Unless you live under a rock, you know that Donald Trump is on trial in Manhattan for 34 felony counts of campaign finance violations because he engaged in a scheme to prevent American voters from knowing the truth. The big issue in this trial that the jury has to decide is whether the financial documents were intentionally false and whether Donald Trump directed the scheme to falsify them.
The prosecution has presented a strong case that Trump paid off a porn star to stop her from telling her cringey story about their one night stand. He did this after the Access Hollywood tape came out and right before the 2016 election. Trump wanted to keep voters from knowing this icky story because he figured he wouldn’t get elected if the story came out. At the time, Trump needed Mike Pence, Republican women and evangelical voters to support him if he hoped to win. Back in the good old days, Republicans cared about electing a moral, law abiding man to be president. Trump thought he had to keep the truth from coming out if he hoped to win and he was probably right. He is still trying to maintain that alternate reality.
TRUMP’S MO
This is nothing new. This is how Trump always rolls. Trump has created a hugely alternate universe saturated with lies in which Biden is the wannabe dictator, for example, and he, Trump, is the populist savior who is being unfairly persecuted. Republicans are the ones who will help the common man even while Trump gave the rich a huge tax break and Republicans oppose student loan repayment relief. Trump is helped in the effort to maintain the alternate universe by Fox “news”, ultra wealthy donors and right-wing media and radio as well as congressional sycophants who want power and will carry out Trump’s wishes just as Michael Cohen once did as Trump’s fixer.
MAGAS AUDITIONING TO BE TRUMP’S FIXERS
The MAGA GOP, is not your dad’s GOP. It has gone to the dark side and is all in on Trump’s upside down alternate universe. This is what happens when you join a cult and your leader is a malignant narcissist.
A group of MAGA cult members from Congress have been showing up outside the courthouse, many wearing what has become a uniform for the MAGAs: same color dark blue suit, magenta tie, American flag pin, and white shirt that Trump wears. They look like Donald Trump mini-mes: Vivek Ramaswamy, Doug Burgum, JD Vance and others. They put on their Trump costume and go to New York to defy the gag order from Judge Merchan and rail at the legal system. If Trump verbally attacks the judge’s daughter he could go to jail. The judge has sternly warned him. So these congressional MAGAs do it for him, claiming that the judge’s daughter is making “millions” working for a Democratic organization. She does work for a Democratic group but she does not make “millions”. Her job has nothing to do with Judge Merchan’s ability to be an impartial judge. They also attack the courts and our legal system by doing this performative stunt. These guys are Trump’s current fixers. Just like Michael Cohen, they also lie for Trump. They are lying about the trial being a sham and so unfair to Trump. Judge Merchan is conducting the trial in a very fair and judicious way. His rulings from the bench are even handed.
Trump was observed by reporters who were in court and could see over Trump’s shoulder that he was reviewing and editing what these MAGAs were going to say on his behalf. They all used the same words: claiming Trump was their “friend” and that the trial was a “sham” and the judge’s daughter made “millions.” Trump was micromanaging the show. As usual.
All of this showboating has been happening for several reasons. “At its most tangible level, what we’re seeing is a work-around to the gag order,” Sarah Isgur, a former senior spokesperson for the Trump-era Justice Department, told me. The ex-president was warned by the presiding judge, Juan Merchan, that if he talks or posts any more about the jury or the judge’s family, he could face jail time. So, just as in a political campaign, Trump’s surrogates are stepping up to stump for him.
Legally, Trump can’t ask these politicians to violate the order on his behalf. But why would he have to ask when they know exactly what he wants from them? “The playbook that Trump expects party members in good standing to follow is in public,” Amanda Carpenter, a former GOP staffer and now an editor at Protect Democracy, told me. Trump’s given these acolytes their cues with his posts on Truth Social, and they’re dutifully following them.
Lower Manhattan has, over the past week, become a pilgrimage site for those vying to be in Trump’s inner circle, with a court appearance carrying the promise of a holy anointing. You could also think about this courtside display as another audition in the early veepstakes. For Ramaswamy, Burgum, and Vance, in particular, this moment is a chance to demonstrate their abiding loyalty to Trump in the hopes of being selected as his running mate. Others may have reasoned that a little time in front of the cameras yelling “Sham trial!” will go a long way toward snagging a plum Cabinet position in a second Trump administration. (A virtual unknown such as Bird, of course, probably doesn’t expect to get either of these things. But, as every climber knows, one must never miss an opportunity to ingratiate oneself with the boss.)
Which brings us to one final observation. “There’s a larger, more philosophical reason they’re all there,” Isgur said. “That’s what the Republican Party stands for now.” There is no real platform, no consistent set of principles. There is only Trump, and degrees of loyalty to him. These courtroom groupies are simply responding to the obvious incentives—“If you didn’t know that the Republican Party is now focused on Trump,” Isgur said, “I’ve got an oceanfront property to sell you in Arizona.”
That’s their deal, but what about the boss’s? Trump no longer appears concerned only with shielding himself from political accountability. Now that he has almost clinched the nomination, he’s using the party to shield himself from criminal accountability, too. This has given the GOP a new rallying cry. “The Big Lie in 2020 was that the election was stolen,” Carpenter said. “The Big Lie 2.0 is that justice has been weaponized against him to deprive him of the presidency.” (The Atlantic)
CAN OUR LEGAL SYSTEM SURVIVE TRUMP and the MAGA MOVEMENT?
