A progressive daily ledger of Trump-world self-owns, legal pain, policy blowback, and bad-faith chaos.
2 verified reports published on April 13, 2023.
This edition is the complete daily record. Reports remain separate so readers can see each claim, source set, correction, and update without one article being mislabeled as the entire edition.
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.
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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.