In the Trump felony trial now underway, there’s a yawning gap between media attention paid to this and the actual scale of the crime and its potential punishment.
Trump is not indicted for trial for electoral fraud. He’s not on trial for paying a porn star for services. He’s not on trial for adultery. He’s not on trial for being a loudmouth ex-president who is loathed by centrists and lefties alike. He’s not on trial for disrespecting women or the electoral system or New Yorkers or anything like that. But it’s only that stuff that makes this case worth covering.
What Trump is on trial for is whether prosecutors can successfully tie specific counts of doctoring some financial records of his companies to a more lurid election-related conspiracy for which he is not facing charges.
He is on trial for something that in legal terms is not particularly consequential. This trial doesn’t deserve the media attention it is getting, but that same media attention is the one way he really will win the presidential election through its bow wave of free publicity.
Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records.
If found guilty he’ll get something between probation and a couple of years in jail. The amount paid to an adult film actress was $130,000. That’s about a weeks’ income for him. So yes, he could have saved himself all this grief if he’s just paid the amount himself. If found guilty, I suspect as a first offender he’ll get probation and a telling off. But getting to a guilty result is no certainty and is no mean feat.
By pleading not guilty he is essentially paying himself hundreds of millions that his campaign saves from trying to gain in advertising profile. It sucks Biden’s oxygen clean out of the room for nearly two months when he desperately needs it. It is a complete gift to Trump’s campaign – win or lose.
There is of course politics behind this prosecution. That’s not unexpected in an explicitly politicised judiciary and prosecutorial system. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has defended his approach saying that allegations against Trump are not out of the ordinary in the nation’s financial capital and has called the charges the “bread and butter of our white collar work.” Similar cases include instances of business owners and companies falsifying records to evade insurance payments, cover up theft and improperly secure federal loans, and other similar stuff. Falsification charges in New York have been brought 11,663 times in cases arraigned in state and superior criminal courts from 2014 to 2023. Not out of the ordinary to prosecute at all.
But of all the legal jeopardy Trump is in and it’s quite a lot, this is the weakest and least meaningful of the trials.
In New York falsifying business records is a mere misdemeanor unless prosecutors can prove a defendant acted with an intent to commit another crime. If Bragg can prove that, the charge can eke upwards into a Class E felony which is the state’s lowest level felony count.
By the Friday of the first week of evidence, no one will give a damn about the description of a fee on a lawyers’ invoice, which is what this case amounts to.
What they will give a damn about is whether Donald Trump paid a prostitute for sex while his wife was pregnant.
Way back in 2008 then-Presidential hopeful John Edwards really did pay a woman by using campaign funds to keep her quiet in order to stop her damaging his campaign.
Edwards got a not guilty on one count and a deadlocked jury on the other and all charges were subsequently dropped. Bragg, there’s your warning.
Bragg’s case on the whole has better witnesses, and with Cohen already found guilty, there’s plenty of ground to show that Trump and team really were conspiring to protest him from another crime. Bragg has a fair few other crimes to pick from, to get up to a Class E case.
But honestly the real trial would be unfair on Trump were he Republican, Democrat, or independent. Because what he is about to get on trial for in reality is sex with a hooker. It’s as simple and as tawdry an as American as that. It’s made slightly worse by it being adultery and sex with a hooker. And just a wee extra spice on top that it was adultery and sex with a hooker while his wife was pregnant. Which finally gets around to what the show is really being framed about: whether Trump treats women badly enough to turn more women off than he turns on. That, finally, is why the media is interested in making a big deal about this: can you make falsifying business records interesting to female viewers.
That’s how far you have to go to make this relevant to the 2024 presidential election.
If you can possibly keep your fingers prized together as you flick over your tv or tablet screens from feeds of the trial from X to Facebook to HuffingtonPost to The Guardian to The Atlantic to The Bulwark to Meidas Touch to msnbc to Fox and Friends to NewsMax and deeper, try settle on something with some actual policy or even character relevance to it.
This trial is not worth your attention.
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