The first time Donald Trump faced the writer E. Jean Carroll in court, in the spring of 2023, he declined to appear at the trial. He lost: The jury, finding him liable both for assaulting her in a department-store dressing room in the 1990s and for defaming her in the aftermath, awarded her $5 million in damages. This month, another defamation suit went to trial—a case based on claims Trump had made about Carroll during his presidency in 2019. This time, he attended the proceedings. Or, more accurately, he attempted to star in them, treating the courtroom as a set and casting himself, variously, as the trial’s screenwriter, narrator, publicist, and tragic hero. On Thursday, very briefly, Trump took the stand. On Friday, as Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, delivered her closing arguments, he made an abrupt, dramatic exit. Sitting with his defense team, he pouted and smirked and stage-whispered his indignation about the proceedings (“con job,” “witch hunt”), at one point emoting so loudly that the judge, Lewis Kaplan, threatened to remove him from the …