s term in office, the news media had come to routinely label many of his claims as false — especially his denial of his defeat in the 2020 election. Some had also taken to labeling as lies the Trump statements they believed he had to know were false.
But Friday at Trump Tower was another reminder that as the November election gets closer and the political season comes to predominate, Trump can be expected to test and exceed the boundaries of fact and fiction one again.
Are we better prepared to deal with it this time?
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., takes questions at a news conference at the Capitol on Tuesday.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
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J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Speaker Mike Johnson, R.-La., is forging ahead with his latest proposal to renew a key American spy power. His bill, revealed Thursday, is largely unchanged from a previous plan which failed in a series of overnight votes earlier this month.
The program at center of the debate, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), is set to expire on April 30.
FISA 702 allows U.S. intelligence agencies to intercept the electronic communications of foreign nationals located outside of the United States. Some of the nearly 350,000 foreign targets whose communications are collected under the provision are in touch with Americans, whose calls, texts and emails could end up in the trove of information available to the federal government for review.
For almost two decades, privacy-minded lawmakers from both parties have sought to require specific court approval before federal law enforcement can conduct a targeted review of an American’s information gathered through the program. The lack of any such warrant requirement helped sink an effort last week to extend the program for 18 months, as well as a separate vote on a five-year renewal.
Trump officials, like those in past administrations, have argued that such a warrant requirement would overburden law enforcement and endanger national security. Johnson’s latest proposal would reauthorize the program for three years, but does not include a warrant requirement. Instead, the bill calls for the FBI to submit monthly explanations for reviews of Americans’ information to an oversight official as well as criminal penalties for willful abuse, among other tweaks.
“I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country,” the president wrote on Truth Social last week, advocating for the program to be extended without changes. “I have spoken with many in our Military who say FISA is necessary in order to protect our Troops overseas, as well as our people here at home, from the threat of Foreign Terror Attacks. It has already prevented MANY such Attacks, and it is very important that it remain in full force and effect.”
Glenn Gerstell, who served as general counsel at the National Security Agency during the Obama and first Trump administration, says Johnson’s reforms look like an attempt to find a middle ground.
“There’s not a lot of really substantive changes to the statute, but some gestures are made to people who are worried about privacy and civil liberties,” Gerstell said. “It seems like a pretty reasonable compromise that is going to be satisfactory to the national security agencies and yet at the same time represents some gesture to the privacy advocates.”
“This is not a reform bill and it’s not a compromise,” Elizabeth Goitein, a privacy advocate and senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, wrote on X. “It’s a straight reauthorization with eight pages of words that serve no serious purpose other than to try to convince members that it’s NOT a straight reauthorization.”
A bipartisan reform deal is still out of reach
Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, told NPR on Wednesday, before the release of Johnson’s new proposal, that lawmakers were working on a bipartisan solution. He said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., was in touch with Johnson on the issue.
“There’s a lot of work being done here,” Himes said. “We’re sort of working out a process that will be inclusive rather than exclusive.” Himes said he was negotiating with Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and constitutional law scholar, on a reform proposal they hoped could preserve and reform the program — reauthorizing it with bipartisan support.
But Johnson’s new bill appears to fall short of the inclusive approach Himes hoped for.
NPR obtained a memo written by Raskin to his colleagues urging them to oppose the bill, which he said “continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans’ data.”
“FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans’ communications without any review from a judge,” Raskin wrote.
FBI agents must receive annual training on FISA and are generally barred from searching for information about people in the U.S. if the goal of the search is to investigate general criminal activity, rather than find foreign intelligence information, and those searches need approval from a supervisor or an attorney.
Republican hardliners — who sunk Johnson’s last reauthorization attempt — also don’t all appear to be on board for Johnson’s latest revision. Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, a past chair of the Freedom Caucus, said “we’re not there yet” in a video he shared to X on Thursday.
“I didn’t take an oath to defend FISA, I didn’t take an oath to defend the intelligence community,” Perry said. “We can’t have them spying on American citizens and, when they do, there has to be accountability and I haven’t seen any that I’m satisfied with yet.”
