A progressive daily ledger of Trump-world self-owns, legal pain, policy blowback, and bad-faith chaos.
Backfill edition for April 13, 2023, when Trump’s New York civil fraud deposition and a Manhattan criminal-court fight both underscored how much legal trouble he was already lugging around.
April 13, 2023 was one of those days when Donald Trump managed to make multiple court battles look even worse for himself. The headline act was his New York civil fraud deposition, where he spent hours lobbing insults, rewriting history, and giving state lawyers fresh material for the record. The same day also brought more courtroom jockeying over the Manhattan hush-money case, with prosecutors pushing back on Trump’s attempt to sideline Michael Cohen as a witness. Different cases, same core problem: Trump was still trying to bully, delay, and bluster his way through allegations that were becoming harder to wave off as politics. This edition focuses on the biggest documented screwups that landed on April 13, 2023.
By April 13, the Trump legal strategy looked less like defense than performance art: deny, shout, attack the referee, repeat. The problem was that the paper trail, the transcripts, and the court filings were piling up while the slogans were getting louder and less useful. That’s not just bad optics. It’s how you end up handing your opponents the receipts they want.
5 stars means maximum fallout. 1 star means a smaller self-own.
Donald Trump’s April 13, 2023 deposition in New York’s civil fraud case put his own words into the record as part of the attorney general’s lawsuit over alleged misstatements about Trump Organization assets. In the transcript, he told lawyers to drop the case, defended his business record and repeated familiar boasts about his success and presidency.
Manhattan prosecutors pushed back hard on Trump’s attempt to keep Michael Cohen from testifying in the hush-money case, saying Trump’s lawyers were trying to block a witness based on little more than their assumption that they wouldn’t like what he says. The filing was another sign that Trump’s defense in the criminal case was headed toward a familiar place: aggressive motions, theatrical objections, and a lot of noise that may not change the underlying facts.