Donald Trump inaugurates an unpredictable phase in US politics between the bench and the rallies

It will take place in a gloomy courthouse a few blocks from New York City Hall, right next to Chinatown, with a plot that mixes black money, a porn star and a person accused of proven verbal incontinence who arrived against the odds in 2016 — after uttering atrocities about women or immigrants—to the presidency of the United States. The first criminal trial against Donald Trump, of the four he faces (the others are two attempted coups and one to withhold classified documents), begins this Monday in Manhattan amid the usual media clamor and with swords raised: the defendant's candidacy for re-election in the November elections adds bite to the spectacle. Some compare the level of media scrutiny to that of the OJ Simpson trial almost three decades ago. Others wonder if it will test the institution of justice and the very concept that no individual is above the law, not even a former president, the first in US history in such a position.

The trial for the

Stormy Daniels case

(the payment of a bribe to the porn film actress of that name to silence an extramarital relationship) culminates a turbulent year since the Republican was indicted. After months of legal procedures, including three appeal attempts by his defense, the last this week, there is no turning back, and it will not be because the Republican has not tried: delaying maneuvers are the ABC of his defense. Also his status as a presidential candidate, judging by the overwhelming argument that he should be campaigning and not “in court defending himself,” with which his lawyers tried to convince the lead judge of the case, Juan Merchan, of Colombian origin, to postpone it. This

continuum

between the rally and the court and vice versa, approved by an avalanche of headlines, turns this electoral call into

terra incognita,

an unprecedented and unpredictable stage in the history of the United States.

The first criminal charge for which he will sit in the dock is a compendium of everything that characterizes the Republican: base instincts, finances and political ambition. The perfect definition of the character: Donald Trump in full. The bribe to bury the scandal that the news of his affair in the 2016 election campaign would have caused is an all-encompassing manifestation of his power: money to buy wills ($130,000); tricks and schemes to hide the payment, from entrusting it to his trusted man, the lawyer Michael Cohen - who later turned against him -, to disguising it as "legal expenses" in his company's records, not to mention the alleged electoral interference to precisely to avoid the interference that the news would have caused if it had been known. This is a factor that, according to many observers, may become the touchstone of the trial for possible violation of electoral financing laws.

It is not surprising, therefore, that of the four accusations against him, the one from New York is the one that he detests the most, according to those close to him, who are categorical in stating that the Republican candidate feels uncomfortable due to the very nature of the story: dirty rags that are difficult to convert into evidence. of the political persecution to which he claims to be subjected by the Democrats (as is the prosecutor who investigated the case, Alvin Bragg). But if only because he may be the only one of the four to be held before the elections, he is already of capital importance. Often dismissed by experts and observers as legally dubious and, comparatively speaking, more venial in theory than the two election interference cases (in Washington and Georgia), it may be its Achilles heel.

Larry Sabato, from the University of Virginia, considers the trial, still undated—like the other two remaining, those in Georgia and Florida—more harmful for its attempts to reverse the 2020 electoral result, which pushed a horde of followers his to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021. “The January 6 affair could do a lot of damage to Trump, for example, but I'm not sure the trial involving Stormy Daniels will, even if he were convicted. Trump's ratings rise every time he appears

persecuted

. His cult is fanatical,” explains Sabato. A conviction in the New York trial, which is expected to last between six and eight weeks, “could have an impact, but I dare not bet even on that. Inflation and the border [crisis] seem to weigh more electorally than the public's verdict on Trump's fitness for office. But I warn you: we are only in April. Many things will happen and change before the November elections.”

The voters, those other prosecutors, have the say, and judging by the latest poll released, a clear majority of Americans consider the 34 criminal charges serious, all of them class E felonies, the lowest category of felonies in the State of New York: 64% of voters see them as “quite serious”, compared to 34% for whom they are not serious, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published this Monday. Four in ten Republicans, and two-thirds of independents, believe the accusations are important. If Trump is convicted, each count carries a maximum prison sentence of four years.

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“I have a system,

The Keys to the White House,

to predict presidential elections. But the judgment has no bearing on my prediction,” says Allan Lichtman,

distinguished professor

of history at American University in Washington. “However, outside the scope of the system, a conviction could be an unprecedented event to have an independent impact on the results. According to primary polls, a substantial percentage of likely Trump voters have said that a conviction would disqualify him, in their opinion, from the presidency. Even if only a fraction of these voters abandoned Trump, that could be significant in a close election.” Most voting intention polls give Trump an advantage over his Democratic rival, President Joe Biden.

“If Trump were found guilty and received a prison sentence, that could influence voter perception. However, the trial itself is unlikely to significantly influence public opinion, since it does not present new information,” says Diana Z. O'Brien, professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis. Regarding the

hallway

that leads from the court to the rallies, O'Brien adds a detail: “Trump will have to be in the courtroom four days a week. He says he will campaign in the afternoons, but the trial limits the amount of time he can spend outside.”

I despise women

The development of the case seems to have come from the pen of an inspired screenwriter. In the final days of Trump's first run for the White House, in 2016, porn actress Stormy Daniels threatened to reveal an affair she claimed to have had with him in 2006, when Trump's wife, Melania, had just given birth. the only son of both. So, according to prosecutors and his star witness, former lawyer Cohen, the magnate bought his silence for $130,000 (121,829 euros at the current exchange rate). Employees of his emporium falsified a series of invoices, checks and accounting entries to cover the tracks of the bribery. Cohen was later sentenced, in late 2018, to three years in prison for illicit financing of his former boss's campaign; that is, for the black payment to Daniels, whose purpose was none other than to prevent the matter from spilling over to him at the doors of the polls.

