Michael M. Santiago/Pool Photo via AP
Former President Donald Trump speaks alongside his attorney Todd Blanche following the day’s proceedings in his trial, May 21, 2024, in Manhattan Criminal Court in New York.
The testimony in Donald Trump’s business records/hush money case in New York City wrapped up this week. To be sure, Trump is legally innocent until proven guilty. But the prosecution’s case was overwhelmingly convincing. Their argument was that Trump directed his then-lawyer Michael Cohen to pay $130,000 to Stormy Daniels as hush money for keeping quiet about her having sex with Trump in 2006, and later paid Cohen back with checks falsely disguised as payments for legal services.
Then-publisher of the National Enquirer David Pecker testified that he had personally promised Trump he would “catch and kill” negative stories about the candidate in 2016, and spent $180,000 to keep two other scandalous stories from running. But after that, Pecker refused to spend more, which is why Cohen had to step in. Trump’s former White House comms director Hope Hicks testified that Trump told her in 2018 that he didn’t want the story to come out before the election.
Phone records proved Cohen and Trump had been in routine contact throughout 2015 and 2016. Cohen said he met with former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg (since convicted of tax evasion) and Trump himself to arrange a repayment plan. Former Trump Organization Controller Jeffrey McConney testified he met with Weisselberg about the plan, and provided handwritten notes he had made at the time. Copies of the invoices Cohen sent were shown, as well as the checks signed by Trump, which former White House aides testified they witnessed Trump doing.
Conversely, Trump’s legal defense was practically self-undermining. The main effort centered on discrediting Cohen, who indeed is a convicted criminal with a long history of shady behavior. But not only does this fit exactly with the argument of the prosecution—that Cohen is the kind of sleazebag you’d need to bribe a porn star to keep quiet, and it is telling that Trump is always hiring this kind of guy. Trump’s lawyers’ attacks on Cohen’s integrity also contradict Trump’s statements that Cohen made the payments on his own, supposedly out of loyalty.
Then, of course, Trump himself refused to testify after promising repeatedly he would do so. The main defense witness, Robert Costello, not only got into a petty spat with the judge, but also was confronted by the prosecution with emails seemingly demonstrating that he had been involved with the effort to stop Cohen from flipping on Trump in 2018.
It was already a tired cliché five years ago to speculate about what would happen to other politicians if they were involved in something like Trump’s various scandals, but here it can’t be denied. Imagine if, say, Barack Obama had given hush money bribes to a porn star, attempting to hide them by funneling them through a scumbag lawyer, in a successful effort to keep the story about how he committed adultery from getting out before his presidential election, and was therefore on trial for 34 felony charges.
There can be no doubt it would be one of the biggest media feeding frenzies of all time. The first criminal prosecution of a former president, complete with a tawdry cover-up and titillating sexual details? Ten thousand reporters would be tripping over each other outside the courthouse. Every newspaper would have blaring front-page headlines covering each twist and turn of the story. Every nightly news broadcast would have an update each day of the trial.
Trump’s trial matters because it is emblematic of the corruption that utterly saturated his business operations and presidency.
Yet while many reporters have covered the story with aplomb, there has not been anything like that kind of breathless saturation coverage. Most ordinary people are seemingly not paying much attention. It seems to have maybe dented Trump’s polling by a couple of points, but that’s it.
This is a disastrous underreaction.
It’s rather baffling at first glance why such a salacious story isn’t getting more attention. Part of the explanation here is surely that Trump has so many scandals that it’s impossible to treat each one with the requisite focus. Another factor is that without cameras or microphones allowed in the courtroom, there aren’t any compelling videos or pictures to put in a story.
But that’s not the whole story. Again, if this were an Obama trial, having to use courtroom sketches as news hooks certainly would not stop a media frenzy. I think the bigger factor is that most mainstream reporters, and many Democratic Party officials, have internalized the idea that Trump is immune from negative coverage. He has seemingly skated on so many scandals—above all, winning in 2016 after the Access Hollywood tape came out—that these people believe there is no point in even trying to make political hay out of them, thereby creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of apathy.
This learned helplessness is both false and highly destructive. It is not true that Trump is immune from criticism and media scrutiny—for one thing, what coverage of his fascist ramblings he does get is part of why he’s been consistently unpopular since 2015. And while it may be true that Trump is so awesomely corrupt that the press can’t pay proper attention to every crime and scandal, that’s no excuse for not picking one or two and focusing heavily on them.
This actually worked with the Access Hollywood tape—the media frenzy was so intense that Trump felt he had to issue a rare (if half-hearted) apology. Again, Hope Hicks testified that the motivation for the hush money payment was that Trump thought if the story came out, his campaign would be so damaged among women voters that he’d lose badly. It would have been much worse for Trump had WikiLeaks not released the emails the Russian government hacked from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta literally one hour after the Access Hollywood tape dropped, thus distracting the press into their billionth round of “but her emails” coverage.
On the merits, then, Trump’s trial matters, first, because it is emblematic of the corruption that utterly saturated his business operations and presidency. His administration was the most corrupt in American history by orders of magnitude. Never before has a president continued to own and, we recently learned, personally operate a vast business empire from the White House. The conflicts of interest alone run into the thousands—and the empire itself, we also learned in Trump’s other trial about falsely inflating the value of his properties so he could receive loans, was riddled with fraud. He took enormous payments from foreign governments through his hotels and other businesses in flagrant violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause. He personally welcomed Putin’s meddling in the 2016 election, and attempted to use his presidential powers to bully Ukraine into making up fake scandalous stories about Joe Biden, which got him impeached. Trump is simply one of the worst people ever to hold high office in this country, and that’s saying a lot.
Second, the trial matters because it is also emblematic of Trump’s mile-long history of abusive sexism, something that has gotten even less attention. Stormy Daniels was careful to emphasize that she consented to having sex with Trump, but also made clear that it wasn’t exactly a free choice. She testified that she walked out of the bathroom and there he was in his boxer shorts, with his bodyguard outside. An enthusiastic, mutually satisfying encounter this was not.
As numerous female writers have pointed out, this kind of awful situation where a woman formally agrees to sex because it’s easier or less dangerous than trying to say no is crushingly common. And given the dozens of women who have accused Trump of sexual harassment, assault, or rape, it’s clearly the kind of thing he’s been doing for his entire adult life. Is it any wonder he constantly boasts about ending Roe v. Wade? The autonomy and rights of women mean nothing to him.
Observers of national campaigns know that only two or three narratives can break through to the distracted swing voters who typically decide the race. It takes sustained coverage or messaging, repeated over months, for this to happen. The American people deserve to know that, on the evidence presented in this trial alone, Donald Trump is a corrupt goon who thinks he is entitled to sex with any woman who catches his eye.
