Stormy Weather: The cases against Donald Trump are piling up.

« Stormy Weather: The cases against Donald Trump are piling up. From The Economist, March 23rd 2023 (abridged). Unlike many other countries, America is exceptional—having jailed no expresident in its entire history.

Even Richard Nixon was given a pardon to spare him the indignity of a trial after the Watergate scandal. But Donald Trump may soon break that precedent.

Manhattan prosecutors are weighing whether to arrest the former president for covering up hush-money payments during the 2016 presidential campaign to Stephanie Clifford (better known by her performing name, Stormy Daniels), a former adult-film actress (=X rated films), who says they had sex once.

Such an extraordinary sentence would have felled a lesser politician, but not Mr Trump. The past (and would-be future) president called for his supporters to rally to his defence—in ways that echoed his messages ahead of the attack on the Capitol by his supporters on January 6th 2021.

“THEY’RE KILLING OUR NATION AS WE SIT BACK & WATCH” he wrote on his social-media, Truth Social.

“PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”.

Mr Trump’s deduction from January 6th seems to be that summoning a mob works well for him.

Police set up barricades outside Manhattan’s criminal court in anticipation of the indictment.

Numerous bomb threats have already been made. So begins a years-long period which will upend American politics.

Having received a respite* from Trumpian storm and stress, American media are returning to their previous patterns of coverage.

Mr Trump will, in all likelihood, fight to be president while his lawyers try to defuse a criminal trial. Mr Trump has promised again to destroy ‘the deep state’ once he is back in the White House in January 2025.

Prominent Republicans have rallied to the president’s defence, including would-be rivals. *a respite=un répit. Prosecuting Mr Trump for the campaign-finance violation relies on a complicated argument.

In 2016, Michael Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer (who later went to prison himself), paid $130,000 to Ms Daniels out of his own pocket.

Mr Trump allegedly reimbursed Mr Cohen with payments disguised as routine electoral expenses.

Falsifying business records can be a misdemeanour under New York law.

The felony indictment would indicate that prosecutors are going to argue that the minor crime facilitated a more serious one: failing to declare the payment, which was made a few weeks before the election, as campaign expense. The payment was indeed undeclared.

Mr Cohen, the lawyer, pleaded guilty to breaking campaign-finance law.

But legal theory for prosecuting Mr Trump in Manhattan is untested.

The campaign-finance rules that he may have broken are federal.

The accounting rule is a state one.

Linking the two in this way is unusual, and a judge may decide it is unwarranted. Of the four active criminal investigations into the former president—over the stolen-election claims that preceded the January 6th attack; over his mishandling of classified documents after leaving the White House; and his attempts to encourage election fraud in the state of Georgia—the New York case is the weakest.

Meanwhile, the others are grinding their way through the.... »