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Sitting among the spectators about 20 feet away was Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the investigation that led to the 38-count indictment of Mr. Trump and his personal aide, Walt Nauta, who was also present for the proceedings but did not enter a plea.

Mr. Trump, who spent much of the arraignment with his arms folded and a grim expression, and Mr. Smith, a flinty former war crimes prosecutor rarely seen in public since taking charge of the case, did not talk to each other at the hearing, or even exchange glances.

The 50-minute hearing, both mundane and momentous, marked the start of what is sure to be at least a monthslong process of bringing Mr. Trump to trial against the backdrop of a presidential race in which he is the front-runner for the Republican nomination.

Mr. Trump has also been indicted in an unrelated case by the Manhattan district attorney, who has charged him in connection with hush money payments to a porn star ahead of the 2016 election. He faces a separate inquiry by a prosecutor in Fulton County, Ga., who is scrutinizing his efforts to reverse his election loss in Georgia in 2020, and Mr. Smith is pressing ahead with a federal investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to retain power and the ensuing Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.

Outside the courthouse, amid a heavy police presence, small groups of pro-Trump demonstrators voiced their support for the former president, who has denounced the indictment as the latest installment in a long-running and politically inspired witch hunt against him.

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Inside, Mr. Trump was moved briskly through the process of becoming a defendant in a federal criminal case, with the authorities seeking to minimize anything that could be interpreted as an attempt to further embarrass the former president.

He was not required to have his mug shot taken, the government did not ask for travel restrictions often imposed on those accused of serious crimes, and prosecutors seemed willing to grant him generous bond terms, without demanding cash bail.

Mr. Trump did not speak in the courtroom except for whispered chatter with his two new lawyers before the arraignment began, and asides to them once it got underway.

When asked for his plea, one of his lawyers, Todd Blanche, spoke for Mr. Trump.

“We most certainly enter a plea of not guilty,” he said.

Mr. Trump has been charged with 37 criminal counts covering seven different violations of federal law, alone or in conjunction with Mr. Nauta.

The former president was charged with 31 counts of willfully retaining national defense information under the Espionage Act and one count of making false statements stemming from his interactions with federal investigators and one of his lawyers.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Nauta were jointly charged with single counts of conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding government documents, corruptly concealing records, concealing a document in a federal investigation and scheming to conceal their efforts. Mr. Nauta was charged with a separate count of making false statements to investigators.

Mr. Trump’s case has been assigned to Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who earlier handled a lawsuit he filed challenging the F.B.I.’s court-authorized search of his Florida estate and club, Mar-a-Lago. A ruling in Mr. Trump’s favor in that case by Judge Cannon, who was nominated by Mr. Trump, was later overturned by an appeals court that was sharply critical of her legal reasoning.

But Tuesday’s hearing was overseen by Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman. Magistrate judges handle many of the routine and procedural aspects of court cases.

Mr. Nauta was unable to enter a plea because he still lacked local counsel. Judge Goodman set a hearing for June 27 for Mr. Nauta to enter a plea.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Nauta were ordered by Judge Goodman not to discuss their criminal case, even though the two work closely and see each other practically every day. Judge Goodman said that any discussions related to the case must go through their lawyers.

The restrictions — which do not apply to other topics of conversation — are common for co-defendants in a criminal matter, but they could be particularly difficult to uphold given that Mr. Nauta’s job is to follow the former president through his days, attending to various needs. To underscore Mr. Nauta’s proximity to Mr. Trump, Mr. Nauta was riding with him from Mr. Trump’s club, Doral, to the courthouse for Tuesday’s hearing.

The two men talk frequently and have for most of the past two years; Mr. Nauta first served as a valet in the White House and now serves as an aide to Mr. Trump in his post-presidential life. The former president tends to treat his close personal aides as sounding boards for all manner of topics.

Mr. Trump is hardly known for his restraint under typical circumstances, but especially when told to do something by a person in a position of authority. An edict not to discuss a case that has consumed Mr. Trump’s thinking for weeks poses even more of a challenge.

The same restriction on the defendants’ communications was also applied to witnesses in the case, a list of which the government is expected to draw up. That presents a similar challenge to the situation with Mr. Nauta: A number of Mr. Trump’s advisers, current and former Mar-a-Lago staff members, and even some of his lawyers have been interviewed as part of the investigation.

