Would people finally understand?
On Monday 15 April 2024, the State of New York will commence its trial against Donald Trump on the accusation of falsifying business records. (A copy of the filing is available on documentcloud.org here.)
The media has struggled with naming this lawsuit for a number of reasons. “Falsifying business documents” sounds mundane. They can imagine their audience yawning. And then clicking.
The core allegation is that this is a felony because Donald Trump lied to cover up a kind of election fraud. He sought to keep his dirty laundry out of public because it threatened to torpedo his presidential campaign. But “election interference” is very hard to sell because Donald Trump himself has been whining about “election interference” for years. And the federal DC case is also about election interference (although of a much more direct and violent sort).
The fraudulent business records covered up “hush money payments” to “porn stars”. So, many in the media call this trial the “hush money payments” trial or just the “hush money” trial, even though paying someone to keep quiet is (bizarrely) legal.
All of these attempts miss the point. It’s not like the MSM is trying to bury the lede (ha, ha), but the entire portent of this trial is what a conviction tells us:
Very, very likely if the public knew about the payments, Hillary Clinton would have won the 2016 presidential election.
That is, this trial almost certainly will prove that Hillary Clinton was (almost certainly) cheated.
Really, the fact pattern here already tells us that. The Trump Campaign knew that after the Access Hollywood tapes came out, another sex scandal with Donald Trump, one in particular that showed he was unfaithful to his wife right after she gave birth to his latest son, would be fatal to his campaign. It would spell days if not weeks of discussion about his misogyny. This wasn’t locker talk. This was women talking about his sex life, exposing the sleazy nature of it. That’s why he paid to catch and kill these stories. It’s not like he was protecting Melania from his scandals. He was protecting himself.
While the lawyers can’t tell you that, and the media seems unwilling, I’m just spelling it out. This trial should be called The Trump Done Cheated trial. Both on the basis of his cheating and on the basis of his cheating Hillary Clinton out of the presidency.
I don’t expect the Biden campaign to be proclaiming this from the rooftops. That would be unseemly.
But Democrats should not be quiet about the import of a conviction. Conviction confirms what we knew pretty much all along: The Donald Trump “presidency” was never legitimate in the first place. Just look at the facts:
- Donald Trump pretended to be enormously rich. His riches came from defrauding people, as we can see by his conviction in the last trial. His entire spiel that people should vote for him because he was a winner and knew how to make us all rich was a patent lie. Not that we should elect successful business people in the first place. Business success is not a qualification.
- The Russians interfered in the election to support Donald Trump. We “elected” a foreign representative to the White House! When all the facts are laid on the table, it looks just like he colluded with the Russians. Just look at his call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He’s Putin’s agent burrowed into the U.S. It appears.
- The Republican Party regularly games our election system with election fraud, voter suppression, and gerrymandering. Thousands of eligible voters were cast off the roles in advance of the election, who may well have voted for Hillary Clinton—given the chance.
- Late in the campaign, FBI Director James Comey announced to the public Hillary Clinton was under investigation when there was actually no reason to do that, making her sound guilty of, er, something.
And now, what we know is that Donald Trump withheld information from the public that would have caused them not to vote for him. Frankly, we don’t need the trial to tell us that. All the facts have been reported.
What the trial does is provide the imprimatur of the court, where claims can be challenged and there’s process to filter out prejudices, lies, and suppositions. And, an opportunity for exculpatory evidence. (Not that there’s likely to be any, because for months the opportunity has existed to raise it and nary a peep.)
This is a trial about who should have won the 2016 presidential election. The likely outcome is that the wrong person was given the keys to the White House.
That’s why Donald Trump has been so keen to keep this from going to trial, in my opinion. Yeah, he’s probably scared of the prison door slamming shut. He probably doesn’t want people to see him convicted of a felony, which could cut several percentage points off his vote count in November.
But the real terror for him is this: It would show he was never legitimately elected President of the United States.
Imagine facing that outcome.