But like an oil spill, or a juicy soap opera, Bragg and his team asked Judge Merchan for permission to tell a much broader story, which not only involves a single secret payment, but three. Also the detailed account of how Trump used his ties to a tabloid editor to prevent embarrassing stories about him from coming to light. As if that were not enough, prosecutors want to present evidence about the embarrassing audio known as

Access Hollywood

. In the recording, which came to light in the final stretch of the 2016 campaign and included a conversation from 2005, Trump openly talked about “kissing and grabbing women by the pussy,” obviously without permission.

“Trump's pattern of behavior toward women has long been well documented, including the release of the

Access Hollywood

tape in October 2016,” adds O'Brien, a gender and politics specialist. “Of course, his behavior harms him with female voters. Trump does worse among women than [Republican candidate Mick] Romney did in 2012, especially among college-educated, single, and black women. But both his supporters and his detractors know what to expect from him, so they are unlikely to change their minds based solely on the trial.”

Prosecutors may call Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who said she had an affair with Trump, as well as Cohen, the prosecution's main witness, to testify. Days after the judge expanded the gag order imposed on Trump to restrict his “inflammatory” speeches, the Republican tested his limits by calling Daniels and Cohen liars. In a message on his Truth Social platform published this Wednesday, he referred to both as “two bags of sleaze that, with their lies and misrepresentations, have cost our Country dearly!”, with a capital letter.

So the spectacle seems guaranteed, inside and outside the court, as demonstrated by the media circus, animated by a bizarre gallery of Trumpists, on the occasion of his appearance on April 4, 2023 for the reading of the charges. In the process there will be room for sensational elements, with sessions worthy of popcorn, and other soporific and dense ones, with the detailed analysis of accounting entries of his company, the Trump Organization. A company that also turns out to be in the pillory as responsible for continued tax fraud, for which the tycoon has been sentenced to pay 464 million dollars. Both the latter and the defamation process against the columnist E. Jean Carroll, which has cost her 92 million in fines, are civil cases, without prison sentences, but the million-dollar sentences imposed once again link with the candidate Trump as if once and for all. another reality, the judicial and the electoral, were communicating vessels: the use of funds raised in the campaign to contain the drain on their legal expenses.

After the constitution of the jury - whose selection is expected to last between one and two weeks, although it could take several weeks because it will not be easy, neither for the prosecution nor for the defense, to assess the objectivity of its members in the face of the most polarizing figure of the recent decades in the United States—Trump's fate will be in the hands of twelve anonymous neighbors, plus six surrogates, selected at random among the 1.4 million adults who live in Manhattan. The 42-question questionnaire to which the candidates will be submitted gives an idea of ​​the scrutiny. The real countdown, the discount time for the November 5 elections, has now just begun.

The delaying maneuvers of the defense hinder the pending processes

The only common denominator of the four criminal proceedings facing Donald Trump, accused of a total of 88 crimes, is that in all of them he has declared himself “not guilty”, the equivalent of innocent in the American judicial system. Those in Washington and Georgia, due to electoral interference, are more political in nature than the one in Manhattan, and theoretically more serious. The one in Florida, due to the retention of classified documents, concerns national security itself. None of the remaining three have a date, after numerous delays and appeals, another characteristic of all processes: the delaying maneuvers of the defense. In order of indictment (the first was Manhattan), they are as follows:

The Mar-a-Lago papers

Initially scheduled for May 20 and later delayed, it refers to the illicit possession of classified materials that the former president took from the White House in January 2021 and kept in his private residence in Florida, called Mar-a-Lago. An FBI search in August 2022 found 48 boxes of material, including a hundred restricted-access documents, in various rooms of the mansion, including a bathroom. About thirty referred to top secret contingency plans to attack a foreign country (Iran).

Special prosecutor Jack Smith, appointed by the Department of Justice to take charge of this case and the one related to the attempts to overturn the 2020 elections, accuses Trump of about 40 crimes of illicit possession of classified documentation and violation of the law of espionage, including the attempt to delete images from the cameras that monitored the mansion after receiving a court order for its delivery.

The attempt to reverse the 2020 electoral result

It is the most serious accusation and refers to the events carried out by Trump, his advisors and supporters in the period between his electoral defeat in the November 2020 presidential elections - which gave victory to Democrat Joe Biden - and January 6, 2021. , when a mob of his supporters stormed Congress to prevent the certification of the current president's victory. Prosecutor Smith has charged him with four counts: witness tampering, obstruction of a legal proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the US Government and to violate civil rights.

Initially scheduled for March 4, the defense appeals, which have reached the Supreme Court after the Court of Appeals rejected their immunity in the case, have delayed their start

sine die

.

Punch attempt in Georgia

The fourth accusation is also about an attempted coup, but, unlike the one in Washington, it is not federal, but state, and is limited to the State of Georgia. Trump pressured state election officials to change the sum of the votes, which gave Biden victory by less than 12,000 ballots. Irregular manipulation of the computer systems of electronic voting machines in a rural county and an attempt to use fake voters to vote for Trump have also been the subject of investigation.

The conflict of interest derived from the romance between the prosecutor in the case, Fani Willis, and the special prosecutor she hired for the investigation has been on the verge of derailing the process, since Trump's defense challenged Willis although a judge rejected it last month. his attempt. On the 4th, an Atlanta judge also rejected the request of the former president's lawyers to be exonerated, arguing that he was making use of his freedom of expression when he tried to alter the electoral result in Georgia.

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