The exchange also provided a glimpse into what has not yet become public about the government’s investigation — namely that a significant number of witnesses in the case, working on the president’s campaign, security detail and personal staff remain unknown to the defense.

One of the prosecutors, David Harbach, conceded that the “elephant in the room” was that the Justice Department had not yet been able to produce a comprehensive list of witnesses.

Mr. Trump’s day highlighted the challenges of being both a defendant in a criminal case that could send him to prison and a presidential candidate. And it demonstrated that Mr. Trump has no intention of muting himself as the case plays out or to abandon his instinct to fight as much in the court of public opinion as in the court of law.

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Mr. Trump posted several times on his social media platform throughout the day, many of them half-sentences in which he denounced the case against him. In one post, he attacked Mr. Smith as a “thug,” while in others he kept up his long-running efforts to frame the inquiries as a partisan effort to prevent him from facing President Biden next year.

“ON MY WAY TO COURTHOUSE. WITCH HUNT!!!” he wrote at one point.

Once the court proceedings ended, Mr. Trump headed to a campaign-style stop in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami, where his support has always been strong among Cuban Americans, and especially older Cuban exiles. “Donald Trump,” the crowd cheered. “Viva el presidente!”

He stopped into Versailles, the self-proclaimed “world’s most famous Cuban restaurant,” where he greeted a crowd of supporters, including a rabbi and a nondenominational minister who prayed on his behalf.

He then boarded his jet for a flight back to New Jersey, where he held a fund-raiser, with donors who raise at least $100,000 for his campaign invited to a “candlelight dinner,” and gave remarks at his golf club in Bedminster.

“I did everything right and they indicted me,” Mr. Trump said, subdued but barely containing his anger.

He asserted, in defiance of the clear meaning of the law, that he was entitled under the Presidential Records Act to keep the documents he took. “I had every right” to keep them, he said.

The 49-page indictment of Mr. Trump and Mr. Nauta laid out in vivid detail Mr. Trump’s casual, at times haphazard handling of highly sensitive documents from his White House. It said those documents included details of sensitive nuclear programs, intelligence on foreign adversaries, Pentagon battle plans and other documents that detailed the country’s potential vulnerabilities to military attack.

In some cases, prosecutors said, he displayed them to people without security clearances and stored them in a haphazard manner at Mar-a-Lago, even stacking a pile of boxes in a bathroom at his private club and residence in Florida.

Tuesday’s hearing also marked a milestone — it was the first time Mr. Trump and Mr. Smith, adversaries in a legal battle with enormous implications, crossed paths publicly.

After the hearing ended, Mr. Trump took a brief look over his shoulder at the reporters who crammed the courtroom, before exiting through a side door.

Mr. Smith and his prosecutors left through a door on the opposite side of the courtroom about a minute later.

Reporting was contributed by Maggie Haberman, Alan Feuer, Zach Montague, Shane Goldmacher, Nick Madigan, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Frances Robles, Luke Broadwater, William K. Rashbaum, Ben Protess and Gaya Gupta.

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Even before his indictment, Mr. Trump, his allies and his lawyers had hinted at some of the arguments they could raise.

They include asserting that Mr. Trump had a right to take the documents from the White House and that he had declassified them before leaving office. They could accuse the prosecutors of misconduct or try to show that he was a victim of selective prosecution. And they could seek to have potentially damning evidence excluded from the trial or try to force the government to disclose classified material that it wants to keep secret.

But all of those claims could be difficult to sustain in court.

Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor and a law professor at Duke University, said that it was difficult in general to have a federal indictment dismissed before trial, and that Mr. Trump and his lawyers would face an uphill battle in trying to prevent the case from moving forward.

“Their options here are extremely limited,” Mr. Buell said, “and highly unlikely to prevent the case getting to a jury.”

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Mr. Trump’s visit to Versailles Restaurant, a landmark that is emblematic of the Cuban diaspora, came as Republicans have increasingly likened his indictment to corruption and political oppression in Latin American countries.

Outside the federal courthouse where the arraignment took place in Miami, Alina Habba, a lawyer and spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, suggested that he was no different than political dissidents from Latin America.

“The targeting, prosecution, of a leading political opponent is the type of thing you see in dictatorships like Cuba and Venezuela,” she said. “It is commonplace there for rival candidates to be prosecuted, persecuted and put into jail.”

