If the Stormy Daniels case is supposedly so trivial, if it’s purportedly no big deal that Trump faked business records to buy the silence of a porn star paramour, if indeed it’s a minor trifle that he did this on the eve of the ’16 election to hide the sordid affair from voters…then why has he been so manically fixated on delaying or canceling his criminal trial, which starts on Monday?
Several reasons. First, he’s surely not keen on becoming the first and only ex-president to sit in the dock as a criminal defendant. Second, his presence in court will be mandatory; he’ll have to sit there day after day, far removed from the adoring rally saps, as a prosecutor lays bare – in texts, emails, documents, and witnesses – his lowlife lawbreaking behavior. Third, he rightly fears that the jury will convict him; being tagged as a criminal felon would be…um…a bad look for a presidential candidate. Indeed, according to a new national poll, 64 percent of registered voters say the charges in this case are serious.
This explains why, all this week, he has launched a dozen desperate salvos at New York’s appellate judges, pleading in vain for a trial stoppage; and why he’s been chewing the carpet nonstop on his social media site, ranting that holding him accountable “is Communism at its worst and Election Interference at its Best.” But the core truth is that when he hushed up Stormy two weeks before the 2016 balloting, hiding crucial info from the voters, that coverup was election interference.
As Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg said in a recent radio interview, “the heart of the case” is “about conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up,” violating New York Penal Law 175.10 on 34 felonious occasions. I won’t bore you with the abstruse legal details, but here’s the incontrovertible evidence in a nutshell:
Candidate Trump was clearly worried about Stormy on election eve – this was right after the release of the Access Hollywood grab-’em-by-the-pussy tape – so he discussed a plan of action with his best boyos: lawyer-fixer Michael Cohen and National Enquirer boss David Pecker. Cohen is already on record about what happened next. Trump asked Pecker, “How bad do you think this could hurt me with the campaign?” Pecker replied, “It can’t be good.” The next morning, according to Cohen (who went to jail in 2018 for abetting this scheme), Trump gave the OK to pay Stormy 130 grand.
Cohen put up the money himself, using a home equity line of credit, and Trump reimbursed him after the election, personally signing nine monthly checks; those payments were listed in the Trump Organization’s books as “legal fees…services rendered.” At Cohen’s 2018 sentencing, prosecutors stated that he paid off Stormy “in coordination with and at the direction of” Trump – who, in court papers, was called “Individual-1.” Meanwhile, in the signed hush money agreement with Stormy’s lawyer, Trump went by a pseudonym, “David Dennison.” (We know that, thanks to a government search warrant.) And Rudy Giuliani spilled the beans on Fox News a few years ago, when he said that Trump “did know about the general arrangement, that Michael would take care of things like this.”
All sordid stuff, as you’d expect from Trump. But the DA is not out to prove that the defendant is a dirtbag (that, we already know); he plans to persuade the jury that when Trump faked his business records, he did so to hide a separate crime. The key allegation is that Trump bought Stormy’s silence in order to influence the presidential election, which means that the $130,000 was an illegal federal campaign expenditure. That too is a felony.
Maybe Trump would’ve been elected in 2016 anyway; maybe his teensy victory margins in pivotal states – Michigan by 0.2 percent; Pennsylvania by 0.7 percent; Wisconsin by 0.8 percent – would’ve held up anyway; maybe swing voters wouldn’t have cared if Stormy had gone public to reveal that Trump had bedded her while Melania was home with a newborn. But Trump was clearly worried that Stormy plus Hollywood Access could make him a loser. That’s the heart of the DA’s narrative.
And whether this trial will hurt Trump in the next election is of secondary importance right now. Holding him accountable in a criminal court for alleged criminal acts – finally! – is the first priority.
Granted, you may well view this case as chump change – especially when compared to, oh, fomenting a violent insurrection to overthrow a democratic election, or ginning up fake elector slates, or stealing classified documents and piling them in the john – but rest assured that the bible salesman does not. I wouldn’t be surprised if he feigns illness on Sunday night, or pleads bone spurs, or arranges to be captured on camera wandering around Manhattan in his jammies like an addled old mobster. Because he knows darn well that Monday’s courtroom weather will be Stormy with a chance of jailing.