How a ‘Nerdy’ Prosecutor Became the First to Try Trump

Reporters vied for seats in the briefing room, some even crouching on the floor. They all knew, on this Tuesday in early April 2023, that Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, was about to announce something momentous: the first criminal charges against a former American president.

Yet when Bragg walked quietly onto the stage, it took a second or two for the audience to realize he was there. In his dark blue suit and dark-rimmed glasses, he blended into the dark blue curtains behind the lectern. He took out his notes and thanked everyone for coming. He was flanked by poster boards with flow charts, but that was as far as the showmanship went.

The accusations he went on to level against Donald J. Trump were salacious, involving money paid to a porn star just before the 2016 presidential election so she would remain silent about her claim that they had sex a decade before. But Bragg studiously avoided mentioning sex or hush money during the 13-minute event, focusing instead on 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up the payment. Bragg looked frequently at his notes while he spoke, mostly in a monotone. He seemed unprepared (or unwilling) to answer the most obvious questions: why he had abandoned a different case, about whether Trump had falsified the valuations of properties, or why he thought he could make these new charges stick.

Bragg displayed passion only once, in response to a question about why he brought a hush-money case after his predecessor and federal prosecutors had not.

“This is the business capital of the world,” Bragg said, his voice rising. “We regularly do cases involving false business statements. The bedrock — in fact, the basis for business integrity and a well-functioning business marketplace — is true and accurate record-keeping. That’s the charge that’s brought here, falsifying New York State business records.”

True and accurate record-keeping. It’s hardly the stuff of history books. But a year later, it is this paperwork case — not the three other indictments that have dominated the news, involving accusations of trying to overturn a presidential election and mishandling highly classified documents — that will in the coming days make history as Trump’s first criminal trial, and perhaps the only one before the election in November.

Hardly anyone figured that it would play out this way. Bragg himself had said that “broader justice may warrant another case going first.” Yet with those other cases mired in legal skirmishing and delay, it is Bragg, a Harvard-trained prosecutor who has often appeared to be a most uncomfortable, un-media-savvy public figure, who will now face off against the reality-television star turned Republican former president, master of spin, media-ready insult and creation of his own narrative.

Bragg’s legal argument is complicated, but it stems from a simple episode: In the days before the 2016 election, Trump’s personal attorney and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, paid $130,000 in hush money to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels. Prosecutors argue that Trump, who denies that he had sex with Daniels, then lied on 34 business records — 12 ledger entries, 11 invoices and 11 checks — to disguise his repayment of Cohen as legal fees.

On its own, falsifying those documents would be misdemeanors, relatively minor crimes. Bragg elevated each of the charges to felonies by arguing that they were committed to hide or further another crime — which, in an unusual move, he did not charge. He said he wasn’t required to specify that crime, but added that it might have been a violation of state or federal election law. What may further complicate the case is that it relies heavily on testimony from Cohen, a disbarred lawyer who served prison time after pleading guilty to violating campaign-finance laws, evading taxes, making false statements to a bank and lying to Congress.

After the indictment, a chorus of critics — some but not all on the right — questioned the legal reasoning, wisdom and winnability of the hush-money case. Today, many experts believe that Bragg’s legal strategy looks considerably stronger, validated by a federal judge who rebuffed Trump’s effort to delay or even kill the case by having it moved to federal court, and by the Manhattan judge presiding over the case, who in February officially greenlit Bragg’s premise by setting a trial date.

None of which means the case has ceased to be controversial. The furor lives on, primarily in the political space. Trump and his allies have branded the case a witch hunt, a selective prosecution brought by a Democratic district attorney in the pocket of George Soros, boogeyman of the right. Many Democrats, in turn, worry that Trump’s narrative of persecution is only fueling his presidential campaign, especially because this case of sexual peccadillo and faked paperwork might look frivolous next to his three other indictments, which cut closer to his presidency and the foundations of American democracy.

“We’re all kind of like, ‘I can’t believe Alvin is at the center of this,’” says Erin E. Murphy, a New York University law professor who is part of Bragg’s close-knit friend group from law school and was one of more than 70 friends, colleagues and legal and political experts interviewed for this article. She adds: “He’s just so not political. He’s like, not a hyperpartisan political person in any way, shape or form. So there’s just this dissonance.”