The day before his arraignment, Mr. Trump said he believed Hispanics in South Florida were sympathetic to him because they are familiar with governments targeting rivals.

“They really see it better than other people do,” he said in an interview with Americano Media, a conservative Spanish-language outlet in South Florida.

Mr. Trump has enjoyed relatively strong support in some Latino communities, particularly those in South Florida. Eduardo A. Gamarra, a professor of politics and international relations at Florida International University who is also part of its Cuban Research Institute, said the narrative woven by Mr. Trump and his surrogates, while false, was a shrewd one.

“It’s reinforced by local media, by much of what of the Trump campaign and other Republicans are saying: that this administration, the Biden administration, is behaving like the banana republics behave, so that’s resonated very intensely here,” he said. “It’s great politics, but it’s not true.”

Mr. Gamarra, who was born in Bolivia, noted that Mr. Trump had also tried to win support from Latino voters by railing against socialism and communism. He lamented the way that Mr. Trump and his allies had repeatedly mentioned Latin America.

“It’s a very unfortunate narrative,” he said. “I think it just sort of propagates the stereotypes about Latin America. It’s much more complex than simply the banana republic image.”

Mr. Trump’s cameo at the restaurant was the latest for him and a long line of politicians that includes former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In 2016, the restaurant hosted Mr. Trump and Rudolph W. Giuliani together after Mr. Trump’s first debate against Hillary Clinton.

Paloma Marcos, a native of Nicaragua who has been a U.S. citizen for 15 years, rushed to Versailles with a Trump hat and a sign that said, “I stand with Trump.”

She said many Nicaraguans like her had an affinity for the former president, because he is against communism. She added that people like her, as well as Cuban and Venezuelans, saw how that form of government destroyed their home countries.

“He knows we support him. The Latino community has had an awakening,” Ms. Marcos said. “The curtain has been pulled back.”

The Rev. Yoelis Sánchez, a pastor at a local church and a native of the Dominican Republic, said she did not hesitate when asked to go to Versailles Restaurant to pray with Mr. Trump. Several religious people, including evangelicals and Catholics, prayed with him while her daughter sang.

“We prayed for God to give him strength and for the truth to come out,” she said. “We are really concerned for his welfare.”

Ms. Sánchez, who lives in Doral, Fla., which is part of Miami-Dade County and is where Mr. Trump owns a golf resort, was not yet a citizen in 2020. She would not say whether she plans to vote for him in 2024.

“I don’t think he came here just because of the Latino vote,” she said. “He came because he wanted to meet with people who have biblical thinking — he’s pro-life and pro-family and Latinos identify with that.”

Mr. Trump is facing criminal charges related to mishandling classified documents and then obstructing the government’s attempts to retrieve them. The federal indictment of a former president is unprecedented in the United States, but many Latin American presidents have been prosecuted after leaving office.

Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, served more than a year in prison after he left office the first time. Argentina’s former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was sentenced to six years for corruption last year. In Peru, Alejandro Toledo was recently extradited to face a bribery charge. Its former leader, Alberto Fujimori, is serving 25 years in prison.

Arnoldo Alemán of Nicaragua is one of the few former presidents who was arrested in a corruption case despite his own party being in power.

“This is something you see a lot in Latin America, especially in Peru and now in El Salvador,” said Mario García, a regular at Versailles who was tickled to see Mr. Trump visit the restaurant. “But in those countries, they do it for a good reason: because the presidents get caught robbing money.” Mr. García said he believed the government was targeting Mr. Trump “because they don’t have any other way to get him.”

Mr. García said he didn’t think Mr. Trump came to Versailles to court the Latino vote. “The votes here at Versailles are ones he already has,” he said. “He needs support. It’s nice to surround yourself with love when everyone is attacking you.”

Maggie Haberman and Nick Madigan contributed reporting.

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Despite all that, Mr. Birchum still got three years in prison when he was sentenced this month.

Mr. Birchum’s sentence was most likely reduced because he cooperated with prosecutors and was not charged with orchestrating a cover-up, while Mr. Trump has signaled no willingness to cede any ground. He has so far said he did nothing wrong and is waging a full-throated attack against federal prosecutors.

Mr. Birchum’s case and others like it are warning signs for Mr. Trump, who faces 31 counts of willfully retaining national defense secrets, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

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After a 50-minute courtroom encounter unlike any other in the country’s history, Mr. Trump exited by a side door recessed in dark wood paneling, but not before allowing himself a curious peek over his shoulder at the 40 or so reporters crammed into the room.

About a minute later, Mr. Smith and his team walked to the opposite side of the room and left wordlessly. He did not look back.

The first-ever arraignment of a former president on federal charges coincided with the first public encounter between the two men, Mr. Trump and Mr. Smith, at the center of the Mar-a-Lago documents case. The two did not say a word to each other. But these most dissimilar of adversaries are locked in a legal battle with immense political and legal implications for a polarized nation.

Mr. Trump’s body language in the courtroom suggested he understood the gravity of the situation. A former president who thrives on being in control seemed uncomfortable with having so little as a defendant.

Mr. Trump, who has denounced his indictment as a witch hunt and called Mr. Smith a “thug,” did not say a word at the hearing. Nor did the magistrate judge, Jonathan Goodman, ask him a single question, as sometimes happens in criminal arraignments.

Mr. Trump has promised to have more to say later. Several of his political aides were seen outside the courthouse mixing with a small but vocal group of supporters, who were shouting their support over the chopping of a helicopter hovering above.

Inside, the hearing itself was a quiet and strikingly civil affair.

The former president, flanked by his two lawyers, Christopher M. Kise and Todd Blanche, waited patiently for at least 15 minutes for Judge Goodman to enter the courtroom. While Mr. Kise absorbed himself in paperwork, Mr. Trump and Mr. Blanche leaned in close to whisper in each other’s ears, once or twice sharing a laugh. The former president seemed for a moment or two to be at ease.

But the atmosphere changed abruptly at 2:45 p.m. A court official announced that the closed-circuit camera, which piped the hearing into a fifth-floor jury assembly room taken over for the day by the news media, had been turned on. The former president stiffened and stared directly into the camera, as if to recognize the power of the lens.

Mr. Trump, who liked to appear at the White House flanked by flags, often in front of the presidential seal, found himself on the opposite end of the visual on Tuesday. Judge Goodman sat atop a marble dais, elevated several feet above everybody else, next to an American flag in the largest, most modern hearing room in the Wilkie D. Ferguson courthouse.

It is not clear how long Mr. Trump and his co-defendant, Walt Nauta, spent in the courtroom after being booked and electronically fingerprinted by U.S. marshals in the building earlier. But the nation’s 45th president was sitting at his table, along with dozens of court and security workers, when reporters were led into the room shortly after 2:40 p.m.

Most of the substance of the hearing centered on the details of the bond agreement for Mr. Trump. Mr. Smith’s senior prosecutors waived demands for bail, or any other precondition that might be deemed as undignified or overly restrictive. They insisted that Mr. Trump not discuss the case with Mr. Nauta, who remains on the former president’s payroll as a personal aide.

Judge Goodman pressed for a tougher deal, suggesting that Mr. Trump be blocked from having any contact at all with important witnesses. His lawyers responded that the witnesses included people on Mr. Trump’s personal staff and security detail, and that it was not realistic to ask him to cut off contact with them.

The prosecution appeared willing to go along. David Harbach, one of Mr. Smith’s senior prosecutors, asked the court to let the two sides work out the details at a later date. Two earlier drafts of a bond agreement had already been discarded, but a third draft of the deal was printed and Mr. Trump signed it. “Third time’s the charm,” Judge Goodman said.

The judge seemed to be the only participant who appeared truly relaxed, perhaps because he was the only one walking away from the case. Another magistrate judge will preside over preliminary hearings before Judge Aileen M. Cannon takes over for the trial.

“The good news is it will not be me,” Judge Goodman said just before dismissing the parties.

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Mr. Trump’s CNN diatribe against Ms. Carroll, 79, followed a civil jury’s verdict last month finding Mr. Trump, 76, liable in the separate case for sexually abusing Ms. Carroll in the mid-1990s. It also found that he defamed her last year when he went on his Truth Social website and called her case a “complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie.” The jury, after a two-week trial, awarded Ms. Carroll $5 million in damages.

Mr. Trump, in response to questions from the CNN moderator, called Ms. Carroll a “wack job,” said that her claim of a decades-old assault was “fake” and a “made-up story” and that her civil trial was “a rigged deal.”

Ms. Carroll’s revised lawsuit seeks at least $10 million in compensatory damages for Mr. Trump’s statements in 2019, after Ms. Carroll first went public with her rape accusation. At the time, he called her allegation “totally false” and said he could not have raped her because she was not his “type.”

The revised lawsuit, citing Mr. Trump’s CNN comments, says his post-verdict conduct also “supports a very substantial punitive damages award” in her favor, “to deter him from engaging in further defamation.”

Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, said on Tuesday, “We look forward to moving ahead expeditiously on E. Jean Carroll’s remaining claims.”

Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, said, “We maintain that she should not be permitted to retroactively change her legal theory, at the 11th hour, to avoid the consequences of an adverse finding against her.”

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Mr. Corcoran’s notes, first recorded into an iPhone and then transcribed on paper, essentially gave prosecutors a road map to building their case. According to the indictment, Mr. Trump, who appeared in federal court in Miami on Tuesday, pressured Mr. Corcoran to thwart investigators from reclaiming reams of classified material and even suggested to him that it might be better to lie to investigators and withhold the documents altogether.

Earlier this year, over Mr. Trump’s objections, the special counsel overseeing the investigation, Jack Smith, obtained the notes through an invocation of the crime-fraud exception. That exception is a provision of the law that allows prosecutors to work around the normal protections of attorney-client privilege if they have reason to believe and can demonstrate to a judge that a client used legal advice to further a crime.

Mr. Trump’s legal fate could now hinge on testimony and evidence from two men he paid to defend him: Mr. Corcoran, who is still a member of his legal team, and Michael D. Cohen, a former lawyer for Mr. Trump who has helped prosecutors in New York with their case related to the former president’s payment of hush money to a porn star before the 2016 election. Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to federal charges, including one related to that hush money payment, in 2018. Mr. Corcoran has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

Their complicated involvement in the two cases reflects the perils of the former president’s long habit of viewing lawyers as attack dogs or even political bosses rather than as advocates bound by ethical rules.

All of this raised the level of concern among civic leaders in the city, who issued calls for protesters to remain peaceful. In the end, their fears did not materialize. It did not appear that any Proud Boys showed up and about 500 people, including one with a pig’s head on a spear, answered Mr. Trump’s call to action.

The atmosphere outside the building was circuslike. There was the Uncle Sam who sped around the courthouse grounds on a two-wheeled hoverboard singing pro-Trump songs, the woman with a unicorn horn affixed to her forehead who wore an “Aunt-ifa” shirt and chanted derisively about the former president, and the man in a black-and-white jail jumpsuit carrying a sign that read, “Lock Him Up.”

That man in the jumpsuit later instigated the most hectic moment of the day, when he ran in front of Mr. Trump’s S.U.V. as it left the courthouse. The man, who was not immediately identified, was pushed out of the way by the police and later taken into custody. As officers took him away, a crowd of Trump supporters used the message on his sign to taunt him: “Lock him up!”

As he left, Mr. Trump, sitting in the back seat of the S.U.V., flashed a thumbs up to supporters, some of whom sprinted after the vehicle as they cheered. He headed to the famous Cuban restaurant Versailles, where a smaller crowd of supporters awaited him, a rabbi and minister prayed for him and he briefly shook hands and posed for photos.

It was the second time this year that Mr. Trump had called for protests at a court appearance, only to have his summons receive a kind of fizzled response. When he was arraigned in a separate case in April in Manhattan, the New York City Police Department mobilized in force over concerns about unrest, but the chaos never occurred.

In Miami, too, on a blazingly hot day thick with humidity, the crowd was calmer than some had feared. Miami’s police chief, Manuel Morales, faced tough questions from reporters a day earlier on whether he was doing enough to keep the area safe during the court proceeding and why he did not plan to separate anti-Trump and pro-Trump demonstrators.

“We know there is a potential of things taking a turn for the worse, but that’s not the Miami way,” he said in response.

The Proud Boys, who were founded during Mr. Trump’s first campaign for office, have rallied for years on his behalf, often violently. During the 2020 election, Mr. Trump notably called out the group, urging them during a presidential debate to “stand back and standby.”

Scores of Proud Boys took part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and federal investigators cracked down hard on them in the aftermath. The group’s former leader, Enrique Tarrio, who is from Miami, was convicted of seditious conspiracy along with three of his lieutenants for their role in the attack. Dozens of other Proud Boys have either been charged or questioned by the authorities.

It is possible that the group never intended to take part in an event in Miami. It is also possible that the group has simply had enough of supporting Mr. Trump and suffering the consequences. After the violence at the Capitol, some high-ranking Proud Boys disavowed Mr. Trump, expressing anger at him for having left them standing on a limb.

As temperatures reached nearly 90 degrees by lunchtime, trucks circled around the courthouse with flags and loudspeakers, and several people on foot with selfie sticks broadcast live video streams to thousands of viewers while weaving in and out of the crowds.

“This is craaaazy,” shouted one pro-Trump streamer, Rafael Gomez, as he walked among the palm trees in front of the tall, shimmering courthouse. “Welcome to the banana republic of Miami!”

Also seeking to capture an audience were more established conservative figures, such as the Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who held a news conference in front of the courthouse defending Mr. Trump and said that he would pardon his campaign rival if elected.

In an interview after his news conference, Mr. Ramaswamy said that despite his defense, he would not have done what Mr. Trump is accused of. “I wouldn’t have taken the boxes,” he said. “I’m not a memento guy. Not my style.”

The police largely stayed out of the way of the demonstrators, observing from close by while a helicopter circled overhead and jumping into the crowd only a few times when more hostile arguments sprouted up.

At one point, however, Homeland Security and Miami Police Department officers urgently closed in and began clearing a large area of the courthouse grounds. They investigated a large TV that had been affixed to a pole on the sidewalk and that bore a message criticizing what it called “the Communist-controlled news media.” About an hour later, the police removed the television and reopened the area.

Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami, a Republican who is mulling his own presidential bid, arrived in the early afternoon wearing a Miami Police Department polo shirt. He hugged several Trump supporters before shaking hands with a line of police officers. “I think, up until now, it’s a peaceful demonstration for people exercising their constitutional rights to express themselves, which we love about this country,” he said.

Nearby, Carlos Brito, 66, sold American flags for $5. Mr. Brito, who immigrated from Cuba in 1980, said he supported Mr. Trump and criticized President Biden for sending money to support Ukraine while Americans struggled financially. “Look how much a cup of coffee costs here,” he said. “We need help here at home.”

Scott Linnen, 61, a Trump critic from Miami, said he came to the courthouse because he had grown distraught over the direction of the country. As a gay man, he said he had seen a rise in anti-L.G.B.T.Q. rhetoric, hate speech and extremist behavior on the right.

“This man tried to overthrow the 247-year-old American experiment,” he said of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “I don’t understand why more people’s hair isn’t on fire.”

Luke Broadwater and Nick Madigan contributed reporting.

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But even before the new courthouse was built, Miami was the backdrop for a number of high-profile federal cases. Here are three famous cases that played out in Miami federal court:

• In 1992, Manuel Noriega, the former leader of Panama, was convicted of drug trafficking and money laundering following a seven-month trial. The New York Times reported that Mr. Noriega gave a two-hour speech — quoting Hillary Clinton, Socrates, and others — before a judge sentenced him to 40 years in prison. He later was sent to Panama and served a prison term there. Mr. Noriega died in 2017.

• Jose Padilla, a Brooklyn man who was accused of being associated with Al Qaeda, was tried in Miami in a high-profile and hotly debated terrorism trial that was closely watched in the post-9/11 era. He was found guilty of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people and remains imprisoned in a federal prison in Colorado.

• The rapper Lil Wayne was charged in the district with illegally possessing a gold-plated gun. He pleaded guilty in December 2020 — in a virtual hearing — only to be pardoned by Mr. Trump a month later. Following the pardon, Lil Wayne, born Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., expressed his appreciation in a tweet: “I want to thank President Trump for recognizing that I have so much more to give to my family, my art, and my community.”

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“This is a big event, it’s a historic event,” said Mr. Abhyanker, as he waited in a jury overflow room at the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. federal courthouse with nearly a hundred members of the news media, who were also hoping to be let into the courtroom through a lottery. “I want to be part of that history.”

It required sacrifice. Mr. Abhyanker — a Republican who said he no longer supported Mr. Trump and called the evidence provided in the indictment against the former president “very strong” — was rained on late at night, and suffered unfortunate dousing by the sprinklers in the grass outside the courthouse.

He had prepared for a long night, raiding his hotel’s minifridge for Pringles, M&Ms and bottled water, which he shared with Lazaro Ecenarro, a South Florida native who now lives in Oklahoma but had returned to the area for eye surgery.

Mr. Ecenarro, 48, proudly displayed his allegiance to Mr. Trump, wearing a red Make America Great Again hat and a Trump 2024 T-shirt, as well as a gray patch over his left eye.

“These are fabricated charges,” he said.

The jury room at the courthouse is normally a place for jurors to have coffee and refreshments as they wait to see if they will be called. On Tuesday, in addition to housing members of the public, it held a group of news reporters who entered their business cards in a lottery for a chance to sit in the 13th-floor courtroom where Mr. Trump would appear. After more than six hours, roughly three dozen reporters were selected to attend. The remainder stayed in the jury room to watch the hearing on closed-circuit television monitors.

Janie Jackson, a Democrat from Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood, said she was willing to spend hours waiting in the jury room simply to catch a glimpse of Mr. Trump up close. There wasn’t much to do in the meantime, except talk and read the courthouse’s selection of old magazines. Nobody was allowed to have electronic devices with them: no phones, no tablets, no internet. Not even smart watches.

Like Mr. Abhyanker and Mr. Ecenarro, Ms. Jackson was eventually called into the courtroom.

Mr. Trump was already seated at the defense table when she walked in.

“I looked up and I saw the hair and I almost screamed out: ‘That’s him,’” Ms. Jackson, 52, said after the hearing. “But they told us they would kick us out if we made any noise. That’s what kept me from yelling his name out.”

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Mr. Smith and Mr. Trump are in a way familiar figures to each other. Mr. Smith was raised in New York State and worked for years in Brooklyn, toiling in the borough whose politics helped Mr. Trump develop a transactional view of business, politics and human relations.

Mr. Smith worked as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York, which covers Brooklyn. That’s where Mr. Trump’s father, Fred Trump Sr., worked the Democratic political machine and became a deeply connected real estate developer who used the levers of power to help his business.

Mr. Trump was just a fading casino magnate and publicity hound when Mr. Smith was working in Brooklyn, at the U.S. attorney’s office. But the prosecutor’s proximity to the streets of Brooklyn — he worked on general violent crimes early in his career — and the politics of New York City provided him insight into the worldview and forces that shaped Mr. Trump.

One veteran defense lawyer who has known Mr. Smith for years, and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he was a Boy Scout-like prosecutor out of central casting. And Mr. Trump, the lawyer said, represented everything that Mr. Smith disdained about people who flout the rule of law.

Among the cases that Mr. Smith worked on was the prosecution of a New York City police officer, Charles Schwarz, involved in sodomizing a Haitian immigrant with a broom handle in a police precinct in 1997. The case Mr. Smith prosecuted, which was tried in 2002, stemmed from an incident that roiled the city and threatened the re-election of the city’s mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who later became Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer.

Mr. Smith later married his experience with gritty street crimes with working on public corruption cases involving crimes committed by crooked elected officials, including some prominent Democrats. Later, he prosecuted war crime cases at The Hague.

It remains to be seen how she will handle her second turn in the spotlight. It is also not clear whether she will refer some pretrial motions to a magistrate judge who works under her. But here is a closer look at how her decisions as the judge presiding over the trial — like on what can be included and excluded — could affect the case.

Pastor Yoelis Sánchez, a native of the Dominican Republic who became a U.S. citizen after the 2020 election, has never voted for Trump. But, when asked, she still felt moved to go to Versailles restaurant on Tuesday to pray with him. “We prayed for God to give him strength and for the truth to come out,” she said. “We are really concerned for his welfare.”

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Three of the major broadcast networks — ABC, NBC and CBS — interrupted their usual afternoon programming to cover the news. NBC sent its evening news anchor, Lester Holt, to Miami, as did CBS with Norah O’Donnell.

The cable news networks turned to its top news anchors. Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper oversaw coverage on CNN, and Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum helped lead coverage on Fox News.

Like Mr. Trump’s trip to a Manhattan courthouse, the six major broadcast and cable news networks all used overhead shots to show Mr. Trump’s motorcade making the roughly 20-minute trip to downtown Miami, where the former president was arraigned.

