New York’s Trump Trial Is About More Than Paying Off Stormy Daniels
Like the OJ Simpson trial, the repercussions could go on for decades
Barring an unforeseen development, former president Donald J Trump will appear in a Manhattan courtroom to stand trial on Monday (April 15).
He is accused of falsifying business records as part of a scheme to keep voters from learning about extra marital sex with two women and to quash a potential ‘lovechild’ story. He pleads not guilty and says (on occasion) the purpose of the scheme was to protect his wife; the state of New York says he was seeking to influence an election.
Specifically, Manhattan Dist. Atty. Alvin Bragg is prosecuting Trump for concealing three crimes: a federal campaign finance violation, a state election-law crime and tax fraud. Bragg does not have to charge Trump with those crimes, or even prove those crimes occurred. He just has to prove there was intent to commit or conceal a second crime.
The case isn’t a slam dunk. The defense will throw everything it can think of at the prosecution, and it’s always possible something will stick or that a juror will remain unpersuaded.
Should there be a guilty verdict, it won’t be final for years as an endless number of appeals will come. The one thing making this case different from other charges the former president is facing is that these are State of New York charges, which cannot be undone by presidential pardon.
This trial is all-but-guaranteed to be the focus of news, opinion, and cultural reporting in just about every nook and cranny of the US for the next six to eight weeks. A conscious effort will be necessary NOT to be submerged in the minutiae of hearings on Monday, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Wednesdays and weekends will be reserved for events featuring the defendant denouncing the proceedings, and summaries of what happened in court ad nauseam.
Make no mistake about it, Judge Juan Manuel Merchan’s courtroom will now function as a platform for campaigning. The big difference will be the lack of an adoring audience. Gag orders and sanctions for contempt will effectively be the cost of doing business for the defendant.
The daily denunciations of this case by the former president will be variations on the theme he’s started pushing even before the grand jury indicted him for 34 felonies; that the charges were all part of “the Biden regime’s weaponization of our system of justice.” By repeating this accusation, Trump is hoping to convince voters that a conviction should be ignored, since it was a political attack. He’s no doubt seen the polling showing damage that would occur with a guilty verdict.
Via Kerry Eleveld at Daily Kos:
Yet another poll has found that, yes, voters would take a criminal conviction of Donald Trump—even in an adult film star hush-money case—seriously. Trump is accused of falsifying records to cover up payments to Stormy Daniels in advance of the 2016 election; the trial is set to begin April 15 in New York.
The Reuters/Ipsos survey released Monday found that 64% of registered voters believe the fraud charges brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg are at least "somewhat serious," while 34% said the charges lacked seriousness. Voters taking the charges seriously included two-thirds of independents and roughly four in 10 Republican respondents.
Ever since the outlines of Trump’s four criminal cases took shape last year, legal analysts and some Democrats have viewed the New York hush-money case as “the runt of the litter.” The conventional wisdom became that a conviction in New York would deal a lesser blow to Trump’s presidential prospects than the election interference cases.
Dean Obeidallah says the lies about the basis for prosecution should be refuted, lest it be used in the same way Hitler did to gain power:
In reality, the criminal investigation into Trump that led to the current charges began when Trump was President—back in 2018. Yep, in 2018 under Trump! And the reason the investigation was initiated by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office at the time was not Joe Biden, but Trump’s own lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen. When Cohen plead guilty in 2018 to federal crimes that included arranging the “hush money” payments on Trump’s behalf in violation of federal election laws, the Manhattan DA opened a criminal investigation into this matter.
However, that investigation by the DA was stopped after a request from Trump’s own DOJ because they wanted to potentially investigate any such crimes first. Yes, Trump’s DOJ delayed the investigation. When Trump’s DOJ finally gave the Manhattan DA the greenlight in late 2019 to resume their investigation, Trump, through his lawyers, delayed the investigation over and over that led to two cases before the US Supreme Court. Finally in 2021, the DA obtained Trump’s tax records and more allowing them to focus on Trump’s “hush money” crimes.
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OJ Simpson died of cancer this week. There has been extensive reporting on his life, the lives of the people he was accused of murdering, and the subsequent fame bestowed upon the players/observers of his days in court.
Simpson’s trial was a watershed event, bringing forth many narratives including misogyny, racism, and police misconduct. The not guilty verdict convinced many that there really were two systems of justice in America. OJ straddled those two realities, but wealth and power emerged victorious.
The larger implications and commonalities of Simpson and Trump’s proceedings will be understandable in the coming weeks, as the former president wields his fame and fortune as a shield against charges that would have already produced a verdict for a lesser human.
Oliver Darcy at CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter postulates that Simpson’s trial helped pave the way for the phenomena we now know as Donald Trump. He reminds us that the trial helped persuade Rupert Murdoch into launching Fox News after he realized the profits CNN must have been making with its wall-to-wall coverage..
It's difficult to imagine Trump being elected to the White House without the three-legged stool that Simpson's trial played a crucial role in building. Is there a Trump presidency without reality television? Or cable news? Or, especially, Fox News?
Trump exploited each of those branches of the post-Simpson media environment to gain fame. And then he ultimately used them to cease — and hold onto — political power.
