Inside the Trump Plot to Turn His Jan. 6 Trial Into a ‘MAGA Freak Show’

Attempts to drag Nancy Pelosi into court to berate her on the stand and, hopefully, on live TV. Claims that the Jan. 6 Capitol attack was an FBI frame job, with an assist from Antifa. Conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was indeed “stolen,” supposedly backed up by still-classified documents. Unhinged assertions that President Joe Biden is now secretly, personally orchestrating an unprecedented act of political persecution. Calls to publicly unmask the federal officials and lawyers investigating the former (and perhaps future) president of the United States. Efforts to blame any illegality on some of the ex-president’s closest confidants and former legal allies. Insinuations of election meddling by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

These are just some of the items that former President Donald Trump and his lawyers have been discussing and planning to deploy when he goes on trial for his efforts to steal the 2020 election. The brewing defense strategy is outlandish and feral, even by Trumpland standards, to the point that it’s baffling some of the ex-president’s former lawyers and senior administration officials. One person with knowledge of these strategic and legal discussions bluntly describes the plans as a blueprint for staging a “MAGA freak show” at Trump’s federal election subversion trial.

Despite launching delay tactic after delay tactic, the former president, his attorneys, and various close allies have been preparing for a trial they expect to begin in 2024 — possibly in the summer. What they are mapping out so far, according to four legal and political advisers to Trump and two other sources familiar with the situation, is a courtroom and pretrial strategy laced with conspiracy theories, Fox News-style talking points, and raging innuendo — just as the spectacle-obsessed former president craves.

Special Counsel Jack Smith and his prosecutors are working to preemptively block this strategy, requesting the judge bar Trump and his defense team from offering “improper evidence and argument” — but trying to muzzle the former reality TV star is easier said than done.

Trump’s broader efforts to block Smith’s election subversion case have failed so far, though they could succeed in pushing back the trial date, currently planned for March 4. While the judge in the case rejected Trump’s claims to have sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for acts he committed as president, the proceedings have been largely paused for an appeals court to review the immunity decision. The Supreme Court rejected Smith’s request for an expedited review on the immunity question — a decision that could help push back the trial.

Since last year, Trump and his attorneys have repeatedly discussed subpoenaing a wish list of his political foes, including former House Speaker Pelosi (D-Calif.), three sources with knowledge of the matter say. This would be aimed at somehow painting Pelosi and other Democrats as the true villains of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol — who, as Trump and various Republicans claim, were responsible for the security breakdown and deaths that day.

In reality — after Trump, his lawyers, and allies led an unprecedented campaign to rig the 2020 election and overturn the votes in key swing states — the then-president urged his supporters to come to Washington and whipped a crowd of thousands into a frenzy on Jan. 6. Some of those supporters violently stormed and took over the Capitol, as lawmakers were preparing to certify Biden’s electoral victory. Five people died in connection with the Capitol assault, and several U.S. Capitol Police officers who responded that day have since died by suicide. In August, a grand jury indicted Trump on four conspiracy charges related to Smith’s Jan. 6 investigation.

Trump and his staff want to use the trial to hold a conspiracy-theory-fueled referendum on a U.S. government “deep state” (faceless bureaucrats in the intelligence community and elsewhere) that, in the former president’s mind, stood by as China, Hezbollah, and who knows who else meddled in the 2020 presidential election and tipped it to Biden. “Donald Trump’s opinion on this is that the ‘deep state’ knew the election was rigged and did nothing to stop it, and refused to back him in his declarations that the election was stolen,” according to a source close to Trump who’s discussed the federal investigations with him many times. 

The ex-president also wants to rant at the judge in the courtroom about how the trial is one big act of “election interference” designed to hobble Trump’s rising poll numbers.

Trump’s spokesperson and lawyer did not respond to Rolling Stone‘s requests for comment.

For the past several months, according to four of the sources, Trump has been demanding his attorneys incorporate an array of crank conspiracy theories about Jan. 6 and the 2020 election into their court filings and, eventually, performances at trial. His list of ideas has included asserting that there’s “evidence” that anti-Trump elements in the FBI “framed” him and MAGA protesters by using undercover agents and informants to instigate the deadly Jan. 6 riot; that anarchists and left-wing anti-fascists played a role in attacking the Capitol that day; and that Trump’s lieutenants had gathered real evidence showing “massive amounts” of voter and election “fraud” in 2020 in swing states and heavily Democratic urban areas, as he’s long baselessly claimed.

