Judge warns Trump about social media posts as legal team defends baseball bat picture

A New York judge warned Donald Trump about making statements, online or otherwise, that would foment unrest or target public officials, the Associated Press reports, as the former president was in Manhattan on Tuesday facing charges for his role in a hush money scheme.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office accused Mr Trump’s social media posts of “threatening our city, our justice system, our courts and our office.”

In recent days, Mr Trump and his sons have posted aggressive messages online about the officials in the New York case.

On 23 March, the former president shared an article on Truth Social which used an image of Mr Trump holding a bat next to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

“He wasn’t swinging a baseball bat at anyone’s head,” Trump lawyer Joseph Tacopina said on Tuesday outside of the courthouse in Manhattan. “That was a picture of him showing off an American-made bat.”

In a post just hours before his arraignment, Mr Trump called the whole proceeding a “KANGAROO COURT” and attacked what he described as the “HIGHLY PARTISAN JUDGE” and his family, whom he described as being “WELL KNOWN TRUMP HATERS.”

In court, Trump attorney Todd Blanche said Mr Trump’s posts were a response to prosecution witnesses talking publicly about the case, and a form of protest against the “grave injustice” of being charged.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump Jr also criticised judge Juan Merchan and his family, calling the fact that Mr Merchan’s daughter worked on the Biden-Harris campaign evidence of the indictment being a “hand picked democrat show trial.”

“The BS never ends folks,” Mr Trump wrote on Twitter.

Eric Trump, one of the former president’s other sons, has also hammered DA Bragg online, criticising the New York official for the thousands of dollars spent on security as Donald Trump was taken in and out of Manhattan to face charges.

“I never thought I would see this level of corruption in the United States,” Eric Trump wrote on Twitter.

As The Independent has reported, observers say Mr Trump’s rhetoric during his new campaign has taken on an increasingly violent tone, including during his 2024 kickoff rally in Waco, Texas, the site of an infamous armed standoff with cult members that galvanised the modern right-wing militia movement in the US.

“Given what happened on January 6, he’s playing with fire,” professor Matthew Dallek, a political historian of the right and homeland security issues at George Washington University, told The Independent ahead of the event.