Certainly, Bragg, who is 50, has never seemed to concern himself much with appearances. His friends have long joked about his wearing rumpled suits or a Boy Scout outfit on a date. If he could have applied for this job instead of campaigning for it, they say, he would have. That’s what he did when he became a federal prosecutor and then a deputy New York attorney general, each move a step forward in a life devoted to a careful, verging on nerdy, practice of the law; to the commitment to service — a word he has often used — that his parents instilled in him when he was growing up on Strivers’ Row in Harlem.

Bragg himself has seemed almost sheepish about the Trump case, preferring to talk about tackling wage theft or creating a jail-diversion program. Just after he announced the indictment last spring, his office sent out its regular roundup of big cases. It listed the Trump indictment not first, not even second, but third — after the convictions of two killers. The office’s 2023 highlights list didn’t even mention Trump. Bragg declined to comment for this article, concerned about being accused of unethical behavior before the trial.

Yet if Bragg the district attorney has been largely quiet about the former president, a look back through his record shows that hasn’t always been the case. Bragg the candidate, in fact, was more than willing to talk up his legal bona fides in the matter of Trump. Bragg may lack the polish and presentation of a politician. His friends may insist that he’s not a politician. But for all his lawyerly reticence, inside his sometimes-ill-fitting suits is a man of unmistakable ambition who has hitched his aspirations to the pursuit of Donald J. Trump.

Bragg’s emergence as a public critic of Trump came at a time when he was relatively unknown outside New York legal and Harvard-alumni circles. And it came in an unusual venue: a video, posted in May 2019 by the progressive news outlet NowThis and hosted by the flamboyantly public Trump hater Robert De Niro. In the video, Bragg and 10 other former federal prosecutors said they believed that Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election had uncovered more than enough evidence to indict Trump. “This isn’t even a close case,” Bragg said.

Bragg was on a break from public service, teaching at New York Law School. But he was also just weeks from announcing his next move: his candidacy for Manhattan district attorney in an election still two years away.

The incumbent district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., had begun his own investigation of the president and his businesses. And even before Vance announced in March 2021 that he would not seek re-election, the race had become a referendum on who could best take on Trump. In a primary campaign of would-be Trump slayers, Bragg sold himself as the most experienced.

He talked about supervising the state investigation into the Trump Foundation as chief deputy attorney general in 2017 — a case that led to the charity’s closure. He said he knew how to prosecute fraud in the valuation of properties, one strand of Vance’s Trump investigation. Referring to Trump’s “criminal policies,” Bragg added, “He has embraced white nationalism, misconstrued data and engaged in cronyism, and the result has been a parade of horribles.” Bragg told The Wall Street Journal that he “certainly” had more experience with Trump “than most people in the world.” A rival Democrat’s spokeswoman complained that Bragg attacked Trump “for political advantage every chance he gets.”

Bragg also used Trump to contrast himself with Vance. The district attorney, he argued, had appeared soft on the rich and powerful, declining to prosecute two of Trump’s children several years earlier on accusations that they misled potential buyers in the struggling Trump SoHo condo-hotel. Vance had also met with one of Trump’s lawyers, Marc Kasowitz, and accepted his $32,000 campaign contribution just months after rejecting the Trump SoHo case. (Vance later returned the money.)

For Bragg, this was a break with lawyerly protocol — to be talking about a potential case before seeing all the facts, at the risk of appearing biased. Yet in this election cycle, and especially with Trump newly vulnerable after his 2020 loss, holding him to account seemed vital to being elected in Manhattan.

Bragg’s campaign was hardly all Trump. He also championed the sort of criminal-justice-reform issues — for example, ending long prison sentences for low-level street crimes — that had helped progressive prosecutors sweep into office nationwide. But he seemed to double down on Trump as the campaign went on, simplifying and exaggerating his record. “It is a fact that I have sued Trump over 100 times,” Bragg told The New York Times in April 2021, an often-repeated claim that would be published everywhere from CNN to the BBC. “I can’t change that fact, nor would I. That was important work.” Asked recently for documentation, a campaign spokesman, Richard Fife, sent links to more than 100 news releases. A review of these and court filings found 30 cases in which the New York attorney general’s office had sued Trump or his federal agencies during Bragg’s time there — nearly always alongside other states. (The office also joined 12 other ongoing lawsuits against the Trump administration, the analysis found.) As a top aide to the attorney general, Bragg could have supervised those cases, but taking personal credit seems a bit of a stretch.

