Which is still photos and courtroom sketches convey about the former president's demeanor as a defendant. These historic proceedings are not televised, which is why it's good to be joined now by New York Times senior political correspondent Maggie Haberman, who not only has spent time inside the courtroom, but is also a Trump biographer. So what do you make of the former president's demeanor today? What was it like?

There were a couple of things that were striking. He looked very unhappy. He looked very unhappy on the monitors where you can see his face. He looked... And in court, we're well behind him, so we can't see his face. When we're in there, we have a better view when we're in the overflow room.

So there's an overflow room that has monitors?

Correct. And there's monitors in the courtroom, too, but it's much easier to see the monitors in the overflow room. They're right up at your face. It's just different. He looked unhappy when he left for a break. He looked unhappy when he left when court ended for the day. It was tense in the room when David Becker was on the stand. It was tense in the room when Kal Angela, the prosecutor, was going through the narrative of the case and talking about Stormy Daniels and Access Hollywood and Karen MacDougal and all of these things that Trump does not want to hear about.

I said this earlier today when we were covering this, but I just kept imagining what is going through Trump's mind when he's sitting there at the defense table watching David Pecker, his former friend-ish, who knows a lot of secrets about him, going back a long time on this stand.

It's fundamentally different than what we have seen with Trump over many years now, which is a lot of former aides or allies or advisors going on television or writing books. This is a courtroom, and this is under oath, and this is David Pecker opening his testimony. We only heard a little bit of testimonies coming back tomorrow, but him opening saying, We practiced, and I'm paraphrasing, but we practiced checkbook journalism. That is a quote. At the National Enquiry, we paid for tips about celebrities and so forth. And Trump knows what that means, and he knows what information that meant that David Pecker had. And David Pecker was very poised, and I think that he's going to tell a story that the jury is going to find pretty compelling.

David Pecker essentially made a deal. He has a non-prosecution agreement, and so that's why he's testifying.

Yeah, he's testifying under subpoena. He is not doing this because he wants it.

The prosecutors say he's a co-conspirator.

Correct. He is not there because he wants to be there. But the prosecutors are going to try to suggest that his testimony, the same way they're going to try to say this with Michael Cohen, is credible for X, Y, Z and that these are things Trump just didn't want to have come out.

The fact that the foreign president has no family with him, no friends, he's just got his legal team. I understand he talked about this. He was upset about the lack of proximity of supporters the supporters outside the courthouse.

Yeah. It has been striking that there's no family because I know that there was some discussion at some point in the last couple of weeks about who would be with him in court. Last week, which was just jury selection, there weren't that many people. Today, there was a phalanx of lawyers from his other cases and from the Trump org who showed up in court, but I think it's because they were next door dealing with this New York attorney general appeal. He is by himself, and when he feels boosted, it's by his supporters. And so he has been hoping for something of a circus around his trial. But the reality, Anderson, is that only 2-3 dozen supporters, max, over the last week, have shown up. And they're positioned to protest, demonstrate, whatever, across the street from the courthouse. Trump started trying to suggest on Truth Social that that's why the number has been so small, is that they're all being blocked. But that's not it. It's that people are not showing up.

You also wrote a really interesting piece for the New York Times about how this trial strips Trump of control. You really see that there was the famous example just the other of he got up to leave, and the judge admonished him and said, sit down, we're still in session. But it's just such... For anyone who's been in those courtrooms, it's a dreary... It's like old New York.

It is trapped in Amber, 1980s. Tom Wolf, New York, and it's the New York that Trump thrived in, but this is not the part of it that Trump ever wanted to be captured by, and he has to sit there, no cell phone, bored, which is not something he ever handles well. While he is being insulted or described negatively, he doesn't have the same methods to push back. Remember, there is a hearing about whether the judge agrees with prosecutors, that he has repeatedly violated the gag order against attacking witnesses and others in the case tomorrow. There are people around him who believe that this is part of the goal of the prosecution, is simply that this process is so shrinking and small. But courts, and particularly state courts, are really their own nations, essentially. There are rules that get made on high, and you are at someone else's win and will. Your life is not yours. Maggie Hepburn. Thank you so much.Thank you.Thank you.