The House Rules committee meets Monday morning, the first step toward advancing the renewal bill toward a vote.
President Trump announced a three-week extension of a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon that had been set to expire in a few days, after hosting a meeting between Israeli and Lebanese diplomats at the White House on Thursday.
Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group that has been attacking Israel from southern Lebanon, did not have representatives at the meeting and did not immediately comment on the announcement. The prime minister of Israel and the president of Lebanon also did not comment.
A successful peace agreement would hinge upon Hezbollah halting attacks, which Lebanon’s government has little power to enforce because it does not control the militia. Lebanon’s military has mostly stayed out of the fighting and is not at war with Israel.
The cease-fire, which was scheduled to end on April 26, would last until May 17 if it takes effect as Mr. Trump described it. Before the cease-fire was brokered last week, nearly 2,300 people were killed in Lebanon and 13 in Israel. Since then, the number of Israeli airstrikes and Hezbollah attacks have been dramatically reduced, though the two sides have continued exchanging fire.
The Lebanese Ambassador to the United States, Nada Hamadeh, credited Mr. Trump for extending the cease-fire, saying that “with your help and support, we can make Lebanon great again.” Mr. Trump replied, “I like that phrase, it’s a good phrase.”
Asked about the potential of a lasting peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon, Mr. Trump said that “I think there’s a great chance. They are friends about the same things and they are enemies on the same things.”
But Lebanon and Israel have periodically been at war since Israel’s founding in 1948. Israel has invaded Lebanon for the fifth time since 1978, incursions that have destabilized the country and the delicate balance of power between Muslim, Christian and Druze communities.
In the hours before the president’s announcement on social media, Israel and Hezbollah were trading attacks in southern Lebanon, testing the existing cease-fire.
Mr. Trump said the meeting at the White House had been attended by high-ranking U.S. officials, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the U.S. ambassadors to Israel and Lebanon.
Earlier on Thursday, an Israeli strike near the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh killed three people, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Hezbollah claimed three separate attacks on Israeli troops who are occupying southern Lebanon, though none were wounded or killed.
Hezbollah set off the latest round of fighting last month by attacking Israel soon after the start of the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign in Iran. Israel responded to Hezbollah’s attacks by launching airstrikes across Lebanon and widening a ground invasion of the country’s south.
Smoke rises from Port of La Guaira in Venezuela on Jan. 3, 2026 after U.S. forces seized the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro and his wife.
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Federal prosecutors on Thursday unsealed an indictment against a U.S. Army soldier, accusing him of using his insider knowledge of the clandestine military operation to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January to reap more than $400,000 in profits on the popular prediction market site Polymarket.
The Justice Department says Gannon Ken Van Dyke, 38, who was stationed at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, was part of the team that planned and carried out the predawn raid in Caracas earlier this year that resulted in the apprehension of Maduro.
The Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed the actions against Van Dyke, the first time U.S. officials have leveled criminal charges against someone over prediction market wagers.
According to the indictment, Van Dyke now faces counts of wire fraud, commodities fraud, misusing non-public government information and other charges.
Trading under numerous usernames including “Burdensome-Mix,” Van Dyke allegedly traded about $32,000 on the arrest of Maduro, resulting in profits exceeding $400,000.
“Prediction markets are not a haven for using misappropriated confidential or classified information for personal gain,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York. “Those entrusted to safeguard our nation’s secrets have a duty to protect them and our armed service members, and not to use that information for personal financial gain.”
Van Dyke’s defense lawyer is not yet publicly known. Polymarket did not return a request for comment.
The charges against Van Dyke come at a sensitive time for the prediction market industry, which has been growing exponentially, despite calls in Washington and among state leaders for the sites to be reined in.
Van Dyke is the first to be charged in the U.S. for suspected Polymarket insider trading, but Israeli authorities in February arrested several people and charged two on suspicion of using classified information to place bets about military operations in Iran on Polymarket.
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