The courts give and the courts take away. And on Monday, in a few stormy hours, they took a lot more from Donald Trump than they gave him.

The helping hand Trump got from one court, which reduced the bond he had to post to protect his empire from a civil fraud penalty, was more than offset by the blow from the judge who was about to hear the first criminal trial against a former president to chair.

Trump got some very welcome news Monday morning, when a five-judge panel of the New York Appellate Division modified the bond needed to prevent enforcement of the $454 million judgment in which Atty. General Letitia James has secured his fraud trial. The court reduced bail by more than 60% to $175 million and abruptly gave Trump an additional ten days to pay

lie

He stopped his frenzied shouting to comply with Judge Arthur Engoron’s harsh conditions.

The relief was not surprising given the pro-business divisions and the high stakes for Trump’s finances. The court could well have calculated that the lower amount was sufficient to guarantee payment when the final judgment comes. And it could be taken as a harbinger that the court is seriously considering reducing the sentence.

The reduced bond, which Trump indicated he would post voluntarily, serves James’ purposes in one respect. If Trump tries to avoid the collection, the attorney general will be able to immediately collect the $175 million before wading into a legal battle over other parts of Trump’s empire.

Minutes after Trump got that break, however, another New York court convened a hearing that left him much worse off than when the day began.

Judge Juan M. Merchan had convened the hearing to determine how much more time Trump needed to prepare his defense against charges of paying off porn star Stormy Daniels in light of new material produced by federal prosecutors. The jury’s conclusion: not much. Merchan has scheduled jury selection for April 15, suggesting that in one of the four criminal cases Trump faces, his strategy of running out the clock has finally come to an end.

And that wasn’t the only way the hearing went badly for the suspect.

Trump’s team had insisted they needed at least three months to work through the additional material. And they claimed that the late disclosure showed misconduct by Manhattan Dist. Atty. Alvin Bragg who necessitated the dismissal of the entire case, using an all-too-familiar Trumpian gambit to turn an everyday problem into a nefarious deep state conspiracy.

Merchandise had none of it. The judge blasted Trump and his lawyer Todd Blanche for making an incredibly serious accusation without evidence or even a citation. He also blasted Blanche, a former federal prosecutor, for waiting so long to file the documents from the U.S.

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Merchan directly contradicted Trump’s argument, finding that the DA went so far beyond what they were expected to do that it was truly strange that they were even here. Even worse, he told Blanche that the dispute fit into Team Trump’s months-long pattern of advancing an interpretation of events that is truly different from my interpretation.

Translation from the judge’s speech: Your motion was so worthless that it was a waste of my time.

That kind of rebuke from a judge before the trial has even begun should chill any trial attorney to the core. Credibility in court is a lawyer’s most important currency, and Blanche seems to have lost this, perhaps irrevocably. And he lost it because, like so many of Trump’s lawyers, he shaped his advocacy based on the boss’s preferences rather than the demands of the case.

Moreover, Merchan’s rebuke essentially tears a crucial page from Trump’s thin playbook. He made clear that he will not make wild claims about government misconduct or selective prosecution.

The judge underlined his intention to take tough action against such pranksters on Tuesday by issuing a limited silence order against Trump. Merchan is only likely to get tougher once a jury is empaneled, at which point hasty accusations could corrupt the proceedings.

Trump has approached the pretrial appearances as political opportunities to smear the prosecution. But with an actual jury trial looming, presided over by a judge whose patience he has exhausted, he will be forced to base his defense on evidence. And as in all his criminal trials, that is the last position he wants to be in.

Harry Litman is the host of the

Talking Feds Podcast

and the

Speaking of San Diego

speaker series.

@harrylitman