WASHINGTON — False reports about the jury instructions in former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial have been spreading across right-wing media, leading to threats against the judge overseeing the case.

Several conservative news personalities, including some affiliated with Fox News, falsely claimed that New York state Judge Juan Merchan, as one Fox News anchor put it in a viral post on X, “told the jury that they do not need unanimity to convict” Trump.

That’s not true. Merchan instructed the jurors Wednesday that they “must conclude unanimously that a defendant conspired to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means,” adding that they “need not be unanimous as to what those unlawful means were.”

That means that jurors have to agree unanimously that Trump committed a crime by engaging in a criminal conspiracy to falsify records with the intent to commit one or more other crimes to convict him. But jurors can choose from three options about what those other crimes were: violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act, falsification of other business records or violation of tax laws. Those “unlawful means” aren’t charges themselves, and they wouldn’t result in separate convictions, so jurors don’t have to unanimously agree on them.

The jury instruction was complex and “nuanced” — as that Fox anchor, John Roberts, tried to clarify an hour later in another post on X with fewer views — but some right-wing accounts ran with false reports.

Follow live updates on the Trump trial and verdict

In response to inaccurate reporting that Trump could be convicted without unanimous agreement that he committed a crime, a user on Gab, a site popular with far-right extremists, said Wednesday it was “time to find out where that judge lives and protest as the left calls it.” Another user posted: “I hear bad stuff happens to judges in their driveways.” On Telegram, a user called for “a military tribunal” for Merchan, and on the official Telegram channel of Steve Bannon’s “War Room,” a user said Merchan “and all involved” should be hanged.

Over on another pro-Trump forum, a user said, “Merchan wants to be the merchant of death to sell more rope, except he could easily be selling the rope that hangs him.” Another user added: “Treason. With the full penalty.”

On X, a right-wing influencer asked followers who among them wanted to see Merchan locked up for treason. Another user, who identified himself as a Marine, replied: “Let me handle the Justice System & be judge & Prosecutor, Immediate trial & Justifiable Punishments handed out, Funeral Directors get ready for a lot of Democratic Socialist Elites coming your way.”

Trump continued making social media posts about the jury instructions Thursday morning, quoting a Fox News commentator who called the prosecution “an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ case with a Mad Hatter judge” in which the “cherished principles of fairness” had been turned upside down.

Time and time again, legal proceedings in the four cases against Trump have resulted in violent threats and, in at least one case, actual violence. In August, Trump supporters posted the names and addresses of the grand jurors in Fulton County, Georgia, who indicted Trump and 18 co-defendants. In August 2022, a Jan. 6 riot participant named Rickey Walter Shiffer posted calls for violence after the FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and then fired a nail gun into an FBI field office in Cincinnati before he was killed by law enforcement.

More recently, Trump and his congressional allies falsely said that President Joe Biden plotted to kill Trump during the search of Mar-a-Lago based upon a disclosure of a standard FBI use-of-force form that limits the use of deadly force and must be filled out for every operation. In fact, federal authorities specifically planned the search for a time when Trump was known to be out of state and contacted the Secret Service ahead of time to make sure the plan went as smoothly as possible. Even right-wing former FBI special agents who have called for the bureau to be abolished pushed back against the false narrative, calling the FBI use-of-force language “boilerplate” and showing frustration that viral misinformation on the right had forced them to be in the position of looking like they were defending the bureau.

Attorney General Merrick Garland last week called the lies about the use-of-force policy “false” and “extremely dangerous” and pointed out that the same standard operations plan was used in the search of Biden’s own home (yet didn’t lead to conspiracy theories that Biden planned to have himself assassinated).

Donald Trump at Trump Tower on Friday responds to his 34-count conviction in the “hush money” trial.

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Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Former President Donald Trump stood in the lobby of Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan Friday morning looking somehow ill at ease in his own building.

He wore his signature suit, shirt and tie and stood alone at a lectern with five American flags and a cold stone wall behind him. Gone was the usual human backdrop of flag-waving supporters seen at MAGA rallies. He stood alone, without script or teleprompter, armed only with two sheets of paper and a look of barely controlled rage.

It was billed as a press conference to respond to the jury verdict that had convicted him on 34 charges the day before. But it was more a speech than a press conference. A contingent of reporters with cameras stood a few yards away, but Trump spoke without interruption and took no questions.

Not far off, a small crowd of supporters including some family members applauded and cheered at intervals. Trump never quite settled on which group he was addressing, connecting only sporadically with the live TV broadcast camera. Some of the TV news channels eventually cut away while he rambled on for a total of 33 minutes.

It was the same location Trump spoke from nine years ago this month when he descended “the golden escalator” to the same lobby and announced his first campaign for the Republican nomination for president. The scene that day featured Melania and Ivanka Trump, both all in white, and a forest of cameras held aloft beneath Trump’s elevated stage. Everything about those theatrics described a different time in a different world.

Trump would recall that occasion on Friday when he almost immediately started attacking immigrants, as he had in 2015.

But first, he had to deal with the moment — and the reason he was here.

“This is a case where if they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone,” Trump said, referring to the prosecutors and Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg. “These are bad people. These are in many cases, I believe, sick people.”

It was an echo of Trump’s frequent claim to his rally crowds that they and not him are the targets of all his legal woes and political adversaries.

