A planned rally at Trump Tower in NYC to express #MAGA outrage at the pending arrest of Trump drew only about 20 people. NYPD seems prepared for any future mass protest even if protesting the arrest of someone recorded on audio tape directing a payoff seems anomalous.
Trump, who faces state charges related to alleged hush-money payments to a porn star, has urged his supporters to protest his arrest, which he claimed would happen on Tuesday. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has not commented on when, or if, an arrest would take place.
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When Gavin Wax finally launched into his speech, he emphasized that Trump supporters should protest the former president’s impending arrest peacefully. But he struck a much different tone at a black-tie gala he organized in Manhattan late last year.
“We want total war,” he said in the December speech while discussing the MAGA movement’s perceived enemies. “We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets.”
“This is the only language the left understands,” Wax said. “The language of pure and unadulterated power.”
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“He must be fingerprinted, and the fingerprints are sent to Albany,” former Brooklyn homicide prosecutor Julie Rendelman said in an interview.
“They are not required to handcuff him,” noted Rendelman, a Law&Crime legal analyst. “Nor is a ‘perp walk’ required.”
Fingerprinting takes place at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office at 1 Hogan Place, and she said that those prints are sent to New York’s capital of Albany, which typically takes “some hours.”
Then, the walk over to 100 Center Street begins, where throngs of reporters from across the world surely would be waiting for Trump. The former president’s ex-chief strategist Steve Bannon was handcuffed behind his back and smirking when reporters photographed him walking into court in metal restraints. Experts say that law enforcement has broad discretion over whether that is necessary — and so does Trump.
Rendelman doesn’t expect that to happen — “unless Trump wants it that way.”
“It would not be farfetched to imagine that if Trump is indicted he might want to be put in handcuffs for the world to see,” she noted. “From his perspective, such a scene would further enrage those who support him and view his arrest as purely political.”
In a stream of all-caps in his social media posts, Trump called for his supporters to “protest,” using messaging that many commentators likened to his calls before the Jan. 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol
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