The district attorney’s office referred questions about the lawsuits to Fife, who said Bragg’s comments were not written but made “in conversation.” (Bragg, in fact, did repeat the statement in a written candidate questionnaire.) “I will concede,” Fife said, “that our use of the word ‘suit’ isn’t as limited as your definition.”

In heavily Democratic Manhattan, primaries typically function as general elections. On Primary Day in June 2021, Bragg said on Twitter: “As Chief Deputy Attorney General of NY State, I oversaw a staff of 1200+ people delivering progressive change. I led the investigation into stop and frisk. I didn’t just sue Donald Trump and the Trump Foundation — I won.”

On Nov. 2, 2021, the night he trounced his Republican opponent, Bragg moved to the microphone at Harlem Tavern as supporters chanted: “Alvin! Alvin! Alvin!” His first public remarks were hardly memorable.

“Somewhere deep down inside, I think I always wanted a bar mitzvah,” said Bragg, who had long taught Sunday school at the nearby Abyssinian Baptist Church. “This is new for me, newly elected — I think I can say that now, right?” he asked the crowd, starting his speech. Then he paused, practically giddy, to interrupt himself: “Look, this is phenomenal.”

Bragg’s remarks made it clear that he saw his election as Manhattan’s first Black district attorney as the natural next chapter in the annals of his life. Walking to the tavern on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, Bragg told his supporters, his mind flipped back through a personal journey that began along this stretch of what neighborhood old-timers like himself still called Eighth Avenue: being dropped off at grade school by his parents; eventually taking the M10 bus there on his own; facing guns pointed at him by the police; graduating from high school. But that was not all. Bragg had one more memory to share.

“I had my first date with Jamila Ponton Bragg on 139th Street and Eighth Avenue,” he said. “And I was wearing a Boy Scout uniform, because I had just come from leading a troop at Abyssinian Baptist Church, and she still ate with me, and she married me!”

Bragg’s parents, Alvin Sr. and Sadie, raised him to move seamlessly between worlds. They attended church at Abyssinian, a stronghold of Black social-justice activism. But they also enrolled their only child as a kindergartner at the Trinity School, one of the city’s most exclusive private academies. Bragg, one of a handful of Black students, became the center of a tight-knit group of Trinity kids, friends who are still in his inner circle. “We always called him the mayor,” recalls John Scott, who met Bragg in middle school. “He was like the most gregarious and outgoing and charismatic guy, even back then.”

In a Trinity yearbook entry, Bragg quoted Aristotle, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the music producer Quincy Jones — and himself: “You and I are like two stalks of corn in a field of love … waiting for the harvest.” (It was apparently an inside joke.)

Asked by a journalist during the campaign if he was nerdy, Bragg said: “I think yes and no. I think nerdiness is a little bit context-based.” He paused and added: “I think in any broad sense, yes.” The Rev. Al Sharpton, who supported Bragg’s campaign and praised his indictment of Trump, described him this way: “He’s not the larger-than-life swagger figure of Harlem. He is the result of what those generations produced: a competent, efficient guy.”

Growing up, Bragg’s friends say, he didn’t make a big fuss about the three times he remembered the police pulling guns on him on the Harlem streets. Once, several police cars converged on a taxi carrying Bragg and four Black friends; the officers, guns drawn, ordered everyone out. They told them they “fit the description” of some boys who had just committed a crime nearby, then held them for a few minutes before letting them go, recalls Roald Richards, one of the friends. (During the campaign, whenever Bragg brought up his encounters with the police, he would also mention the three times criminals pulled guns on him or would praise the police for keeping the streets safe.)

Yet if Bragg swallowed those experiences as a teenager, he has also described them as fuel for his ambition. He was elected president of his high school senior class; his yearbook described an imaginary 20-year reunion in which Bragg was president of the United States. While he was at college, The Harvard Crimson highlighted his ability as president of the Black Students Association to defuse tension between warring student groups. The headline: “The Anointed One.” Bragg’s role: “Conciliator.” He became such good friends with Republicans that, years later, one would actually donate money to his campaign — despite the fact that said Republican, Harry Wilson, would later run for governor of New York. At Harvard Law School, Bragg joined the team that won the prestigious moot-court competition. Even that makes his path seem preordained: It was the Archibald Cox team, named for the Watergate prosecutor who investigated President Richard M. Nixon.

