The Surreal Scenes at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse as Donald Trump Arrived to Face a Judge
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Photographers and cameramen clambered on the metal pipes of the scaffolding like monkey bars, searching for one last unclaimed angle to get the shot. “Just know that I’m getting back up there,” one told another who was eyeing his former position. Journos of every description chattered amongst themselves or on the phone, asking what the person on the other end of the line was seeing on TV. There were French press, Brazilian, Japanese, Italian. The subway rumbled underfoot periodically, the screech of wheels on tracks blaring up through the grate on which a clutch of reporters stood expectantly. It was 2:40 p.m.
In front of them was Centre Street, cleared except for some police vehicles and a number of officers in uniform or suited up or decked out in light blue jackets that read “NYPD Community Affairs.” A bit to the left, diagonal across the street, was the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse. And nearly straight ahead, beyond Centre, was one of the big city’s shortest streets, Hogan Place. That was barricaded and cleared, too, except for some blacked-out vehicles in various shapes and sizes. Closest was a big van that SWAT teamers would occasionally climb into and out of. Beyond that was a caravan of tinted vehicles, one of which would soon whisk away Donald J. Trump, freshly fingerprinted and arraigned, the first current or former president to face indictment.
We’d shortly learn the 45th president was written up on 34 felony counts, but not before a giant Department of Corrections bus trundled down Centre Street in defiance of all the day’s preparations. He ran out of runway and lurked just off the intersection until the cops started shouting at him almost in disbelief, ushering him up the street and away from the action. It was fun to imagine the bus had come to pick up The Big Guy, but funnier still to know the driver was probably just expecting to follow his Tuesday route as usual. This man must not watch the news.
Earlier on Tuesday, around 8:20 in the morning, that same corner was empty save for some New Yorkers on their morning commutes. There was a line of white square tents behind a barricade directly across from the courthouse, where about 60 members of the media were assembled. But otherwise, the whole area was calm. There were no protesters in Collect Pond Park, the greenspace behind the media tents where a flag would later rise that read, “TRUMP OR DEATH.” Marjorie Taylor Greene had not yet arrived to deliver a speech she’d quickly abandon when a crowd of locals shouted her down, and George Santos hadn’t yet come by to pick up the attention he’d ordered. It was just press and police and New Yorkers, like an older woman looking quite lost indeed when she wandered to a stop near a group of cops.
“Jury duty?” an officer asked her, offering directions.
It didn’t help her quest that the whole area seemed to be under construction, including the courthouse complex. I left the growing cornfield of cameras and lights and mics, crossed the street, passed the first of many security checkpoints, and entered the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse. It’s billed as Art Deco, and there are some exquisite chandeliers that make the case. The floors feature green and black marble designs punctuated with gold lines. But the outer façade and many of the hallways feel less Deco than Brutalist. It’s fitting for a structure that, for all the tawdry glamor bestowed upon it by Tuesday’s events, is a hard place. Walking those halls, you pass doors marked “Domestic Violence Coordinator” and “Warrant Room.” I passed a man with his hands cuffed behind his back, led by two plainclothes cops in gray sweatshirts. Another was led in handcuffs with a uniformed officer in front of him cradling a giant paper bag of what I assumed to be evidence. There were a lot of people facing indictments here, along with their mothers, their lovers, their kids, their grandparents. I overheard a couple of public defenders counseling what seemed to be a new client and telling him what the path forward looked like. It included screening for substance abuse, and he said all that would be no problem. “I can smell alcohol on your breath,” she told him. “I’ve been doing this a long time.”
There were a lot of regulars around, those playing their daily part in the business of justice. There were the public defenders, often in shabbier suits and flat brown ties. There were the high-dollar defense attorneys in sleek fabrics and snazzy brogues. There were the court reporters embarking on another day on the beat, the court police who knew them all. This being New York, there was the occasional “Eyyy!” or “Ohhh!” as two regulars ran into each other, while the court cops often found themselves trying to keep the journalists in line. Many of these folks had reached the very top of their profession, but while waiting for the chance to do their jobs, they kind of looked more like schoolchildren, packed into a tight herd in the middle of the hallway. “You guys are like my six-year-old playing soccer!” a court cop told them.
