Sunday Punch

The guns are out for Donald Trump in Washington as he seeks a presidential comeback, and the first shot was fired on Thursday to thwart his return.

The sound resonated throughout the States, when millions heard the breaking news that a grand jury had voted to indict Trump after investigating a $130,000 pay-out to porn star Stormy Daniels in an attempt to buy her silence over an alleged affair.

It concerned the case of a payment made to the porn star in 2016 allegedly to buy her silence about an affair he is claimed to have had with her in 2006. The 2016 payment is alleged to have been made when Trump was a mere presidential hopeful and didn’t hold any public office. Stormy Daniels has already revealed she had a sexual encounter with Trump at a Lake Tahoe hotel in 2006 – the year after he married his current wife, Melania.

The jury decision was the result of Manhattan’s District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who had spent 5 years since 2018 pursuing the allegation against Trump.

The jury finding brought a swift and sharp reaction from Trump. In a statement issued on Thursday evening from his Florida home, he accused rival Democrats as liars and cheaters who had ‘stolen in their obsession with trying to Get Trump but now they have done the unthinkable, indicting an innocent man.’ It is “political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history.”

While calling the District Attorney Bragg a ‘disgrace’, he placed the blame entirely on US President Joe Biden. He said: ‘Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg is a disgrace. Rather than stopping the unprecedented crime wave taking over New York City, he’s doing Joe Biden’s dirty work, ignoring the murders and burglaries and assaults he should be focused on. This is how Bragg spends his time!’

“I believe this Witch-Hunt will backfire massively on Joe Biden. The American people realise exactly what the Radical Left Democrats are doing here. Everyone can see it. So our Movement, and our Party – united and strong – will first defeat Alvin Bragg, and then we will defeat Joe Biden, and we are going to throw every last one of these Crooked Democrats out of office so we can make America great again!”

Already the Manhattan DA’s Office is coordinating plans with Trump’s attorney for his surrender to the Manhattan DA’s Office for arraignment on a Supreme Court indictment, which remains under seal. Here he will be arrested, his mug shots taken and fingerprinted.

Trump added, “Never before in our nation’s history has this been done.”

TRUMP: Claims political persecution

True. At least not for 150 years has a former or sitting US president been arrested. In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant, the man who led the North to victory in the Civil War was arrested for speeding in his horse-drawn carriage. The policeman – a black Civil War veteran – reportedly told Grant, “I am very sorry, Mr. President, to have to do it for you are the chief of the nation, and I am nothing but a policeman, but duty is duty, sir, and I will have to place you under arrest.”

That’s a sterling example of law enforcement at its best. But now America shows all the signs of descending to the practice of third world corrupt nations where politics and money have begun to cut ice from the top. Trump’s second son Eric Trump told newspapers: “This is the opportunistic targeting of a political opponent in a campaign year. They are ruthlessly attacking my father because he dared challenge the political elite. This is Exhibit A to the decline of American Law.”

With the grand jury indictment remaining sealed, the United States have been steered to voyage on uncharted legal and political seas, with commentators saying it will not disqualify him from the presidential race. According to the Washington Post, legal experts hold that there is nothing in the US constitution that prevents him from running or serving as president even if convicted and sent to jail. This must make Lankan politicians regret that JR did not follow the US model but settled for the Westminster-French version instead.

However, it does mean that former US President Trump faces the humiliation of arrest. But does he care? Though Trump is only an inch shorter than the tallest US President Abraham Lincoln who stood at 6f 4in, he certainly possesses the thickest hide.

STORMY DANIELS: Claims affair in 2006

This armour plating on his epidermis has enabled him to brazenly sail through all political or sex scandals. Where lesser men may have been blown away by the whiff of scandal, Trump has remained as the rock of Gibraltar, even seeming to be invigorated by the free body massage as they repeatedly lash against his weather beaten sides.

The names of women who have claimed he kissed them or groped them or raped them are enough to fill an urban town’s directory, starting from his first wife Ivana. In 1989, during their divorce proceeding, she claimed he had raped her but later withdrew the claim, saying, “I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.” Two other women also made similar claims but they were settled. These three claims had been made and withdrawn before Trump became a presidential candidate.

Trump had never hid his admiration for the female body beautiful. Nor had he been discreet in talking about his sexual conquests to his friends. A secretly recorded conversation was leaked after he had begun to run for the presidency. It had Trump bragging, saying, “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything.”