Bragg started out as a lawyer in private practice representing, among other clients, Native American tribal members who said they had been abused by the police. But he soon became a prosecutor at the state attorney general’s office, explaining later that he felt he could make more of a difference from the inside. After three years, he left to become a lawyer at the New York City Council. Three years after that, he joined the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. After four years there, he returned for a second tour at the attorney general’s office. It became a pattern: Bragg never stayed long enough to build a deep record. He seemed in a rush to get somewhere.

But in offices where head-down self-advancement was the norm, Bragg amassed friends and allies. It’s all but impossible to find anyone who worked with him who has a negative thing to say. He walked around, often slightly disheveled, messenger bag dangling and tie askew, smiled big and asked, “How are you?” Several colleagues recalled being struck by how deliberately he tested the strengths and weaknesses of evidence. “In every regard, he was one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and meticulous,” says Joshua Gradinger, who worked under Bragg in the attorney general’s office. “I say that over and over again — meticulous.”

But as Bragg prepared to take office in 2022, a conflict was brewing: between his careful approach to the law and the promises he made during his political campaign.

Within days of becoming district attorney, Bragg announced his top policy priorities. From the recesses of his campaign website, he pulled a criminal-justice-reform manifesto outlining crimes that would no longer be prosecuted, including marijuana possession, trespassing and sex work. The Day 1 Memo, as it was called, also signaled that illegal gun possession would not mean jail time unless the gun was used in a violent crime.

The timing was less than ideal. During the pandemic, murders and shootings rose, and many New Yorkers seemed to believe that things were spiraling out of control. “Happy 2022, Criminals!” The New York Post blared, referring to Bragg as the “woke new Manhattan DA.”

Bragg’s ideas weren’t exactly radical. But his execution — announcing them as one of his first acts, in the biggest job of his life, without anticipating the backlash — made him look like a rookie, like someone who didn’t seem to fully grasp that he would be upsetting some of the very people he needed to do his job. The police commissioner rebuked him; police unions condemned him. Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney who had hired Bragg and then campaigned for him, was disappointed and frustrated by what he saw as an astonishingly clumsy rollout, according to people familiar with his thinking.

Bragg had another hangover from the campaign: the case of Tracy McCarter, a nurse accused of killing her husband. Vance had charged McCarter with second-degree murder in September 2020, even though she claimed self-defense and domestic abuse. Activists on social media had defended her. Bragg had weighed in. “I #StandWithTracy,” he tweeted on the day she was charged, using the hashtag pushed by McCarter’s backers. “Prosecuting a domestic violence survivor who acted in self-defense is unjust.”

Now, invested with the powers of the district attorney, Bragg had to decide whether he would indeed stand with McCarter. Pressing him to do so was a progressive group, Color of Change, whose political-action committee had endorsed him and pledged to spend more than $1 million supporting his campaign. It ultimately spent about $425,000, money that helped Bragg overcome his closest opponent’s last-minute rush of cash. (That financial link would become Republican ammunition: Within days of its Bragg endorsement, Color of Change received a $1 million donation from George Soros, the billionaire patron of liberal causes. After the Trump indictment, the former president and his allies pointed to it as evidence that Bragg was under Soros’s control.)

In November 2022, Bragg went into court himself — unusual for a sitting district attorney — to ask the judge to dismiss the McCarter case. “I understand the gravity of this decision,” he said, before lapsing into a jumble of legalese. Several days later, the judge, Diane Kiesel, dismissed the case but excoriated Bragg for what she called legal errors and potentially politically motivated decisions. The case, she wrote, “has reached the point where the public could perceive this dismissal as bought and paid for with campaign contributions and political capital.”

But in some ways, Bragg had started to get his footing, delivering on some of his campaign promises to take on the powerful and help the less fortunate. He prosecuted hate crimes against Asian Americans, exonerated a sixth defendant in the 1989 Central Park jogger case and pursued significantly fewer lower-level crimes than Vance had. He charged Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former political strategist, with money laundering and conspiracy for his role in a charity that skimmed from donations for a border wall, a case that has yet to go to trial. Bragg would also obtain indictments of two men with ties to a fellow Democrat, Mayor Eric Adams.

Still, Bragg seemed to be trying to thread the needle, looking for compromise as he had throughout his career. While he stopped demanding bail as often as Vance had, those decisions were often dictated by state bail reforms. His office also filed about 3,800 violent-felony cases in 2022, the most in 10 years, even as shootings and murders dropped, allowing Bragg to claim that his policies were working. But none of this would stop conservatives from grumbling that Bragg was a left-wing coddler of violent criminals, as a Republican prosecutor in Arizona would later do when she refused to extradite a murder suspect to New York.

By the end of his first year in office, Bragg had turned a corner. He had just won his biggest victory: convicting Trump’s company of tax fraud. Vance had filed the charges, but Bragg delivered on them. And finally, he was finding the way forward with Trump himself.

For more than two years, Cyrus Vance’s prosecutors had hunted for a winnable case against Trump. But while it wasn’t hard to find legally questionable behavior across Trump’s business empire, each possible case had a flaw.

The lawyers were intrigued by the hush-money case. Mark Pomerantz, a former federal prosecutor Vance had pulled out of retirement to pursue Trump, was among those who called it “the zombie case,” because it was alive, then dead, then alive again. Pomerantz thought the hush-money facts seemed incriminating, easy to explain to a jury. But he worried about persuading a judge that the misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records — for disguising the hush-money repayment as legal fees — could be elevated to felonies.

Pomerantz, who had led the criminal division in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, was drawn to another option: Trump’s exaggerations of his net worth on financial statements submitted to banks. Trump wasn’t just boasting, Pomerantz argued. He was committing crimes.

Weeks before his term ended in December 2021, Vance brought together a group of experienced lawyers to evaluate the net-worth case. The group included two prosecutors who worked on the Mueller investigation, but it did not include the incoming district attorney; Bragg was not even told about the meeting. Regardless, Vance emerged with a plan. He would push ahead.

When Bragg took office that January, he needed to decide quickly whether to sign on to the case; prosecutors were already presenting evidence to a grand jury. But quickly wasn’t in Bragg’s nature. By month’s end, a frustrated Pomerantz sent Bragg an email that he would later write was “blunt, perhaps too blunt.” He told the new district attorney that he needed to “respect our judgment,” noted that it was “virtually impossible” to meet with him about the Trump case and scolded Bragg, who was two decades younger, for looking at his phone during one of their few meetings. Pomerantz later wrote that he had wondered if Bragg “was in over his head.”

But Bragg remained skeptical, according to people familiar with his thinking. He believed that there was no evidence tying Trump directly to a financial fraud; without it, he worried, he would not be able to prove Trump’s criminal intent. And prosecutors wanted a tour guide — a cooperating witness who knew the ins and outs of the crime. Michael Cohen was extremely willing, having broken with Trump, but he lacked intimate knowledge of the Trump Organization’s finances.

There were more meetings, more emails — but Bragg refused to bring the case on Pomerantz’s timeline. So in late February, Pomerantz and another lead prosecutor on the case quit — in spectacular fashion. Pomerantz’s resignation letter described Bragg’s decision as “a grave failure of justice.” He then wrote a book called “People vs. Donald Trump” that might as well have been called “Pomerantz vs. Bragg.” Pomerantz wrote that the investigation turned into “the legal equivalent of a plane crash” and accused Bragg of “pilot error.”

Bragg, for his part, said little — even when Pomerantz’s resignation letter became public, even when many of his liberal supporters complained that he had dropped the ball on Trump and even when critics lumped this decision together with the Day 1 Memo as some kind of proof that he wasn’t up to the job. For all of Bragg’s campaign rhetoric, those who know him insisted that he would never have indicted Trump without reviewing every piece of evidence. Plus, Bragg did not feel bound by Vance’s view of the case — he was the district attorney now.

“He doesn’t get the luxury of saying, ‘Well, Cy Vance said it’s OK,’” says Kim Foxx, a Bragg friend who is the state’s attorney in Chicago. “His name is on the door. His face is on the wall. He owes it to the case. He owes it to the potential defendant to do his due diligence.”

To the world, it might have looked as if the Trump case were dead. Bragg was no longer talking about Trump publicly. But he and three top aides had begun meeting regularly on the eighth floor of the district attorney’s office, going back through all the documents from the net-worth case. The Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, had already been indicted in the tax-fraud case; now he might be persuaded to plead guilty and cooperate against Trump in this one. And he might, perhaps, become a witness about another matter: the hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels.

Bragg kept returning to that payment. This case had a far cleaner narrative than the net-worth case, with clear evidence of Trump’s involvement; he had personally signed nine checks repaying Cohen. And Cohen was the perfect tour guide: He had paid Daniels in the first place. By the summer of 2022, Bragg was confident that he could convince a court that these misdemeanors should be elevated to felonies. He added prosecutors to the Trump team. The “zombie case” was alive.

