The Daily Fuckup

On Sunday, April 21, 2024, Donald Trump’s New York hush-money trial was sitting at the edge of its next phase. Opening statements were set for Monday, April 22, after weeks of jury selection and pretrial rulings in the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president. The case centers on 34 counts of falsifying business records, which prosecutors say were used to cover up a scheme tied to the 2016 election.

The court had already put unusual protections around the jury. By that point, jurors’ names were not being made public, and the judge had restricted the release of identifying details as part of an effort to keep prospective jurors from being exposed to pressure or harassment. The court later said it would also publish daily transcripts of the proceedings, but that announcement came on April 22, after opening statements began.

Trump continued to criticize the case publicly as the trial approached its opening. The courtroom rules did not stop him from treating the proceeding as campaign material, but they did keep the juror information and daily mechanics of the trial under close judicial control. That left the case heading into opening statements with a built-in tension: a high-profile defendant eager to attack the process, and a court determined to keep the process from turning into a spectacle.

For the public, the next day mattered less as a political milestone than as a procedural one. Once opening statements began, the trial stopped being about jury selection and started becoming about evidence. On April 21, the only certainty was that the courtroom was about to take over the news cycle, and Trump was not going to be able to ignore it.