NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE W ell, it happened: The political party currently in power indicted and arrested the leader of the opposition.
Several things stand out about the formal arraignment of Donald J. Trump this past week, and the Alvin Bragg–managed case surrounding it. First, the Donald — who makes me in my collegiate “raver” days seem like Saint Thomas Aquinas — does not appear to be a remarkably good person. He may indeed, in addition to cheating on his recently pregnant wife with a porn star sometimes referred to as the Facial Queen, have committed a minor “paper crime.”
Second, however, the prosecution targeting him is clearly and rather blatantly political, led by a partisan Democrat who was elected largely because of his claim that he is “tough on Mr. Trump.” Third and most important, the attack on Trump has aroused the aggressive New Right, almost certainly making banana republic–style prosecutions of this kind more common on both sides of the aisle going forward. Each of these points deserves a paragraph (or more) of words.
First, no ethically normal person (or me, for that matter) can ignore how remarkable the context surrounding this case is. Essentially, all allegations here spring from the claim that Donald Trump — allegedly, allegedly — had an extramarital affair with legendary porn star and sex worker Stormy Daniels after a charity golf outing. At least according to Daniels and her polygraph results, the pair had sex in a Lake Tahoe luxury hotel room in 2006, days after Melania Trump had given birth to a child, and then remained in touch for years.
The stormy session was hardly Trump’s only alleged sexual peccadillo: ABC News once memorably reported that the former president and television host has been accused of some form of sexual assault by at least 18 women, in addition to consensual extramarital hookups like the one with Daniels. While Big Orange denies most or all of that, it seems essentially uncontested that he and his team did pay Mrs. Daniels $130,000 to keep her mouth shut: Michael Cohen publicly admitted this following a widely read 2018 Wall Street Journal article. Given a 2024 GOP race likely to be full of staid family men like Ron DeSantis and Tim Scott, in addition to current contenders Vivek Ramaswamy and Asa Hutchinson, the attraction of much of the American Right to a libertine New York City billionaire merits some notice and a bit of a weather eye.
That said, Donald J. Trump is not running for pope, and the actual charges against him seem — bluntly put — to be BS . . . to such a degree that numerous smart leftists like Van Jones have very publicly called them out. Essentially, the core claim against Trump is that a legal hush-money payment to Daniels, part of a standard NDA, was falsely or inaccurately recorded in his account books: listed as legal fees to then-lawyer Michael Cohen rather than (say) “payoff to sex worker.”
Notably, falsifying personal nontax business records isn’t necessarily illegal either. However, the “novel” legal claim of NYC’s Bragg — a Soros-backed blue-city DA (by which I mean a DA in a blue city who was financially backed by George Soros) who devoted much of his campaign to how hard he would be on Trump — is that the records falsification was done to conceal a separate crime, probably a campaign-finance violation, even if the indictment is not crystal-clear on this point. I.e., Daniels was being paid off in order to bolster the 2016 Donald Trump presidential campaign. And, as multiple checks, invoices, and so forth were sent to Cohen by Trump over the months: bazinga — 34 felony criminal charges!
Speaking as a proud-if-non-practicing 2005 graduate of the U-Illinois College of Law (Section C, where you at?), I see several obvious problems with this theory. First, it centers on an almost unprovable allegation of state of mind. A very simple response from Mr. Trump could be that he paid off Daniels more to protect his wife or avoid embarrassment about his sexual tastes than to boost his political prospects.
“Disproving the null hypothesis,” as we worldly wise academics say, seems well-nigh impossible in this case. Further, the prosecution of federal campaign-finance violations by city-level legal officials seems to be almost unheard of — and similar technical improprieties relating to NDAs or business deals could likely be brought against half the politicians in Washington. Other issues also exist. Very few serious people, I suspect, believe that Donald Trump would be facing the same charges were his name literally anything else.
That said, the big guy may not be the lone political figure in the docket for long. It is almost a cliché in left-wing politics that the Republicans are the crooked party of bidness: a widely cited 2019 article by the edgy Rantt concluded that GOP administrations saw 38 times more criminal convictions than did Democratic administrations between 1961 and 2019. However, in recent years, members of the New Right have begun to point out one obvious potential reason for this.
The U.S. national media and even the social-science academy lean less than 10 percent to the right, and far more national furor arises over GOP scandals than Democrat ones. For example, Barack Obama was president during the absurdly disastrous “Fast and the Furious” gunrunning escapade but was widely praised for being scandal-free beyond once wearing a tan suit. Compact magazine’s Nathan Pinkoski recently argued, surprisingly persuasively, that even Richard M. Nixon was a victim of this kind of double standard, in an era when political “dirty tricks” were bog-standard on all sides.
Perhaps no mas. Of late, youngish right-wing figures like Jesse Kelly and Matt Walsh have been calling for a sort of mutually assured destruction (MAD) strategy to prevent any double standards around politicized prosecutions. The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles directly argued that, following the indictment of Trump in Manhattan, at least one rising GOP prosecutor should “indict one of theirs” in (say) Fargo, N.D. And, frankly, if we’re going to play this game, there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of targets on the left side of the aisle.
Almost unbelievably, the current president’s son is featured in a dozen or so videos depicting him smoking crack cocaine and cavorting with young-looking Eastern European prostitutes. An actual video exists of Hunter Biden, a well-known international executive, weighing out less than an ounce of crack rocks on a digital scale. Hunter isn’t currently an elected official, it might be protested, but neither is Donald Trump — and we all know who “the big guy” that the first man mentioned giving “10 percent” to probably is. For that matter, what was Big Bill Clinton doing on Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane, and what ever happened to his wife’s classified-info scandal?
Ugly questions, all. While I do not really endorse this, we are very likely entering a new and unpleasant era of American politics. As we do, it might be worth keeping one specific fact in mind. Joe Biden is currently 80 years old, and plagued by scandal. Donald J. Trump is currently 76, and plagued by scandal. Ron DeSantis is 43.