A payoff to a porn star might seem like a trivial matter on which to hinge a historic prosecution of a man who later tried to overturn an election. But in late February, the Supreme Court further delayed the federal prosecution of Trump on charges of plotting to do just that, agreeing to decide whether he has immunity for acts taken as president. Trial dates for the other two cases — the federal classified-documents case in Florida and the state election-interference case in Georgia — seem at best months away.

So the hush-money case it is. Some legal experts initially deemed it shaky, largely because Bragg failed to specify the underlying crime that Trump intended to commit. Though the crime of falsifying business records is nominally a misdemeanor, the Manhattan district attorney’s office almost always charges it as a felony. Still, the Trump case stands apart. The Times could identify only two other felony cases in Manhattan over the past decade in which defendants were indicted on charges of falsifying business records but no other crime.

In an opinion piece in The Times soon after the Trump indictment, Jed Shugerman, a law professor at Boston University, called the case a “disaster” and a “legal embarrassment.” Some lawyers predicted that it would be kicked up to federal court and buried in delays, largely because it was related to a federal-election campaign. Some wondered how internal records could prove intent to defraud.

But in the following months, Bragg beat back legal challenges. He detailed the crimes that Trump was trying to conceal — violations of state and federal election law and state tax law. When Trump’s lawyers tried to move the case to federal court, the judge there, Alvin K. Hellerstein, rebuffed them, saying that the fact that the alleged fraud happened in a federal election was “not a basis” to move the case. Then the New York judge overseeing the case, Juan M. Merchan, ruled that Bragg’s prosecutors had presented “legally sufficient evidence” for the grand jury to reasonably find that Trump intended to defraud voters and the government. Some initial skeptics have come around, even if they believe that the legal questions surrounding the case will probably re-emerge in appeals.

Accounting for the weight of the moment, Bragg has increasingly cast the case as an attempt to subvert the 2016 presidential election. “The case is not — the core of it’s not — money for sex,” Bragg said in a radio interview in December. “We would say it’s about conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up.”

Trump heads into the trial after a series of setbacks, both legal and financial. Relying on some of the same evidence that was pursued by Pomerantz, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, recently won a $454 million civil judgment against Trump for fraudulently inflating his net worth. He also owes an $83 million defamation award to the writer E. Jean Carroll. And in his pretrial rulings, Merchan has slapped Trump with a gag order and strictly circumscribed the arguments his lawyers will be allowed to make. Defense lawyers have signaled that their case will most likely focus on attacking Michael Cohen as a serial liar who cannot be trusted and arguing that prosecutors have little evidence of Trump’s intent to commit a crime.

If Trump is convicted, he faces limited personal jeopardy, at least in the near term; any penalty — a maximum of four years in prison — would probably be deferred by his almost-certain appeal. The far-larger questions as the trial and the Trump-Biden rematch converge are about political jeopardy, or political advantage. Republican strategists believe, and some of their Democratic counterparts fret, that an acquittal or a hung jury will energize Trump, while he could more convincingly write off a conviction than with the other cases. “I can’t imagine anything easier to paint as a partisan witch hunt,” says Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster.

Even so, some Democrats argue that wall-to-wall coverage of the trial will remind voters on the fence — like the moderate Republicans Trump needs to win — that he has been accused of having sex with a porn star while his wife cared for their infant son and then covering it up to win a presidential election. “The world’s going to stop for this,” says James Carville, the longtime Democratic strategist. “I mean, the first criminal trial ever of a president? I think if anything, the significance of this event is not yet fully appreciated.”

On the morning of Feb. 15, Bragg was back in the dingy courtroom where Trump was first arraigned. The district attorney, this time wearing a well-fitted gray suit, sat on a hard wooden bench in the second row, behind the team of prosecutors he had assembled. Walkie-talkies crackled, signaling the arrival of the former president. In a dirty hallway crammed with Secret Service agents, Trump spoke to television cameras. He said his lawyers would ask to delay the case — then he walked in, wearing a slightly rumpled navy suit and a screaming red tie.

In the courtroom, an unusually subdued Trump stared at the ceiling, arms at his sides. But once the trial date was set, Bragg didn’t seem to focus on Trump or on discussions about jury selection and trial exhibits. He bent over the judge’s decision declining to dismiss the case, reading it slowly, carefully. After the hearing, he released a brief statement, pronouncing himself “pleased.” Pleased. His spokeswoman confessed later that it was a struggle to get him to say even that.

Susan Beachy and Julie Tate contributed research.