But Trump reserved most of his vitriol for Judge Juan Merchan, who would not move the trial out of New York and denied most of the motions filed by Trump’s attorneys.

“We just went through one of many experiences where we had a conflicted judge, highly conflicted. There’s never been a more conflicted judge,” Trump said.

Trump has long tried to make an issue of Merchan’s total of $35 in contributions to Democrats in 2020 and the Democratic ties of the judge’s daughter. At Merchan’s request, both issues had been reviewed by the New York Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics and his refusal to recuse was upheld on appeal.

But Trump was back at it on Friday, and the accusations of bias were just getting started.

“As far as the trial itself, it was very unfair,” said Trump. “We weren’t allowed to use our election expert under any circumstances.”

Merchan actually did allow that expert to testify with the stipulation that the prosecution could also bring in its own expert. At that point, Trump’s team decided not to call the witness.

“You saw what happened to some of the witnesses that were on our side, they were literally crucified by this man,” Trump said, again referring to the judge.

“He looks like an angel but he’s really a devil,” Trump said of Merchan. “He looks so nice and soft.”

Hearing Roy Cohn in Trump’s words

Former President Donald Trump speaks at a news conference at Trump Tower on Friday following the verdict in his hush-money trial in New York City.

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Trump’s weeks of vituperating Merchan recall the maxim he had received half a century ago from a lawyer named Roy Cohn, who was known for saying: “Don’t tell me what the law says, tell me who the judge is.”

Cohn had a career matched by few in the legal profession. The son of a judge, he graduated from both Columbia and Columbia Law School at the age of 20 and went to work for the Justice Department. He helped to convict Julius and Ethel Rosenberg of helping the Soviets steal nuclear secrets. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover then recommended Cohn to Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who hired him to help with his hunt for communists in the government.

Cohn went on to spend 30 years representing many of the biggest names in New York, including athletes, entertainers, a cardinal and organized crime bosses. In the 1970s he represented Trump’s family real estate business when it faced federal charges for racial discrimination.

Trump himself continued to rely on Cohn for years thereafter. Even after reaching the White House in 2017, he complained that none of his many lawyers fought for him like “my Roy Cohn.”

Trump’s well-worn playbook of false statements

Trump did not let his most recent court reversal take up all his on-camera time on Friday. With live TV coverage rolling, at least for a while, he veered off his latest court reversal to attack the man he wants to replace in the White House in November.

Calling Election Day Nov. 5 “the most important day in American history,” Trump blamed Biden for all his legal travails. He said the trial in New York had been orchestrated “in Washington” to protect the incumbent administration, which he called “a fascist state.”

Trump has made these accusations before, offering no form of evidence, as he again did not on Friday. But he used the allegation of Biden involvement to pivot to attacking Biden on immigration.

It was a kind of reprise of what might be called Trump’s greatest hit. In his speech in this same venue in 2015, he had stunned the political world with his language about immigrants at the U.S. border with Mexico: “They’re not sending their best … they’re bringing drugs, they’re rapists.”

Trump on Friday broadened his assault to include a number of other specific countries and nationalities sending “millions” who were “pouring in” unchallenged across “open borders.” He mentioned Congo in Africa and China in particular.

He said the prisons of Venezuela had been “emptied out” and that countries were sending people from their mental institutions.

He offered no evidence or sources for any of these statements.

And while some of his assertions took the form of casual, unproven superlatives such as “record numbers of terrorists” entering the country, some were downright false statements starkly at odds with the facts.

Early in his Friday remarks, when he criticized the Manhattan district attorney, he had said crime was “rampant” in the city and painted it in apocalyptic terms. Crime statistics in New York City are actually much lower today than in the 1990s, a decade in which Trump ally Rudy Giuliani was elected to his two terms as mayor. Shootings and homicides are down in particular in the past two years.

But this species of misstatement or disinformation has been part of the Trump arsenal for some time. He often raises rhetorical questions and makes sweeping statements that seem to have sprung from an alternative reality.

His talent for selling his own version of reality posed a challenge to the news media as far back as his years as the star of a TV “reality show” called The Apprentice. Trump was in the middle of his 14 seasons with the show when he began publicly questioning whether President Barack Obama had been born in the U.S.

It was just this kind of falsehood — picked up and promoted by countless commenters on cable TV, websites and social media — that made Trump a political force before he was an actual candidate. And when, in the fall campaign of 2016, he informed the world that he had himself laid to rest the “birther” issue (which he blamed on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign), it forced many in the mainstream media to reexamine their longstanding aversion to the word “lie.”

By the end of Trump’s term in office, the news media had come to routinely label many of his claims as false — especially his denial of his defeat in the 2020 election. Some had also taken to labeling as lies the Trump statements they believed he had to know were false.

But Friday at Trump Tower was another reminder that as the November election gets closer and the political season comes to predominate, Trump can be expected to test and exceed the boundaries of fact and fiction one again.

Are we better prepared to deal with it this time?

The other day on CNN, prominent Never Trump lawyer George Conway did something you rarely see in Washington. He dressed down a GOP commentator for lying his ass off about Donald Trump—and then, right on the air, he asked why CNN was paying this Republican to spread lies on Trump’s behalf. We think this episode illustrates a deep problem with the media’s handling of pro-Trump propaganda. So we chatted with Conway about why he unloaded—and in the process, he revealed some interesting things about the network. Listen to this episode here.