Donald Trump will spend most of this spring in a drab county courtroom, and he’s not happy about it.

By Kyle Cheney

04/16/2024 05:00 AM EDT

Donald Trump is learning a hard lesson: Criminal defendants don’t get to set their own schedules.

Three times on Monday the former president asked Justice Juan Merchan to cut him loose from his hush money trial to attend to other matters — some personal, some political and some legal. Three times the judge responded with, essentially, “eh, we’ll see.”

Could he attend his son Barron’s high school graduation on May 17? I’ll get back to you, Merchan said.

May he skip the trial on April 25 to attend Supreme Court arguments about whether he’s immune from special counsel Jack Smith’s charges for trying to subvert the 2020 election? Not likely, said Merchan.

Can he be exempted from any proceedings that may arise on Wednesdays — when Merchan’s court is typically dark — so he can campaign? Not if the jury is in, the judge told him.

It’s a jarring new reality for Trump, who has been accustomed to setting the agenda for most of his adult life — and, in the years since his presidency, has bounced between his sunny Florida resort and political rallies brimming with adoring fans. But this spring, he’ll have to spend most weekdays in a drab 15th floor county courtroom in a city with very little MAGA.

True, Trump’s campaign apparatus will remain in full swing, as he and his advisers look to harness the trial for political gain. But Trump the defendant will face stark restrictions on where he can go (and what he’s allowed to say). That will require him to submit to a judge and a case he has long maligned — just as any criminal defendant would, even if they also considered the charges against them to be bogus.

After the first day of the trial on Monday, Trump seemed less focused on the substance of what had transpired — which included several key evidentiary rulings and the qualification of nine potential jurors — than on Merchan’s decision not to accommodate his scheduling requests.

“He won’t allow me to leave here for a half a day to go to D.C. and go before the United States Supreme Court, because he thinks he’s superior,” Trump told reporters outside the courtroom.

And he griped about the prospect of missing Barron’s graduation.

“I was looking forward to that graduation, with his mother and father there, and it looks like the judge does not allow me to escape this scam,” he said.

Later, on Truth Social, Trump repeated the same complaints and falsely asserted that Merchan had already ruled against him on the graduation request, even though the judge indicated he would accommodate that request if the trial remained on schedule.

Although Trump has been a criminal defendant for more than a year, he’s rarely been required to show up to court and indeed has routinely skipped pretrial proceedings in the four criminal cases he’s facing. In all four cases, he was allowed to remain free pending trial, as long as he abided by certain conditions of release (conditions that he has, at times, flouted with few consequences).

Of course, if Trump is convicted by the very jury that his lawyers and Manhattan prosecutors are jockeying to select, the imposition of a trial will seem trifling compared to the constraints on his liberty that Merchan might impose — a jail term.