Trump's 'self-aggrandizement' habit could hurt him in Monday testimony: legal analyst

Donald Trump's well-documented history of going off script, digressions and boasting while under oath may lead to more legal woes if he can't control himself on Monday when he testifies in Judge Arthur Engoron's courtroom.

The former president is scheduled to take the stand this coming week to defend himself and his Trump Organization in the $250 million financial fraud lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James which could lead to the dissolution of his company.

According to MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin, who has been in attendance and reporting on the testimony given by Trump's sons Don Jr. and Eric, she expects the former president to eschew carefully preplanned answers and instead ramble as he has done in previous depositions.

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On X, formerly known as Twitter, she wrote she is wondering "What latitude he has to boast about his prowess as president & deflect from his control over his business."

Noting a deposition given in the E. Jean Carroll defamation lawsuit that came back to haunt him and cost him millions, Rubin suggested the former president likely hasn't learned his lesson to keep his responses to questions short and to the point.

Asserting, "...we know from prior Trump testimony, his certainty of self and propensity for self-aggrandizement sometimes leads to blisteringly bad admissions," she predicted, "So tomorrow, we can expect Trump to respond to one-sentence questions with answers that take up several pages of the transcript. The question is who wins when he does that. Trump clearly thinks it’s him."

She then added that, if the prosecution lets him ramble there is a reason for that, writing, "And a failure to complain on the AG’s part might be strategic, not a lapse in prosecutorial judgment."

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