Furthermore, the sources add, the former president and his legal team are trying to use highly sensitive — in some cases, still-classified — government documents to support the notion that Trump was correct to think the 2020 election was rigged against him. According to Newsweek, Trump’s lawyers have sought records of classified communications between the Department of Justice and Hunter Biden; documents detailing efforts by Russia, Iran, and even Hezbollah to influence the 2020 election; information on alleged Chinese hacking of election infrastructure; and details of all undercover agents who were present at the Jan. 6 insurrection. These court demands are widely viewed, including in the upper ranks of Trumpland, as doubling as delay tactics, since insisting on a thorough review of classified information pretrial would invariably slow things down.

Trump and his lawyers are prepared to contend, as part of a broader legal argument, that his effort to overturn the election results was no different from when some Democrats questioned the integrity of elections they had lost. They plan to hammer the message that a guilty verdict would mean a death knell for free speech in America.

Not everyone who has legally counseled Trump is on board with these plans — including one of the lawyers who was previously tapped to develop strategy for this federal trial.

“From what I can tell — as an outside observer and former member of Donald Trump’s legal team — about how the trial strategy is taking shape, all I can say is: It is a terrible idea to try to use a criminal trial to stage a political campaign ad,” says Tim Parlatore, formerly one of the top lawyers advising Trump on the Jack Smith investigations. Parlatore was one of the attorneys who departed the legal team last year, following protracted in-fighting that caused the team to implode. “That would be incredibly detrimental to the client,” he says. “It is also a surefire way for you to quickly alienate jurors, particularly when you’re dealing with a jury pool like Washington, D.C.’s.

“If I were still on the team, that is not how I would be doing it,” Parlatore continues. “I hate partisan lawyering, from both sides. Try your case, show there was no corrupt intent, keep a laser focus on that issue, don’t grandstand about ‘the deep state,’ and don’t showboat for the TV cameras.”

Last year, after attorney John Lauro was hired as a new leading member of the Trump Jan. 6 defense team, the lawyer quickly made clear that he wanted television cameras to broadcast the trial. Lauro also appeared on TV and showed a brash willingness to parrot some of Trump’s conspiracy theories. “[Trump] gets an invitation to appear before a grand jury in the same week that Joe Biden is ensnarled in a massive bribery allegation at the same time that [former] President Trump is leading in the polls. Something is going on here that’s not quite right,” Lauro said during a Fox News hit at the time. Lauro, who has been leading this legal team with fellow Trump lawyer Todd Blanche, added that Trump’s crusade to nullify the 2020 election outcome was justifiable, given “all of these election discrepancies and irregularities going on.”

In some of his recent private conversations with aides and lawyers, Trump has stated he wants his legal team to “prove” in a court of law that Biden is actually the one orchestrating the prosecution, according to two of the sources.

“[Trump] has said that during ‘the discovery process,’ there’s no way we don’t find hard evidence that Biden is pulling the strings to send Donald Trump to jail … Apparently that’s what he believes,” says one of these sources, who has discussed the matter with Trump on multiple occasions. In other conversations that Trump had with his lawyers last year, he has been insistent that the discovery process ahead of trial would help produce currently concealed names of federal officials and attorneys detailed to Special Counsel Smith’s office — which would boost Trump’s efforts to purge those people from government if he’s elected again.

In November, Trump’s legal team filed its discovery requests, which included a demand for correspondence between the special prosecutor’s office and members, relatives, and associates of the Biden administration, in order to demonstrate “coordination with the Biden Administration” and thus “support President Trump’s defense regarding the politically motivated nature of the prosecution.”

These demands prompted a motion from Smith’s office calling on the judge to bar “improper evidence and argument” from Trump, writing that “the defense has attempted to inject into this case partisan political attacks and irrelevant and prejudicial issues that have no place in a jury trial.”

His office continued: “Through his groundless demand for discovery of evidence regarding ‘investigative misconduct,’ the defendant has suggested that he intends to impeach the integrity of the investigation by raising wholly false claims such as the government’s non-existent ‘coordination with the Biden administration’ and other empty allegations recycled from the selective and vindictive prosecution motion that he based on anonymous sources in newspaper articles.”

