Donald Trump is making a mess for himself already

On Friday, Judge Tanya Chutkan specifically ordered Donald Trump not to reveal sensitive evidence in the criminal case against him. She also warned him on a broader level that if he keeps making inflammatory posts of any kind that threaten to turn the trial into a circus, she’ll feel compelled to bring the case to trial more swiftly before it can become a circus.

In the 48 hours since, it appears Trump has gotten the message – but he’s gotten the wrong message. Trump has indeed ceased making inflammatory posts about his federal criminal trial. Instead he’s begun using Truth Social to share inflammatory posts that others have made about the trial and the judge.

Moreover, Trump is sharing posts that make blatantly false claims. For instance, Trump shared someone else’s Truth Social post today which falsely claimed that Judge Chutkan has “openly admitted she’s running election interference against Trump.” But anyone who has been paying attention to the court hearings knows that no such thing happened. Trump is also sharing other people’s derogatory posts about Chutkan’s husband, and while they’re not particularly inflammatory, they’re still inappropriate.

Trump seems to think that by sharing other people’s inflammatory posts about the judge and the trial, he’s somehow skirting the judge’s parameters for speeding up the trial date. But that’s not how things work. These kinds of things are at the judge’s discretion, and can’t be thwarted with technicalities. If Judge Chutkan feels that the posts Trump is sharing are grounds for speeding up the trial date, she’ll do it.

All that said, it’s hard to imagine that Donald Trump thinks he’s actually going to get away with anything by using these kinds of technicalities. If anything, this feels like even more evidence that Trump has concluded he’s going to prison, and has (at least subconsciously) decided to try to push the legal system into locking him up sooner rather than later.