It’s Not the “Hush Money Case”; It’s the “How Trump Stole the 2016 Election” Case
We often hear of “the untimely passing” of someone. O.J. Simpson did many things very right on the football field. In his personal life … not so much. But the defendant in the twentieth century’s “Trial of the Century” did achieve a “timely passing.” His death on Friday demonstrated good timing, clearing the way for the twenty-first century’s “Trial of the Century” (a title it may hold only briefly, until another of Donald Trump’s trials) to begin today.
In what has, sadly—and dangerously and outrageously—become the norm for the mainstream media as the American Republic faces an existential crisis like no other since the time when Arizona’s abortion law was enacted, of using misleading terminology, the accepted description of the trial has become “the hush money case.”
Even liberal-leaning media such as MSNBC fall into the trap. Last night, I heard the charge referred to there as “a low-level felony.”
That “low-level felony” was an intentional, criminal interference by Trump in the 2016 election.
While by no means the greatest of the crimes with which Trump has been charged (attempting to overturn an election result and inciting an insurrection in the United States Capitol to end the American Constitutional Republic would be hard to bottom), a case can be made that the crime for which he is on trial beginning today was the most significant.
The reason it is so significant is that what Trump was doing was desperately trying to keep from voters knowledge of the facts that he had been having sex with an adult film star while his wife was in the late stages of pregnancy and the early stages of motherhood in 2006 and also had a nine-month “affair” with a Playboy model. Given the public emergence on October 7, 2016, of the Access Hollywood tape on which Trump boasted, “I did try and fuck her. She was married,” and “when you’re a star . . . You can do anything [to women]. ... Grab them by the pussy—you can do anything,” the coming out in the final weeks of the election of those other facts about his behavior likely would have assured his defeat.
Jay Kuo made this point nicely in his Substack, The Status Kuo, last week by opening with a piece of
Indeed, it was on the very next day, October 8—exactly one month before Election Day—that Trump allegedly gave the order to pay Daniels to keep her account of what they had done from becoming public. He has tried to say (after repeatedly denying the whole thing) that his motive was to keep his wife from finding out that he was having sex with a porn star while she was giving birth. The timing of the payment puts the lie to that.
In his Substack, The Status Kuo, last week, Jay Kuo nicely made the point that the hush money was about saving Trump’s chances of winning the election. Kuo opened with a piece of fiction:
Big breaking news today.
Access Hollywood reports that, right before the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton had an extramarital affair with her trainer, who was also working as a male escort. In order to prevent a major scandal on the eve of the election, Clinton instructed her accountant to pay her lover off for his silence, then hid the paper trail by disguising the payments as “consultant fees” in violation of New York law.
It gets worse. She also arranged hush money for a second lover, as well as a nanny who was about to go public about a child her husband Bill Clinton had sired out of wedlock.
These bombshell stories were not discovered before the election, and that was by design. They would certainly have been devastating, probably fatal, to her candidacy.
The criminal trial for which jury selection is beginning this morning is about how Trump cheated to help win the 2016 election.
The significance of the crimes of which he is accused is that without what he is charged with having done, the other huge crimes for which he has been charged probably would never have occurred. He would have lost in 2016, Hillary Rodham Clinton would he in the last year of her two-term presidency, and our nation and world would have avoided the horrors Trump has inflicted on them.
As Joe Biden might put it, this trial is “a big fucking deal.”
{Robert S. McElvaine is Emeritus Professor of History at Millsaps College and the author of eleven books, most recently The Times They Were a-Changin’ – 1964: The Year “The Sixties” Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn. He is currently at work on a new book, tentatively titled “Diving Beneath the Wreck—and Resurfacing: The Creation of the ‘Inferior’ Sex & How It Has Shaped History.” He writes a column on Substack, Musings & Amusings of a B-List Writer. }