It was a busy day in court for Donald Trump.

In Washington on October 25, Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the court to reinstate a temporary gag order, this time with jail as the penalty, after Donald Trump called the former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (and, by extension, former allies who have cut deals in his election interference case elsewhere in Georgia) a weakling and coward if he agreed to testify in exchange for immunity.

Trump had been under an earlier gag order which barred him from disparaging prosecutors, court staff, and potential witnesses in a pattern that the court filing called “targeting.” The fear was Trump was calling out those he wanted MAGA supporters to go after. Smith urged Judge Tanya Chutkan to “modify the defendant’s conditions of release by making compliance with the Order a condition." Smith was ultimately successful.

On the same day, October 25, in response to his violation of a separate New York court gag order, Judge Arthur Engoron ordered the former president to testify over an insult Trump threw at the judge’s law clerk. The judge found Trump guilty of violating his gag order and ordered Trump to pay a $10,000 fine on top of an earlier $5,000 one. Trump stormed out of the courtroom, his somewhat bewildered Secret Service in tow. Trump technically remains free only on bail.

Pundits asked if Trump is actually trying to antagonize judges and lose both cases. Or could there be some other reason for Trump’s apparent self-sabotage?

Trump looks like a man who simply does not care what happens with the current trials, or any of the others upcoming. He is both convinced the system is fully unfair and equally aware that the more trouble he seems to get into the faster his poll numbers rise. Each courtroom defeat, small and procedural or a full-on guilty verdict, simply fans the flames for rally crowds. The cash penalties levied by Engoron and Chutkan for violating gag orders have little meaning.

But Trump actually being jailed for violating a gag order would grant him official martyr status. Within a week of his release, Trump will be calling himself a jailed freedom-fighter like Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. He could then literally test an earlier boast by shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue without losing any supporters, or perhaps, with MAGA cheers in the background, simply flip off one of the judges who dare seek to decide his fate.