As Week Three of the Trump trial began this morning, Judge Juan Merchan fined Donald Trump another $1K for violating Merchan’s overwrought gag order. It is the second time the judge has found the former president in contempt.

While it is possible that Merchan could impose a few days’ (up to 30) of imprisonment for violations of the order, I don’t think there is much prospect of that. The gag order is ostensibly in place to prevent Trump from threatening witnesses. That is a pretext: Trump hasn’t threatened any witnesses; he has opined that they are terrible people (including, in Michael Cohen’s case, that he is a convicted perjurer, which is true).

Merchan is a partisan Democrat. The reality of the gag order is that Merchan is effectuating the Democratic political narrative that Trump’s statements, even if not actionable incitement, are sure to stir his most rabid supporters to threaten witnesses — maybe even to a January 6-style attack on the courthouse (as if the highly competent NYPD would tolerate such a thing).

Beyond promoting the Democratic party-line (as well as the one that Trump’s federal election-interference case is his “insurrection matter”), the main purpose of the gag order is to stifle Trump’s attempts to point out that Merchan’s daughter is a progressive political operative who works for Democrats who define themselves by their loathing of and opposition to Trump — including President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Representative Adam Schiff. In pointing out how rigged is this ridiculous prosecution, Trump wants to highlight Loren Merchan’s lucrative political work to add context to the facts that (a) Merchan made 2020 political contributions to Biden and Democrats (small-dollar amounts that are obviously made to show that the donor is on the team rather than to have any measurable effect on the outcome), (b) Merchan has straight down the line endorsed Bragg’s every loopy legal theory and denial of Trump’s due-process rights, and (c) Merchan is orchestrating Trump’s conviction.

Naturally, witnesses for the elected progressive Democratic prosecutor Alvin Bragg have not been gagged, so Cohen and porn star Stormy Daniels are free to keep talking about Trump. The judge could easily lean on prosecutors to encourage the witnesses to zip it, but he hasn’t, on the risible rationalization that Trump is the only one on trial. Obviously, if Merchan’s real concerns were safeguarding the process and shielding the jury from media coverage of extrajudicial statements about the case, it wouldn’t matter which participants in the trial were stoking publicity. But Merchan targets only one participant, Trump, leaving prosecution witnesses — to say nothing of Trump’s political adversaries — free to speak publicly about the case to their heart’s content, no matter how much the ensuing publicity may undermine the fairness of the trial.

In imposing today’s fine, Merchan again admonished Trump that if he continues ignoring the gag order “this court will have to consider a jail sanction.” The judge mewled that he was just trying to do his job, part of which is “to protect the dignity of the justice system.” Of course, if that were a priority for him, he might have forced the DA to tell Trump what the crime is — a rudimentary ingredient of the dignity of the justice system that Bragg has been permitted to omit.

Because the prosecution is so unabashedly political, I believe the chances that Merchan will actually jail Trump — despite the line in the sand the judge foolishly drew this morning — are slim. Putting Trump behind bars, even for a day or two, would be politically disastrous for Democrats. Even voters who dislike Trump would more closely scrutinize the case brought by Bragg — the progressive prosecutor whose default position is to ignore or minimize serious crime — and be outraged by it. It would become more notorious and undeniable that an elected Democrat is exploiting law-enforcement power punitively against the Democrats’ arch political nemesis — and on the election-denial theory that Trump stole the presidency from Hillary Clinton.

So Merchan may huff and puff, but I don’t think he’ll incarcerate Trump. (I know, easy for me to say.) In fact, as I’ve previously quipped, if I were the billionaire defendant here, I’d be tempted to give Merchan a check for $5K or $10K every Monday to cover the upcoming week’s anticipated contempts.

Finally, I’m trying to understand how anything Trump has said is more prejudicial than the “statement of facts” Bragg issued when the grand jury’s indictment was unsealed.

Ordinarily, prosecutors draft the factual recitation on which the charges are based in the indictment. That recitation thus becomes part of the charges as articulated on the public record. That is why prosecutors, who are obliged when speaking publicly to stick to the formal allegations in the public record, are permitted to comment on them.

In this case, to the contrary, the grand jury issued an indictment that accused Trump of fraudulently falsifying his business records from February through December 2017. In conjunction with the indictment’s unsealing, Bragg put on an out-of-court narrative — his own, not the grand jury’s — that accused Trump of conspiring to steal the 2016 election by suppressing politically damaging information in violation of federal campaign law. To support that non-indictment narrative, the DA asserted that Cohen had pled guilty to campaign-finance violations and gone to jail over them. That is, even though the Constitution requires a felony charge to be stated in the indictment, Bragg put out his own statement about a conspiracy offense not charge in the indictment based on federal law he has no authority to enforce, and supported it by evidence that (as even Merchan has conceded) is not admissible against Trump — viz., Cohen’s guilty plea.

If Merchan is truly worried about out-of-court statements that imperil the dignity of the judicial process, what about Bragg’s gratuitous (and deceptively titled) “statement of facts” that so distorted the indictment the grand jury actually returned? That has had much more prejudicial effect on the proceedings than anything Trump has ranted about on Truth Social.