Since he came on to the political scene, Trump has attacked every system in America: the press, our FBI, CIA, government institutions, the electoral system, checks and balances, the peaceful transfer of power, and now the judicial system is being tested and attacked. When you understand how autocrats (dictators) get into power, you understand what Trump is up to. The way it works is that you take over a political party (check), create ever greater cynicism in the voting public for institutions that uphold democracy (check), get your state party members to suppress the vote, limit vote by mail and drop boxes, purge voter rolls to get an advantage for your party (check), use propaganda networks like conservative media to create and sustain the alternate universe in which you are the only trustworthy person left (check). Once in power you never leave. The next election will tell us if Americans can see what Trump is up to and reject it.
THE MANHATTAN TRIAL IS A TEST: CAN TRUTH OVERCOME THE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE TRUMP BUILT?
The Manhattan trial was said to be the least consequential of the 4 criminal cases coming for Trump, but the case is the most consequential now because it is the only one that will be tried to completion before the next presidential election. It is fitting that it is about catching and killing the truth about Trump’s liaison with a porn star to try to sustain a false reality in order to get elected: in that alternate universe Trump is a moral man though he is not, a family man though he is not, and a law abiding man though he is not.
The evidence has gone in well for the prosecution so far. The last witness for the prosecution was Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer-fixer. On direct examination, the prosecutor elicited Cohen’s back story. He was Trump’s right hand man. And since Trump got into hot water or needed to get people to bend to his will, Trump, like most mob bosses, had Cohen on board to do his dirty work. Cohen has talked about all the rotten stuff he did to help Trump out like threatening people who wouldn’t do what Trump told them to do and carrying out Trump’s request to pay off Daniels in whatever way would work, and, above all, lying and lying and lying some more to help Trump cover things up. Cohen opened up a fake LLC, lying to the bank, to get the $130,000 to pay off the porn star and then generating phony invoices to get repayment checks from Trump.
The prosecutor established that Cohen was a big liar. But it was also established that he lied in the service of Trump. Cohen also had a “come to Jesus” moment when his family intervened to help him give up the cult of Trump. You have to wonder what kind of intervention it would take for the MAGA members of congress to give up the cult of Trump. My guess is that they’d drop him like a hot potato if he ever lost power and the potential to become president again. He is a uniquely unlikeable person unless he is getting something he wants from you.
On cross examination the first day, Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche was all over the map. He threw spaghetti at the wall, you could say. He started out attacking Cohen about a social media post in which Cohen called him, Todd Blanche, a bad name. Then Blanche hammered away at Cohen for suggesting that Mr. Trump belonged in a cage like an “animal” and for calling Trump a “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain.” Blanche’s cross focused on what a rotten, nasty lying son of a bitch Cohen is. It was clear to anyone watching this cross, that Blanche was trying to please Trump and that Trump was micromanaging what he was hammering away at just as Trump had micromanaged the defense attorney who did the cross of Stormy Daniels. Trump wants his defense attorneys to beat up the witnesses and expose them as cheap and nasty people whether or not that is a good tactic for the defense.
There was one so-called Perry Mason moment on the second day of the cross of Cohen when Blanche was able to show that Cohen may have gotten the date of one of his conversations with Trump wrong. Blanche raised his voice and accused Cohen of lying which seemed to wake everyone in the courtroom up and cause some reporters to speculate that Cohen would be the cause for the demise of the entire case. If Cohen could not be trusted to have an accurate memory about this one call, then the jury should disregard ALL of his testimony- seemed to be the argument.
It is possible that Cohen might have been mistaken about whether he confirmed the Stormy Daniels deal with Trump in that specific phone call, but there were at least two other calls when the deal was confirmed by Trump according to Cohen’s recollection. If Cohen erred it was not intentional. And then there is the evidence that is undeniable- false invoices for legal work that was never done and a series of checks with Trump’s unique signature to pay for the phony legal work that Cohen never did from Trump’s personal account. The biggest receipt of all may turn out to be the slip of paper with Trump Org’s accountant, Alan Weisselberg’s notes, setting up the amounts Trump needed to repay Cohen to make Cohen whole for hushing up Stormy Daniels. Oh wait, and there is the testimony from David Pecker about how he met in person with Trump to enter into this whole scheme to pay off the porn star as well as the two other people whose stories could have kept Trump from getting elected: a playboy bunny and a doorman. To throw out all of the evidence and the entire rest of the document-based case and witness testimony from Hope Hicks to all the others who had no reason to make it all up solely because Cohen misremembered the date of one phone call is ridiculous. Even if the jury believes NOTHING Cohen said, the case still remains a slam dunk based on the rest of the evidence.
As I said at the beginning of this post the big issue in this trial that the jury has to decide is whether the financial documents were intentionally false and whether Donald Trump directed the scheme to falsify them. If there was any question about that it was laid to rest by the way Trump behaved in this trial. Behavior is on a continuum. Trump is a huge micromanager and is forever hiding the truth so he can look better than he is. So, Duh! of course he knew and he directed this scheme. The proof is right before our very eyes in the way Trump is micromanaging not only his lawyers but the bevy of MAGA VP mini-me hopefuls auditioning on the courthouse steps to be his replacement fixers.