About Judge Engoron. . .

I don't know which way Judge Engoron swings, and it isn't my business, but it seems like he's setting himself up as a bizarre foil for Trump's Chicago Seven strategy.

BREAKING: The judge presiding over Trump's NYC trial appears to have a peculiar hobby of posting half-naked photos of himself on a high school alumni newsletter he controls as reported on by @MarcoPolo501c3.

The 74-year-old judge Arthur Engoron appeared to even post a… pic.twitter.com/JW2ArmxzzN

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 7, 2023

Alan Dershowitz, before the latest revelation of the judge's bathroom selfies, came to the same conclusion in this YouTube post:

At 3:42, he begins,

. . . back at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s before most of you were born, there was a famous trial in America, it was called the trial of the Chicago Seven. It tas during the 1968 presidential conventions in Chicago that a group of radicals headed by people like Abby Hoffman, left-wing progressive radicals, demonstrated and engaged, sometimes, in some violent conduct, and they were all arrested and charged with conspiracy. I was a consultant on the case, because there were free speech issues, and the trial turned into a farce, because they had picked a judge named Julius Hoffman, who was a very right-wing jurist to preside over the trial, and he hated these radical defendants, and the radical defendants hated him, and Abby Hoffman came up with a tactic, he said basically to his lawyers and everybody else, "Look, we can't win this case in front of Judge Julius Hoffman. Let's see if we can go about getting it reversed on appeal, and the best way to do it is to provoke this judge, he has a short fuse, and provoke him into making error after error."

And that's exactly what [Abby] Hoffman did, he stood up, he made speeches, he wore costumes, he did everything possible to provoke the judge, and the judge fell into the trap, and I was one of the lawyers on the appeal, and we won the appeal, and he held the lawyers in contempt, and we won the appeal on contempt. So we had a total victory, and [Julius] Hoffman really was laughed at by his fellow judges, and he was condemned by jurists and appellate judges. So I call this the Chicago Seven tactic, and I think this is what Donald Trump is using now.

In my view, it doesn't hurt that one of Trump's chief attorneys, Alina Habba, is something of a bombshell, and she stands up to Judge Engoron in court, which he must find especially galling, a highly attractive and assertive woman going against a nebbishy, vain, androgynous, bad-tempered 74 year old. Via Newsweek,

Habba then defended Trump, telling Engoron that the judge is here to "hear what he has to say." Engoron gave an angry response to Habba's interjection, telling the attorney: "I'm not here to hear what he has to say. He's here to answer questions," while demanding she sits down.

In a statement outside the court, Habba said she is not going to "tolerate" being yelled at by a judge and that she was only doing her job as an attorney when defending the former president's responses in court.

Following the revelation of Engoron's bathroom selfies, several commentators have noted that this is not appropriate judicial conduct, and it appears that much like Judge Hoffman, Judge Engoron's reputation will suffer in the wake of this trial. Again, apparently written before the bathroom selfies hit the news, Don Surber posted,

Trump is the issue. Democrats blundered by indicting and suing him so much. Tying him up in court ties the media to keeping him on Page One, where he flourished in 2016. NYT is still holding out hope that Democrats will not suffer a Pyrrhic Victory in court that costs them the presidency.

The official paper of birdcages everywhere reported, “Trump Indictments Haven’t Sunk His Campaign, but a Conviction Might.”

The legacy media can't resist Trump, because Trump brings clicks -- but Trump's ability to deflect the narrative in his favor is uncanny. You can see Dershowitz's grudging respect for Trump growing by the day, and Dershowitz is no amateur at self-promotion himself.