Arresting Trump over the Stormy Daniels affair would be the stuff of a banana republic.
There’s a whiff of the banana republic to the reports that Donald Trump will be arrested this week over the Stormy Daniels affair. Trump said on Truth Social that he expects to have his collar felt by the cops tomorrow. It would be related to the 2016 investigation of the hush money Trump gave to porn star Daniels after he caught wind of the fact that she was trying to hawk the story of their extramarital affair. Trump gave her $130,000, which is perfectly legal, but he registered the hush cash as ‘legal fees’, which is not legal – that’s the falsification of business records, prosecutors say, which is a misdemeanour in New York. NYC district attorney Alvin Bragg set up a grand jury on this rather minor matter, and it’s possible an indictment will be announced this week.
You don’t have to be a Team Trump, ‘January 6’ hothead to know that such an indictment would be a brazenly political act, motivated more by coastal-elite animus towards the Bad Orange Man than by concern about a little white lie in Trump’s business accounts. Bragg is a radical Democrat. His loathing of Trump is well known. He’s also notoriously soft on crime, to the fury of many New Yorkers. As the National Review put it, ‘crime is rampant in New York’, in part because ‘Bragg’s default position is leniency and often non-prosecution when it comes to hardened criminals’. The idea that he’s now having sleepless nights over a fib told by Trump seven years ago is preposterous. No, this is ‘bare-naked politics’, in NR’s words.
What we have here, boiled down, is the ruling party using a trumped-up charge to punish the leader they pushed out of power. That’s what happens in banana republics. Republican senator Eric Schmitt was surely right when he said that ‘if this same behaviour occurred in an authoritarian state, our own US State Department would condemn it’. In liberal, woke New York City, however, it’s seen as perfectly okay. The shamelessly political nature of this legal act can be seen in the social-media crowing over it, too. Every detail of the possible indictment is being relished by Trump-haters. Memes abound showing Trump in cuffs. CNN and others can barely contain their glee that Trump would have to be ‘processed and arraigned at the courthouse, which includes fingerprinting and mug shot’. That mug shot would be everyone’s Twitter pic by Wednesday morning.
R&I – TP
