Two top Donald Trump biographers, David Cay Johnston and Tim O'Brien, have said that they think the former president is scared because he's never had to face the kind of consequences he's about to face in New York.
On MSNBC's The ReidOut with Joy Reid, former "Apprentice" star Omarosa Manigault Newman agreed with the men, saying Trump has little "tells" that are now on full display.
"I want to mark that it's 20 years from when we first arrived at Trump Tower and the first time I rode on that Trump plane that we shot the Apprentice," she remembered. "So, it's very, very appropriate that you started out with that clip of the Apprentice. But in terms of Donald Trump and the spectacle, Donald wants to make everybody think he's being persecuted, that someone is doing something wrong to him, and that he has done absolutely nothing wrong."
Rolling Stone cited law enforcement and Trump inside sources who expressed that this kind of Christ-like persecution is intentional.
“It’s kind of a Jesus Christ thing. He is saying ‘I’m absorbing all this pain from all around from everywhere, so you don’t have to,’” a source close to the legal team said. Trump hopes to continue to promote his message, “‘If they can do this to me they can do this to you,’ and that’s a powerful message."
Omarosa explained that this is the first time that Trump has faced something like this before.
"And yes, he is going to try to pivot and distract and make you all think he's not upset or nervous, but Donald Trump is terrified. And I can just certainly tell by his telltale signs, the expression on his face, he doesn't look well," she said. "So no matter what he's saying out of his mouth, he is terrified."
MSNBC host Joy Reid noted that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen is echoing that same sentiment.
While Cohen mocked Trump for failing to draw large crowds to New York on Monday, he explained that there are large issues that Trump is facing.
Speaking to Nicolle Wallace and Ari Melber last week, Cohen said, "I believe that Donald right now is petrified this is one of his biggest fears, that he would be called out for who and what he truly is. The mug shotting is going to be something that is going to really upset his fragile ego, and at the end of the day, he's going to understand that no one is above the law. Something that so many Democrats have actually stated over the course of many years now."
Reid noted that Trump has been trying to circumvent that humiliation by claiming that he might offer his mugshot on t-shirts he can sell on his campaign website. It's unknown if Democrats or other liberal groups have thought of doing the same.
"You know, Omarosa got it," said Tim O'Brien, joining the discussion. "Some of this, and it's part of my response to your question, which is Donald Trump has an incredibly cinematic sense of himself. He thinks of himself constantly as the star, the director, the producer, and the scriptwriter of his own movie. And because of that, he always wants to be in control he wants to be in control of his image. He wants to be in control of the process."
One of the examples of that is Trump's lawyers requesting that the trial not be televised in any way.
"The people around him that kiss up to him the most effectively play to that they play to his vanity, they play to his insecurities about his masculinity," said O'Brien. "And I think that's why this is such a dangerous position for him to be in, including one that I do think is scaring him. Because he's not in control of the circumstances under which he's going to be paraded in front of the public. They are humiliating circumstances.
"The legal process, at least in this case, has now drawn to one of its first conclusions and he's not in control of that any longer. So, he's going to go to his two defaults. He's going to try to pretend that he's feeling something he isn't, which I do think he's afraid and he's unsure because he's also slogging through a tar pit of other lawsuits that are coming at him. And I think he's going to default to violence. He's going to incite people to rise up in his name, so this cartoonish buffoonery that surrounds him has some very real dangers embedded in it," OBrien added.
See the discussion between the two in the video below or at the link here.
Omarosa can see little 'tells' from Trump that he's truly 'scared'www.youtube.com