Later he apologised and said, “it was locker room talk.” But after the tape went public, scores of women came out to claim they had been kissed, groped or molested by him in the past. Trump denied all. But the sluice gate had been opened.

The New York Times published an article in 2016, ‘Crossing the line; How Trump behaved with women in private’. 50 interviews were conducted with women who had known Trump. The article said: “They revealed unwelcome romantic advances, unending commentary on the female form, a shrewd reliance on ambitious women, and unsettling workplace conduct.

“The interactions occurred in his offices at Trump Tower, at his homes, at construction sites and backstage at beauty pageants. They appeared to be fleeting, unimportant moments to him, but they left lasting impressions on the women who experienced them.”

If that weren’t enough, in 2019 a book titled, ‘All the President’s Women’ was published. It carried 43 additional claims by women of sexual misconduct against the US President. But it hardly bothered him. Neither did it bother the majority of the American people.  Not only did Trump win the Presidency handsomely but he managed to retain a respectable popularity rating throughout his term which came to be held as one during which America did not start a single war overseas.

Who knows, behind the rakish lecherous wolfish clothing, a man of peace perhaps, a ‘make love, not war’ secret prophet?

So what’s all the fuss and bother about paying money in 2016 to hush Stormy Daniels’ kiss and tell account over an alleged affair 10 years before payment? Especially since Stormy Daniels had blown the lid off her alleged sexual encounter in a hotel room in 2006 to Vogue magazine describing it as ‘just normal-sex’ to maybe lasting to minutes, while in the British newspaper, the Guardian, she describes the meeting as ‘textbook generic’. Hardly the stuff to get all steamy and enthralled, is it?

Furthermore, in 2018, she gives the full monty in her memoirs, titled ‘Full Disclosure’, but apart from a physical description of his privates, says there was no second helping even though they met again in 2007. She says that though he appeared interested, she was not. “I never met him again,” she says in her book. Trump has denied having an affair.

So why the big hullabaloo?

Even if she had been paid money not to spill the beans about her affair with Trump, isn’t it a legal non-disclosure contract where the consideration for cash from one party is silence from the other? A binding legally enforceable promise given in exchange for cash, commonly used to protect secrets, be they trade or personal. Of course, such an arrangement ‘where one person or party offers another an attractive sum of money or other enticement, in exchange for remaining silent about some illegal, stigmatised or shameful behaviour, action or other fact about the person or party who has made the offer will be held as a criminal offence.

But even this kind of hush money to prevent illegal or shameful or stigmatised behaviour being made public and possibly leading to criminal prosecution has passed muster in New York courts.

Take the case of Prince Andrew’s out of court settlement, just last year in March, with accuser Virginia Giuffre who sued him in New York courts claiming civil damages for sexual assault. She filed the lawsuit claiming that Andrew sexually abused her when she was under 18 at notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan and on his private island, Little St. James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Had the civil case proceeded and had she won her claim, it would have made the prince liable to a criminal prosecution for statutory rape. Andrew paid her an undisclosed sum of money to drop her case and thus conceal a criminal offence. The agreement was formally endorsed by US District Court Judge Kaplan formally ending the case. But wasn’t paying Virginia a sum of monetary damages a form of hush money to prevent an illegal act from being made public?

So what was the crime committed in paying a 37 year old porn star to keep quiet about an affair a 70-year-old twice-married man had when they were ten years younger, merely to save him from some social embarrassment? Adultery is not a crime in the US, neither is prostitution.

Since the specific charge or charges have not yet been made public and the indictment remains under seal, it is difficult to say. But many have speculated that Trump will likely be charged with falsifying business records for trying to improperly conceal the payment as legal expenses.

The charge, which is a minor one, can, however, be upgraded to a more serious offence, if prosecutors link the payment to violations of election law. The payment to Daniels, right before the 2016 vote, could be considered an illegal campaign contribution.

But even if not, this could be only the tip of the iceberg. Trump faces a whole host of criminal prosecutions lined against him by the Biden administration. They include probes into attempts to overthrow the 2020 election result and his handling of classified documents at his Florida home Mar-a-Lago.

But come what may, none of those cases would technically prevent him from running for or becoming president, even if he
was convicted and in jail. The US constitution only speaks of the qualifications necessary to be president and is hush on any disqualifications.