Donald J. Trump has become the first president, former or serving, in history to have been indicted on criminal charges. A grand jury in New York has voted to indict Trump over the hush money he paid to adult entertainment star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 election campaign. Of course, Trump has a lot to say on the matter, and has provided the public with a formal statement.
Despite the numerous times lawmakers have gone after Trump, this is the first time a charge seems to stuck. Trump will be facing criminal charges not for how he tried to coerce a foreign country into finding dirt on a political opponent, not for inciting a riot that saw a mob overtake Capitol Hill on January 6, but it is, in fact, for how he misused campaign funds to silence Stormy Daniels over an alleged affair.
The investigation has been overseen by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat. Of course, with this being the case, Trump and certain members of the Republican Party are calling this current indictment a “witch hunt” and an attempt to derail democracy given that Trump is the Republican frontrunner for the next presidential election. Bragg denied this, stating in a tweet, “We evaluate cases in our jurisdiction based on the facts, the law, and the evidence.”
Trump has responded to the charges by taking to his own social media site, Truth Social, with a statement where he decried the charges. The former president claims the charges are “Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history.”
The former president goes on to state that the Democratic Party, “the enemy of the hard-working men and women of this Country” has been out to get him since the very beginning. He then lists off all the charges that he has managed to evade in the past adding that they have now “done the unthinkable – indicting a completely innocent person.”
The facts that have landed Trump in this situation would not seem to give this latter statement credence, given that Trump’s own attorney during that time, Michael Cohen, admitted to paying the hush money of $130,000 and was sentenced to prison between 2018-2020 while Trump avoided charges. According to the court filings in Cohen’s federal prosecution, the Trump Organization paid back Cohen $420,000 to cover the cost of the hush money, taxes, and an additional reward bonus. These were written down as “legal expenses” and Trump denied knowing anything about it.
Despite his former personal attorney having already gone down for similar charges, Trump is still adamant that he did nothing wrong and is innocent, instead using this moment to attack his opponents. In his statement, he said,
“Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who was hand-picked and funded by George Soros, is a disgrace. Rather than stopping the unprecedented crime wave taking over New York City, he’s doing Joe Biden’s dirty work.”
Trump is deploying his usual tactic of casting himself as the victim whilst using inflammatory rhetoric to describe his opponents as “crooked” and “radical,” whilst claiming that the Democratic Party has “lied, cheated, and stolen.” This is very similar to what he espoused after he lost the 2020 election, language which incited a mob to storm Capitol Hill in an unprecedented and historic attack on lawmakers who fled and hid from Trump supporters after he falsely claimed the election had been “stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats.”
He finishes his tirade with a threat followed by his classic sign off,
“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.”
Trump will continue with his run for president in the 2024 election despite this, and even if he is imprisoned ,there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that states that he cannot run and even serve as president. That would certainly be a first in American history. Even so, his imprisonment could embolden some of his devout followers to view him as a martyr and only deepen their resolve to see him back in office while putting off others who may see his incarceration as an impediment to him governing the country.
