Former President Donald Trump, a man known for making a literal mess when he’s upset, once threw papers across a table and stormed out of a deposition after learning his legal team had agreed to provide lunch for opposing attorney Roberta Kaplan, the lawyer said on a podcast Thursday.
Kaplan has represented Trump sexual assault accuser E. Jean Carroll and Mary Trump, the former president’s niece, in high-profile cases against him. While providing a deposition at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort and residence, Trump requested that they work through a lunch break, but Kaplan declined.
“And then you could kind of see the wheel spinning in his brain. You could really almost see it,” Kaplan recounted, to the hosts of “George Conway Explains it All (to Sarah Longwell). “And [Trump] said, ‘Well, you’re here in Mar-a-Lago. What do you think you’re going to do for lunch? Where are you going to get lunch?’”
Kaplan said she explained to Trump that his lawyers had offered to provide Kaplan’s team with lunch, prompting an explosion from Trump.
“There was a huge pile of documents, exhibits, sitting in front of him, and he took the pile and he just threw it across the table and stormed out of the room,” Kaplan said.
He yelled at his lawyer, Alina Habba, over the situation, Kaplan added.
When Trump returned, Kaplan said, he asked her how she liked the lunch, and Kaplan said she’d just had a banana.
“It was kind of charming — he said, ‘I told you, I told them to make you really bad sandwiches, but they can’t help themselves here. We have the best sandwiches.’”
A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Kaplan’s allegations. But her story shares similarities with what others in Trump’s orbit have said about his outbursts.
In 2022, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified before Congress that Trump once shattered dishes and splattered ketchup on a wall in the West Wing after then-Attorney General Bill Barr told reporters there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
That was nothing out of the ordinary for Trump, Hutchinson said.
“There were several times throughout my tenure with the chief of staff that I was aware of him either throwing dishes or flipping the tablecloth to let all the contents at the table go onto the floor and likely break or go everywhere,” she recounted.
Trump denied Hutchinson’s account, saying: “Not my thing.”
