Donald Trump’s courtroom artist on his frowns, scowls and ‘crocodile’ mode
Christine Cornell has sketched the former president since the 1980s and sees his ‘sourpuss expression’ when she shuts her eyes. He barely changed until the verdict.
When Donald Trump entered the Manhattan court house on Thursday afternoon to hear the jury’s verdict on 34 felony counts, he had a spring in his step.“He came in a little upbeat, I even caught his eye and he nodded to me,” says Christine Cornell, the artist who for the past seven weeks had been drawing him. “That was rare.” As a courtroom artist for the past five decades, Cornell, 69, has had a front-row seat to some of the most notorious trials in history such as those of Bill Cosby, Bernie Madoff and John Gotti. Her most recent assignment: the hush-money case involving a porn star and the former president of the United States. For days on end she has studied him intently, attuned to every twitch of his lips, wrinkle of his brow, shuffle in his chair.
Her first glimpse of Trump was in the early 1980s, in a case involving the United States Football League. “He was strikingly young and very confident and brash,” Cornell says. “I remember enjoying drawing him. He was handsome. He’s an outsized character and I was happy to be able to express that. When I go into court I’m just a channel. Whatever the person is, I’m going to just try and translate that and make that be who they are on my page.”
On several occasions Trump looked over her shoulder on his way into court and praised her work, calling her his “personal courtroom artist”.
Trump’s demeanour in court has changed over the years, according to Cornell. “The first time he came into court and had to sit there, boy, was he agitated; like a bug on a pin,” she says. “He’s not allowed to speak in the courtroom. He just wasn’t used to that kind of treatment.”
For the Stormy Daniels case, each day he walked into court, arms by his side. She compares him to a Roman emperor, walking into an arena with “chiselled face, strong masculine features and a deep furrowed brow”.
But Trump’s “impassive mask” is often hard to glimpse behind, says Cornell. “He’s very deliberate. He doesn’t have any of that fluidness that you see in most people,” says Cornell. “He keeps himself very tight. He doesn’t use his arms when he speaks. He’s very stiff.”
Cornell has been criticised for portraying Trump as a “monster”, but she explains that often in the trial “he frowns and scowls. He is furious.”
“You cannot exaggerate the sourpuss expression on his face,” Cornell says. “That’s the face he puts on when the cameras are allowed in for 45 seconds in the morning. The pictures are always the same: that formidable, wounded dragon look.”
For much of the trial Trump has sat still, with his head back, eyes closed. She imagines him like a crocodile who sits on the edge of a river, being completely impervious to everything around him.
“I think that he is always something of a predator; I don’t think it’s boredom, he’s just tuning it out,” Cornell says. “If there is an opportunity for him to seize on something, that is his MO.”
Artists in the UK cannot sketch in court, but must memorise the scene and draw it after they leave the courtroom. But Cornell is in court, sitting on a cushion, for a better view, armed with binoculars and a tray of pastels. She knows which moments she wants to sketch that day.
“Every time I pull out my yellow chalk it just sings ‘Trump’,” she says. But she has noticed a change in Trump over the years and he’s “losing his glossy appearance. I don’t say that to ridicule him,” says Cornell. “It’s just what he is exuding.”
The one thing he is not, she says, is orange. “His hair was dyed a crazy yellow. That was the colour that was striking,” she says. “Now he’s been stuck like the rest of us for the last seven weeks in this very dingy building, and not getting any sunshine.”
The Times
