The Trump-SBF Trial Doubleheader Is the Ultimate New York Scene
What I saw awaiting Don Jr. and a verdict.
There was a time when any event in New York even tangentially Trump related reliably drew at least a dozen protesters. It seems those days are behind us. On Wednesday morning outside the New York County Courthouse, the sidewalk is essentially abandoned. Even though the former president of the United States is inside the neoclassical fortress, on trial for fraud, pretty much everyone present is here only because they’re paid to be: a few scattered cops and a long, lounging line of camerapeople and TV-news anchors, who I soon learn are waiting patiently for Donald Trump Jr. to arrive. Don Jr. will be testifying for the first time in the trial, in which he and his brother Eric are also defendants, accused of artificially inflating their father’s company’s worth. I mill about and attempt to mingle.
There’s a hulking bald man in a suit who couldn’t look more like a henchman, but he turns his back on me, so I chat up a halal vendor. His name is Ahmad, and he says he hasn’t been following the trials. I order lamb over rice, and while it cooks, a woman runs up and asks for a soft pretzel with zero salt. “None,” she reiterates. Without hesitating, Ahmad starts rubbing the salt off a pretzel with his hands. I ask the woman if she’s been following the trials. “What?” she says. “Yuck,” as though the trials were salt on a soft pretzel. Then she reveals she doesn’t have any cash and runs away without paying and without her pretzel. Ahmad and I share a meaningful glance, then he betrays me by charging me $14.
This is dejecting. My breakfast is expensive, and the scene outside the Trump trial is a dud. Luckily, at just that moment, Don Jr. arrives. A black SUV speeds up to the curb, and he and his entourage step out in one fluid movement. Somehow, even the way he transitions from sitting to standing is irritating and seemingly conscienceless.
The henchman turns out to be an actual henchman. He greets Jr. and guides him up the steps while a few passersby pause and peer silently from the sidewalk. The man standing next to me is the only one to make a sound. He speedily FaceTimes his wife and says, “Look.” “His hair looks good,” she says. “Your hair looks good,” the man says. “Your hair looks good,” she says. Don Jr. disappears into the courthouse and the meager crowd dissipates.
“Who was that?” an Amazon delivery man dragging a cart of packages asks another bystander, who explains that it was Donald Trump Jr. “There’s another one?” the Amazon man says. “For real?”
Around the block, there’s similarly little fanfare outside the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse, where the Sam Bankman-Fried trial is rocketing to a gruesome conclusion. Besides more scattered, dozing cameramen, there’s just one person here with purpose, a woman named Vivian wearing an American-flag knit cap. Vivian is shaking her fist at the building and shouting at the top of her lungs, “MAFIA! CROOKS!”
I ask if she lost money when FTX went under. “FTX?” she asks, in a surprisingly soothing voice. It turns out Vivian is here protesting her own personal court case, an immigration dispute that is being moved out of the city without her consent. Her husband is sick and can’t travel. She’s come to the courthouse every day for weeks to no avail. I describe Bankman-Fried and ask if she’s seen him entering the building. She’s seen him on the news, but she’d had no idea he was inside the courthouse she was protesting all this time. “The man who stole from everybody,” Vivian says. “The cops are getting him? Mafia versus mafia.”
The rest of the day and all of the next I wander around the neighborhood looking for the buzz I’m still sure must be wafting off the two courthouses, but everywhere I go, life in the city seems to be shuffling on as usual, utterly independent from the high-stakes drama Twitter assures me is unfolding just out of view. Old people play Chinese chess in Columbus Park. On Broadway, men in suits run-walk awkwardly wearing backpacks. Up and down Centre, Worth, and Mulberry, at coffee shops, bodegas, hot-dog stands, and bars, I get the same answers about the trials. “Is that still going on?” “I haven’t been following it.” “Huh?”
At Raphael’s Shoe Repair on Duane Street, I enter and explain to Raphael what I’m up to, and I ask his opinion of the trials. He looks at my shoes. “I can’t fix those,” he says. I tell him I understand — my shoes are indescribably shitty — and ask again if he has any thoughts on the trials happening mere yards away. “What are we doing here?” he asks. “I don’t have time for this.”
The most invested locals I meet are three teenage boys who stroll up to the SBF trial at around 5 p.m. Thursday, after the jury has already gone into deliberation. They are reading aloud from a Reddit post explaining how to attend the trial. They walk past Vivian and into the courthouse. The revolving door spits them back out again with cartoonish quickness. “Apparently you can’t just show up whenever and watch him go to jail,” they tell me. “You have to get up pretty early.”
Try as we might to wrestle the city into the shape of a story, at any given moment, the real New York is just an accumulation of almost everybody minding their own business. Even the storytellers largely think of their job as just that: a job. At 7:40 p.m., when the verdict comes in and Bankman-Fried is found guilty on all seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, meaning he will likely spend the rest of his life in jail, a throng of reporters dutifully flocks to the doors of the courthouse. Jostling lightly for position, they joke with one another, complain about the long day and the cold weather, and wonder aloud what’s for dinner. An anchor who’s been waiting all day for this moment discusses with her team what word to use to describe Bankman-Fried’s parents. “Devastated,” or “inconsolable”? They settle on “devastated.”
“Did you see the shot they got of their faces in the courtroom?” asks another anchor. “Apparently it was incredible.”