Federal courts typically do not allow cameras, but Trump and his legal counselors are pushing for his election subversion trial to be televised. “The prosecution wishes to continue this travesty in darkness,” they wrote in a legal filing. “President Trump calls for sunlight. Every person in America, and beyond, should have the opportunity to study this case firsthand and watch as, if there is a trial, President Trump exonerates himself of these baseless and politically motivated charges.”

The point of the camera demand is for Americans to witness the Trump team’s so-called “MAGA freak show” for themselves. Smith’s team has warned that Trump and his legal team are requesting camera access because they want “to create a carnival atmosphere from which he hopes to profit by distracting, like many fraud defendants try to do, from the charges against him.”

“It is clear the [former] president would like to turn the trial into a campaign ad as much as he can,” says another source who has legally advised Trump in recent years. “I mentioned to him that cameras in the courtroom is not what you’d want to do in a case like this. But he and his team see it very, very differently than I do, unfortunately … [Based on what I know], I think they’re going to make it feel like reality TV.”

Trump and his lawyers have long planned to wield an “advice of counsel” defense at the Jan. 6 trial to explain away his efforts to overturn the election results, arguing that the then-president was relying on guidance that he believed to be coming from seasoned legal experts. This would mean effectively scapegoating the attorneys — including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — who advised Trump and served as the architects of his coup attempt.

And just as Trump has done in past legal proceedings, the former president appears determined to wield a Jan. 6 trial as a political cudgel against his many enemies, including his successor and likely 2024 opponent, Biden. For years, Trump and much of the GOP have worked relentlessly to cement his anti-democratic lies about his 2020 loss into party dogma, under the guise of an “election integrity” movement. This has included concrete, wide-ranging attempts to tilt the 2024 election in Trump’s favor, long before election day.

For Trump, though, deploying a strategy of turning a trial into a deranged media and political circus is a feature, not a bug. In 2023, for instance, Trump and his legal team working on the New York civil fraud case plotted for months how they would sow chaos into that trial. This included effectively daring the presiding judge to throw Trump into a jail cell. The stakes in that case are, however, significantly lower than in the expected trials stemming from Smith’s criminal investigations.

In New York, Trump is at risk of seeing his business empire throttled. In the election subversion case, Trump faces the very real risk of going to prison, especially if he doesn’t win another term. And his legal team — who largely view the Jan. 6 case as a “suicide mission” anyway, and have their eyes on the appeal — are gearing up to turn the volume up to 11 at trial.

Alan Dershowitz, the celebrity lawyer who defended then-President Trump in his first impeachment, has called Trump and his legal teams’ tactics the “Chicago 7 disruption strategy,” referencing the famous Nixon-era federal trial of leftist, anti-Vietnam War activists.

But for all the tumult Trump and his legal advisers are hoping to impose on the courtroom, there’s just one problem with the strategy, according to Ty Cobb, a former federal prosecutor who also served as a top Trump White House attorney during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.

“It’s not gonna work,” Cobb bluntly assesses. “Trump and his lawyers, I’m sure, would like to see [the trial] devolve into a chaotic circus, but I don’t think they’re even going to get that … The biggest problem Donald Trump and his lawyers have is that they have no evidence and they have no witnesses … I haven’t seen a single email or document that would be helpful to him … Even if Rudy Giuliani testified for Trump’s defense, Rudy could easily end up making the government’s case for them. So who can they call? They don’t have anybody!”

Despite Cobb’s prior work in Trump’s administration, the lawyer has long since lost any shred of tolerance for the former president, and nowadays uses terms to describe Trump such as “inherently evil.”

Cobb adds that “one of the key ingredients, though, in the chaos of the Chicago 7 trial was of course Judge Hoffman,” who the former Trump White House attorney says “made the fatal error of engaging in combat with the defendants and their lawyers.” Tanya Chutkan, the judge assigned to the Trump Jan. 6 case, “won’t do that — she will shut down a circus and not do anything overtly antagonistic,” Cobb predicts, adding: “She will rule on him in a dignified, appropriate way. She hasn’t said yes to everything [Special Counsel Smith and his team] are doing; I think she’ll run a tight courtroom. That’s her reputation.”

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