A couple hours after I’d arrived, I was sitting on a bench near the “cafeteria”—which looked eerily like any old New York bodega—when one of those aforementioned defense attorneys sat down next to me and spilled about the scenes he’d just made his way through outside. He said he hadn’t seen a media frenzy quite like it in all his years coming to the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, not even when Harvey Weinstein was coming in for his trial. Not even for the arrival of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the subject of a scandal frenzy that the Trump era subsequently rendered quaint.
The mezzanine hanging over the lobby offered a chance to view the carnage outside, but it looked downright tame through the two layers of towering windows. There were some Trump flags, yeah, and a crowd, but it was just a flat image in the pane. Out there couldn’t possibly have much say in what happened in here, except when a couple of sketch artists in the press room told me I’d missed the chance to line up out there—all night—to get a ticket to Donald Trump’s arraignment. One reporter told me he’d been lined up since 2 p.m. the previous day.
However appropriate it might have felt that they were handing out tickets to this event, I also wasn’t pleased I didn’t have one. I knew the courtroom where the arraignment would take place was on the 15th floor, though, and I headed up there early in the morning. I barely made it out of the elevator bank before I was greeted by a stern cop with a shock of white hair.
“You can’t be here,” he said. “It’s regular business this morning.”
Along the route to the criminal courts from the subway station at City Hall, you pass many of Manhattan’s most imposing municipal buildings. There’s the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse, and the New York State Supreme Court building emblazoned with the motto, “The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government.” And then there’s the Tweed Courthouse, built right up next to City Hall itself beginning in 1861 as a testament to Tammany Hall’s grip on this town.
I also passed a line of hundreds of new immigrants outside a federal building, many awaiting asylum hearings, and it made the first page of the indictment all the more fitting when it was unsealed later that day: “THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK against DONALD J. TRUMP.” Those of us who hail from these precincts knew who this guy was before he was on The Apprentice. But it was how he launched his campaign, with a vicious attack on people who want to become Americans, that began his ultimate betrayal of a city that has always been America’s front door. The back side of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse sits on Baxter Street, where a few Vietnamese restaurants are up against a pizza spot and a whiskey bar and all kinds else. It’s on the edge of Chinatown, and of the area that was once known as the Five Points, where Tammany Hall—for all its corruption—once gave new Americans a voice.
The 45th president can claim none of that legacy, though the courts will soon decide if he can claim the corruption. The charges against Donald Trump in the indictment unsealed on Tuesday have weaknesses that will be combed over again and again across the coming weeks. If George Soros really is in charge, you’ve got to wonder why he started with this one instead of, say, the election interference in Georgia. (C’mon, George—there’s a tape!) But the indictment also alleges that at one point, Trump and Michael Cohen worked out the details of the alleged hush-money payment to a porn star in the Oval Office, and that is a real Big Bang event for this vulgarian’s downfall. Whether or not he’s convicted, this will be a part of the Trump legacy, though the Boss Tweed who gave that courthouse its name is proof enough that it may not matter. Everybody knew he was a crook, but his name’s still on the building.
It’s the shamelessness, though, and the car-crash allure that brought all the world’s media to the bottom of the island at the center of the world. It’s what brought me to the bowels of that courthouse to watch the locals pretend to have a normal day before I went out and joined the scrum. It’s what brought George Santos and Marjorie Taylor Greene to the circus outside, these newcomers to the game Trump invented dealing political crack cocaine. The venerable institution of 60 Minutes placed an order just two days prior, gobbling up Greene’s nihilist horseshit in Sunday primetime, and here we all hobbled up to the trough to consume more of this spectacle, these pure aesthetics, as if we’d all been in a coma since 2015. That night, the television networks played Trump’s bizarre and phantasmagorical speech from Mar-a-Lago live and unchallenged. It will never stop. We can’t quit. We’d rather be here than watching vital elections in Chicago and Wisconsin play out the very same day, and so would the viewing and reading public. They tell us so every day with how they view and read.
And so all us journos stood under the scaffolding on a pale-blue 70-degree spring day, the kind you dream about all winter, and waited for the big lug to come out. Maybe he’d come over and say something, a Choppertalk for the new age. And then the wave of anticipation washed through the crowd, and the photographers shifted ever so slightly into position, and a hundred yards or more away a stream of besuited men exited the courthouse onto Hogan Place. Towards the end, there was that familiar yellow thatch atop a man skulking in profile—though just for a moment. Then he was in a tinted car and off to the airport. We’d have to catch the rest of the show on TV. I hear the networks are taking it live.
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