Judge Tanya Chutkan's Gag Order Against Trump Is Extremely Smart

Mr. Trump’s free speech rights do not permit him “to launch a pretrial smear campaign” against those people, said the judge, Tanya S. Chutkan. “No other defendant would be allowed to do so,” Judge Chutkan added, “and I’m not going to allow it in this case.” But the narrowly tailored order explicitly left Mr. Trump free as he pursues his presidential campaign to continue disparaging the Justice Department and President Biden. It even allowed him to assert that he believed his criminal prosecution was politically motivated. Judge Chutkan apparently left Mr. Trump leeway to attack her as well.

A Trump campaign spokesperson connected the decision to President Biden, who had no role in the decision or in Trump’s court cases, and called the ruling “an absolute abomination and another partisan knife stuck in the heart of our Democracy.” “President Trump will continue to fight for our Constitution, the American people’s right to support him, and to keep our country free of the chains of weaponized and targeted law enforcement,” the spokesperson said in a statement shared by the campaign.

Her orders don't make a lot of sense. The boundaries of disparagement and inflammatory are the standards by which to judge President Trump's speech, gagging him and censoring him while he's running for president. He's the top presidential candidate for the Republican party for 2024. But politics, all of politics, is disparaging and inflammatory. That's the nature of politics and campaigns. So the judge has just made her courtroom the Ministry Of Truth.

Much of the hearing was given over to heated sparring between Judge Chutkan and John F. Lauro, a lawyer for Mr. Trump. Cutting Mr. Lauro off several times — and even laughing at him when he maintained that the pretrial release conditions imposed on Mr. Trump were working — Judge Chutkan staked out a position that was largely in keeping with the government’s. She repeatedly said that Mr. Trump should not enjoy any special privileges as a presidential candidate. She added that she was simply seeking to protect people involved in the election interference case from being threatened, and to keep Mr. Trump’s bullying remarks from spiraling into violence. “This trial will not yield to the election cycle,” Judge Chutkan said.

Mr. Lauro, often using exaggerated language, sought to portray Mr. Trump as the victim of the government’s “tyranny” and “totalitarianism.” He tried to reframe the former president’s public statements, saying they were merely examples of “speaking truth against oppression,” and he baselessly portrayed President Biden as having directed the case against Mr. Trump. At one point, the tensions nearly boiled over as Judge Chutkan noted that Mr. Lauro was speaking as much to his client, Mr. Trump, as he was to her, and warned him to “tone this down a bit.” Mr. Lauro responded by accusing the judge of trying to censor his own speech.