During MSNBC’s panel discussion of the first day of Donald Trump’s hush money trial on Monday afternoon, the network’s various anchors naturally spent some time talking about how Donald Trump fell asleep in court.
And while they tended to focus on the seriousness of the trial, they couldn’t help but have a little fun at Trump’s expense, with primetime hosts Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes dropping some amusing punchlines.
“The wheels of justice grind slowly. I did not think they would grind so slowly that they would rock the defendant apparently to sleep,” Maddow joked at one point in the discussion.
Hayes, for his part, got a little more pointed, noting, “If you call your opponent ‘Sleepy Joe,’ you have one job, for the rest of the campaign, which is like: You got to ‘Clockwork Orange’ those puppies open at all times.”
He was of course referring to this scene from the 1971 film “A Clockwork Orange,” directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Malcolm McDowell:
For background, Trump appeared in a New York courtroom on Monday morning, as ordered, for the start of jury selection in the business fraud criminal trial over the hush money payment he made to keep his affair with former porn actress Stormy Daniels a secret in 2016.
At one point, according to multiple reporters in the room including the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, Trump appears to have dozed off, mouth slack. He appeared to be out for a short but significant length of time before snapping awake, Haberman later told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
As MSNBC’s anchors explained, it was a significant moment not only because of the seriousness of the matter — a former U.S. president in a criminal trial — but because of how it up-ends various narratives about the 2024 presidential race.
“I have to say,” Maddow said, “I was not there, I do not know if he was asleep. It is possible that he was, you know, meditating, or just resting his eyes or something, I don’t know. But like, that’s those headlines, on the front page of The New York Times, front page of the Washington Post, front page of Huffington Post, front page, multiple news outlets today coming out of this, that Trump appeared to fall asleep on the first day of his trial. Those are going to stick.”
“I know it’s not the most important legal thing, but we are in the middle of a campaign and, ” Maddow continued, “the age issue is the main thing the Trump campaign wants to use against his opponent. The whole ‘Sleepy Joe’ thing.”
Maddow further noted how historic this trial is — “no president… no former president ever has been a criminal defendant. And on day one, the headlines coming out of it are that he appeared to doze off. To me, that says it’s insane.”
Calling the moment a reminder of how “scary… and somber and important this is,” Maddow added, “we’re also dealing with somebody who’s just fundamentally buffoonish. And this will be as much a reminder of that, as it is of all the more serious things here that are at stake.”
Watch clips of Maddow and Hayes, below:
