On Friday, Donald Trump made history by becoming the first US President—sitting or former—to be indicted for a crime. A grand jury in Manhattan—a body of citizens constituted by the government prosecutor—has decided that there is enough evidence to bring Trump to trial. He will be arraigned in the next few days—produced before a court, which will formally read out the charges and ask him whether he wishes to plead guilty or not guilty.
Trump will of course plead innocence and the courtroom battle will begin. Meanwhile, America is in uproar.
The case is about Trump paying $130,000 to porn movie star Stormy Daniels (Stephanie Gregory Clifford) to keep quiet about a fling he had with her in 2006. But the matter is very complicated, both legally and politically.
It was Michael Cohen, who was then Trump’s personal lawyer, who paid Daniels the money a few days before the 2016 presidential election. Over the next year, Trump reimbursed Cohen in instalments and booked the expenses as regular legal fees. Cohen has since then been convicted, among other things, of tax fraud, bank fraud and perjury, and spent three years in prison.
So Trump fiddled his accounts, but in New York state, where the trial will be held, falsification of financial records is just a “misdemeanor”, not a “felony”, and therefore prosecutors rarely spend time on pursuing such cases. Also, a misdemeanor has only a two-year statute of limitations, so Trump can no longer be charged with it. Knowing this, Manhattan district attorney (DA) Alvin Bragg is accusing Trump of campaign finance violation, which is a felony that has a longer statute of limitations.
But campaign finance violation is a “federal” crime and not under New York state jurisdiction. According to at least one former Manhattan government attorney, the only way Bragg can get Trump convicted under New York law is by proving that he falsified his records “in order to conceal his commission of another crime”, and this crime had to be committed in New York. Federal agencies which have jurisdiction on campaign finance matters had investigated the Daniels hush money business and decided not to pursue the matter.
Bragg, a member of the Democratic Party, has never hidden his views on Trump. While campaigning for the post of DA in 2021, he had promised to prosecute and convict Trump. He has made good on the first part of his pledge. Yet the move could backfire.
Trump faces at least three other lawsuits that are much more serious in nature than paying up to buy a porn star's silence. One is his alleged attempts to tamper with the vote count in the state of Georgia after the 2020 election. The second is his inciting of the riots on January 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters attacked the seat of American democracy, the Capitol in Washington DC. The third is his illegal hoarding of confidential government documents at his personal residence in Florida after losing his presidency.
The Daniels case can provide great salacious fodder to the masses, but if he is found not guilty here, it could greatly boost his and his fans’ incessant claims that he is being hounded for pure political vendetta by Democratic Party officials; that it has nothing to do with truth or justice.
Trump is an incendiary character who often seems half-crazed in his public utterances. Yet, according to all opinion polls, he remains the front-runner to be the Republican Party presidential candidate in 2024. He has been raving and ranting ever since he lost in 2020 that the election had been “stolen” and he was actually the winner. This indictment has certainly enraged him and his supporters even further. Expect new records to be set in fiery and bizarre political rhetoric in the coming weeks and months. Trump has already said that he has no faith in the judge assigned to the case.
As for how all this will play out politically, no one can tell for sure. Even if Trump is convicted, according to the US Constitution, he can still run for president. This was confirmed by a 1969 Supreme Court judgement in a case involving a Congressman who had been convicted of corruption. The Court made it clear that no American legislative body can change this provision.
Optimistic Democratic Party supporters believe that if Trump is nominated as the Republic candidate in 2024, it will make it easier for Joe Biden—or whoever is the Democratic candidate—to win in 2024. The reasoning is that a large chunk of independent non-party-affiliated voters and even some traditional Republican voters will dread the prospect of Trump re-entering the White House.
Meanwhile, the indictment and the subsequent trial will certainly be unifying the Republican Party, at least publicly. In the last few years, there has been considerable disagreement within the party between Trumpists and anti-Trumpists.
What if Trump does manage to win in 2024? He will certainly be angrier than ever, with an even deeper sense of victimhood and a thirst for vengeance. He was unpredictable and impulsive in his first term. No one can even begin to conjecture what lengths he will go to to try to make utterly miserable the lives of those who he feels persecuted him. He will attack them with all the means at his disposal. In his first term, his administration had several senior members who opposed some of his policies or at least, tried to dissuade him on some of his wilder ideas. This time, his administration will be packed solely with blind devotees and yes-men.
It will not be surprising if the war spills out on the streets regularly and violence—from both sides—increases manifold.
What is beyond doubt is that America has never been so sharply divided since the Civil War 160 years ago, with no apparent hope of any compromise and conciliation in the foreseeable future.
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