The wall-to-wall coverage represented yet another day in which Mr. Trump dominated the airwaves. Many of the panelists who took part in the coverage discussed the momentous nature of the day.

“Whenever politics and law clash, there’s always a tension because they are both places where fighting takes place,” John Dickerson of CBS said from a makeshift set on a balcony overlooking the courthouse in Miami. “Politics is the fighting of the barroom, and the law is more like a boxing match — there are some rules.”

Unlike the arraignment in April, there was decidedly a lack of useful footage. There were no shots of Mr. Trump entering the courthouse — his motorcade entered a garage — nor were there any images inside the federal building. The networks relied instead on images of demonstrators outside the courthouse.

Fox News broadcast live images of a person the network’s anchors described as Melania Trump, the former first lady — though within a few minutes the network said it was, in fact, not her. “A day like this, with so many comings and goings, it’s easy from a distance to mistake two people,” said John Roberts, the Fox anchor, who clarified it was actually Margo Martin, a Trump aide.

Earlier in the day, Fox News carried a news conference outside the Miami courthouse by Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican presidential candidate, in which he asked other candidates to commit to pardoning Mr. Trump. Five hours later, Mr. Ramaswamy sat for a live Fox News interview with Ms. MacCallum, this time in studio in New York. “You’re moving around quickly today,” she observed, before he denounced a “politicized indictment.”

All day long, MSNBC seemed to be looking ahead, displaying a graphic in the lower-right hand corner of its screen, featuring an image of Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace and Joy Reid, billing an 8 p.m. prime-time “post-arraignment special.”

The news about Mr. Trump has been good for MSNBC’s ratings. Last week, the network finished No. 1 among the cable news networks in total viewers in prime time for the full calendar week — the first time it had achieved that in more than two years. The network averaged 1.52 million viewers, narrowly besting Fox News’s 1.51 million viewers and overwhelming CNN’s average of 677,000 viewers.

It was also MSNBC’s highest viewership during weekday prime-time hours since Mr. Trump’s April arraignment.

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Mr. Nauta did not enter a plea. A lawyer for Mr. Nauta, who is charged with lying to investigators and scheming with Mr. Trump to conceal boxes containing classified documents from the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors, asked for a two-week extension because he needed a local lawyer to sponsor him.

The restrictions — which do not apply to other topics of conversation — are common for co-defendants in a criminal matter, but they could be particularly challenging to uphold given that Mr. Nauta’s job is to follow the former president through his days, attending to various needs. To underscore Mr. Nauta’s proximity to Mr. Trump, Mr. Nauta was riding with him from Mr. Trump’s club, Doral, to the courthouse for Tuesday’s hearing.

The two men talk frequently and have for most of the last two years as Mr. Nauta first served as a valet in the White House and now serves as an aide to Mr. Trump in his post-presidential life. The former president tends to treat his close personal aides as sounding boards for all manner of topics.

Mr. Trump is hardly known for his restraint under typical circumstances, but especially when told to do something by a person in a position of authority. And an edict not to discuss a case that has consumed Mr. Trump’s thinking for weeks poses even more of a challenge.

The same restriction on the defendants’ communications was also applied to witnesses in the case, a list of which the government is expected to draw up. That poses a similar challenge to the situation with Mr. Nauta: A number of Mr. Trump’s advisers, current and former Mar-a-Lago staff members, and even some of his lawyers have been interviewed in the case.

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Other records covered information about military contingency planning, including “military contingency planning of the United States," American nuclear programs and “plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.”

In describing Mr. Trump’s approach toward classified documents, prosecutors disclosed a recording they obtained of the former president in July 2021 in which he refers to a document he had on hand, saying that it had been compiled by a senior military official and was related to attacking a country the indictment leaves unnamed. Reporting suggests that the document may be a summary of highly classified military options for confronting Iran.

He was recorded talking at his home in Bedminster, N.J., with a writer and a publisher working on a book related to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff.

Prosecutors said Mr. Trump described the document as a “plan of attack” that, according to the recording, he described as “highly confidential” and “secret.”

In total, the government has recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mr. Trump since he left office. Typically the intelligence agencies have to agree to allow the classified documents to be used as a part of prosecution; even though they will not be made public, they will be available to defense lawyers.

The government was alerted to the absence of those materials when it discovered that Mr. Trump’s original correspondence with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, was missing, but those letters were eventually returned.