"Simpson proved enormous profits could be generated from high ratings from programming that did not require actors and writers and sets. Reality TV had started earlier, but after Simpson there was a massive profusion of 'Reality TV,'" Socolow said in an email. "That's how 'The Apprentice' gave Donald Trump a comeback in American culture, and he rode his reality TV stardom to the White House.
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Finally, some more words about The Juice. In Would the OJ Simpson Trial Be Different Today?, Jill Filipovic gets to the larger implications of Simpson’s trial:
OJ Simpson, a Black man who almost surely murdered two white people in acts of stunning violence, got off in part — perhaps ironically — because of a racist criminal justice system. That system had proved so skewed and so unworthy of confidence that a large-enough chunk of the public grew reflexively distrustful and dismissive of it, and it was OJ, a serially violent man of immense financial means and cultural clout, who ultimately benefitted. The price of the public’s distrust, of course, was paid less by “the system” that had wronged so many and instead by the families and loved ones of innocent murder victims — and by abused women the nation over, who saw in excruciating daily detail just how little their lives were valued. The only person who won was the person who least deserved it.
Some of the lessons here are obvious: Biased and unjust systems always result in very bad outcomes, sometimes in wild and unexpected ways that don’t actually benefit the group those unjust systems traditionally serve. But some lessons, I think, we haven’t totally grappled with: That while we can and should seek to understand why whole segments of society get things terribly wrong or take on bad ideas or excuse atrocious acts, we should move forward by treating adults like adults with the agency and ability to see the facts in front of them, and emphasize the necessity of reason over suspicion or sectarianism. (Today, in a media environment where people can and do overwhelmingly seek out that which confirms their preexisting views and affirms their sense of rightness and righteousness, this is perhaps harder than ever).
OJ Simpson is dead, years after the deaths — likely at his hand — of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. I am glad the names of those two innocent people are coming up so much now, that their lives have not been subsumed to their likely killer’s, and that the broader public now understands them as the real victims, even as their names are forever tied to someone else’s horrific acts and the media storm that followed. But the OJ Simpson trial was always about so much more than OJ. I’m just not sure that, even 30 years later, we actually understand it.
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Friday’s Other Stories of Note
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Backers of California homeless camp ban cite ‘successful’ San Diego law. But is it? Via CalMatters (Good reporting job!)
Later that morning, you didn’t have to go far to see where people kicked out of that encampment had ended up. One block away, Brandi James sat hunched on the corner of 17th and J streets, surrounded by her worldly possessions. In three years on the street, James said she’s been given “countless” tickets.
So far, her attempts to get into a safe sleeping site had failed.
“Everywhere we go, they move us out,” she said. “And we try to go to the shelter, and they don’t have any room. We wait for the (Homeless Outreach) Team and they never show up. It’s just like, where do we go?”
Tears began to fall. She pulled the bill of her black baseball cap down to cover her face.
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Top IDF commander in aid strike wanted to block humanitarian supplies into Gaza via Telegraph (UK)
The most senior IDF commander dismissed for his role in the drone strike which killed seven aid workers in Gaza is a settler who signed an open letter in January calling for the territory to be deprived of aid, The Telegraph can reveal.
A senior British lawyer said its contents – including a call for a “siege” of Gaza City – should be considered by the Israeli authorities investigating the killings.
Col (Res) Nochi Mandel, the chief of staff of the Nahal Infantry Brigade, was one of two officers dismissed last week following the incident in which three vehicles belonging to the charity World Central Kitchen (WCK) were attacked by drones, killing all those inside, including three Britons.
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The Flooding Will Come “No Matter What” via ProPublica
As the U.S. gets hotter, its coastal waters rise higher, its wildfires burn larger and its droughts last longer, the notion that humankind can triumph over nature is fading, and with it, slowly, goes the belief that self-determination and personal preference can be the driving factors in choosing where to live. Scientific modeling of these pressures suggest a sweeping change is coming in the shape and location of communities across America, a change that promises to transform the country’s politics, culture and economy.
It has already begun. More Americans are displaced by catastrophic climate-change-driven storms and floods and fires every year. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, the global nongovernmental organization researchers rely on to measure the number of people forcibly cast out of their homes by natural disasters, counted very few displaced Americans in 2009, 2010 and 2011, years in which few natural disasters struck the United States. But by 2016 the numbers had begun to surge, with between 1 million and 1.7 million newly displaced people annually. The disasters and heat waves each year have become legion. But the statistics show the human side of what has appeared to be a turning point in both the severity and frequency of wildfires and hurricanes.
As the number of displaced people continues to grow, an ever-larger portion of those affected will make their moves permanent, migrating to safer ground or supportive communities. They will do so either because a singular disaster like the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California — or Hurricane Harvey, which struck the Texas and Louisiana coasts — is so destructive it forces them to, or because the subtler “slow onset” change in their surroundings gradually grows so intolerable, uncomfortable or inconvenient that they make the decision to leave, proactively, by choice. In a 2021 study published in the journal Climatic Change, researchers found that 57% of the Americans they surveyed believed that changes in their climate would push them to consider a move sometime in the next decade.
