A progressive daily ledger of Trump-world self-owns, legal pain, policy blowback, and bad-faith chaos.
April 15, 2024 edition from New York: the hush-money case reached jury selection, Trump’s gag-order problems kept spreading, and the campaign’s favorite delay machine sputtered in public.
Monday’s Trump-world screwups were led by the long-delayed Manhattan criminal trial finally getting underway, a humiliating reminder that the former president could not keep the first criminal case against a former U.S. president off the calendar. The first day also underscored how hard it is for Trump to control the narrative: dozens of prospective jurors said they could not be fair, and prosecutors were already pushing fresh claims that he had violated the gag order again. The result was a day that combined legal exposure, political theater, and the kind of procedural churn that keeps Trump’s legal brand looking less like invincibility and more like a well-worn court docket.
For Trump, April 15 was supposed to be another delay, another grievance tour, another claim that the system was rigged against him. Instead, it was the day the system kept moving anyway. That is bad for any defendant; for a candidate trying to sell strength, it is worse. The one thing Trump most needs is for these cases to fade. On Monday, they did the opposite.
5 stars means maximum fallout. 1 star means a smaller self-own.
Jury selection in Donald Trump’s New York hush-money case began April 15, 2024, after his latest bid to delay the trial failed. The day did not bring testimony or a verdict; it brought the first step in a criminal case that now moves on the court’s timetable, not Trump’s.
Jury selection began on April 15, 2024, in Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial, and no jurors were seated by day’s end after dozens of prospective jurors were excused for saying they could not be fair or impartial.
Prosecutors asked the Manhattan judge to hold Donald Trump in contempt on April 15, 2024, saying three social media posts violated the hush-money trial gag order. The court had already issued the order on March 26 and expanded it on April 1; the first contempt finding and fine came later, on April 30.