Former US President Trump was indicted by a grand jury on more than 30 criminal counts. This pattern of alleged misconduct that is likely to increase.
A historical event occurred on March 30, 2023. The Manhattan grand jury indicted former U.S. President Trump on more than 30 counts of criminal activity. This is the first time in American history when any President has been charged with a crime. And- no- as of the time I am writing this article, the grand jury has not released the actual crimes Trump is being accused of. Keep this in mind as you continue reading this article.
Let’s put some context in order to understand where we are at right now in this political discourse. There is so much going on in the county and, personally, I have been extremely busy since the last time I’ve had time to sit down and write an article. In fact, the last time I was about to write a “Today in America” was March 7, 2023. I was going to talk about the Republican Primary as it is approaching fast. Relevant to that was the figures who attended, and those who did not attend, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
I was going to predict a lot of what ended up happening but since that is now a moot point, I’ll continue talking to what is relevant in today’s topic because, center stage for CPAC, was former President Trump as the main event speaker. In his speech, he demonized his political opposition and said some inflammatory rhetoric that were in line with him becoming the “retribution” against anyone he deemed had wronged his base – which is really another way to say that he was wronged, personally.
By the time CPAC occurred, Trump was very much under several investigations spanning many different state jurisdictions across the country and at the federal level. This is unsurprising as Trump was very much synonymous with controversy since forever. Yes, well, before his presidency- even back in the 80’s and 90’s. Those were different times and misinformation was a lot easier to conceal because we did not have the same level of fact checking as we do now. And you can like, or dislike the guy, that is irrelevant to this topic. The fact is that he was no stranger to controversy. You can be good or bad and still have controversy. I repeat this because I know that some people might be biased against, or in favor of Trump. You do you. Your personal like, or dislike for him does not matter when it goes on the merits of a case to be argued in court.
This is an important point because from there it becomes a legal game. A shrewd attorney (let’s say it is a dude) can literally make his client get away with murder if he can outperform the other party’s attorney. However, not even the shrewdest attorney can defend the indefensible if all the facts are against his client, and that will make it very hard for Trump’s attorney to defend his client with this laundry list of cases.
A lot of what we have been privy to, so far, happens to be his campaign finance violation, real state over inflation/depreciation of assets for insurance and tax purposes, and other business-related practices that are not in the up and up. Again, as of the moment I am writing this article, the actual charges have remained sealed. And it is worth repeating that this is not the only criminal jurisdiction Trump is going up against. We will write about those individually once they surface. We have to understand that every grand jury and other legal entities in charge of an investigation will have to take time to deliberate on the case at hand. They have to be unbiased so that means they are technically not supposed to be for, or against Trump. That is a tall order on its own. Not impossible though, believe it or not, there are a lot of people out in this great country who live in the bliss of ignorance.
This can be good or bad. Good, because they can (hopefully) be unbiased and pragmatic on the cases and not being swayed by political bias. Bad, because if they have been living under a rock, then there might be a lot of contexts that will go missing for their deliberation if either attorney is able to paint a more relevant picture, even if it is narrated in a way that is not an accurate depiction of events by means of withholding important pieces.
Still, it would not be “untrue” because it is not technically lying, but it can paint a very different picture. Let’s do a quick example unrelated to this topic for illustrative purposes.
Start Illustrative Example: The lady was unhappy with her husband’s figure because he has let himself go three months after they got married. He has gotten fat and as the attraction between them decreased the spouse also let herself go and gained weight. She also started fantasizing about movie stars who seem to take care of themselves and, in their private lives, seem to be loyal to their spouse. The husband found out and started looking at young ladies in their early twenties, but he was rejected altogether.
Who is in the right and who is in the wrong in this example? Neither are right or wrong, depending on the merits of the case. They both got fat, regardless of who let himself/herself go first. They both were looking outside the nest for a more “ideal” type. Neither of them had a chance to make that connection. For the lady, because she’s not part of the celebrity circle and, for the dude, because the young girl has rejected him outright. However, the lady only lived a fantasy about other men and wished that for herself. The dude actually went looking for young ladies. The latter moved from the fantasy into an action that could be highly exploitable in a divorce proceeding. End of Illustrative Example.
Of course, that case can be a lot more complex than this simple example that just popped out of my head as I was typing this article. And, yes, I can type very fast, but it goes to show you that with enough preparation then you can build a very strong case if there is enough evidence and flaws in the other person’s courses of action and decision making. All that evidence can be used against a person in a court of law if that is factored in as the premise for the argument.
In other words, the subject of the debate will dictate if the premise is encompassing a finite number of factors or is open to add additional information that could detract from the realities of the case. And, yes, that happens all the time. I mentioned before that a shrewd attorney could help their clients get away with murder. But if the defense or prosecution crafted a proper case it will be a lot harder for somebody to get away with something that can otherwise be demonstrated as condemnable.
Trump’s pattern of misconduct
Trump is not only notorious for being in court for a plethora of court cases. Often, someone’s mad at Trump for something he did that was not entirely in the up and up. Want an example? Sure, Trump University. Circa 2004, Trump created a “university” even though it was not accredited and was touted as it being a real state educational experience that would teach their students how to make a lot of money on real state. Trump promised that he would be meeting all of the students in person. He did not. There was a cardboard photo of him in the university. Trump promised that he would hand select the educators for this university and that was not true either. The court’s documents showed that to be the case, in fact. People who took student loans or other ways to finance this very expensive “university” were on the hook for a very expensive “educational” experience that turned out to be a scam. And the term “university” cannot be used unless you’re an actual university. This was not an accredited institution. Long story short, a class action lawsuit was settled, and Trump paid 25 million dollars in 2018 after a couple years of dodging the order to pay. Yes, that means 2016, because you cannot have any open lawsuit when running for presidency. Trump had hopes this would go away. It did not, as we are clearly talking about it several years later.
There are hundreds of cases like this and many of Trump’s legal woes are normally of the civil kind and were liked to bankruptcies of many of his business ventures. However, some of those lawsuit charges were also criminal in one way or the other. Many are other lawsuit examples of bankruptcies. Those involved lost all of their money and Trump was able to shake himself from that and move on to the next “venture.” This is not new and not unheard of if you were even awake in the 80’s, 90’s, and the 2000’s. In fact, his “then” political opposites in the Republican Party before the 2016 election pointed out these very things and more that I am pointing out to you right now. And, yes, there is plenty of video clips of all of them saying exactly this, warning the country about Trump. You even would not be very surprised to learn that as Trump rose to the top of the Republican ticket, even his most fervent dissenters during the Republican primary were also his most ardent supporters.
This is as good of a time as any to speak about how in some instances politics are a very tricky game. During the 2016 election Trump ran on a platform of being a “self-funding” candidate. During debates he would attack the other Republicans and tell them on national television that he [Trump] donated tons of money to each one of them as political leverage. And, you know what? None of them were able to disprove this claim. Trump demonstrated something there that went missing to a lot of the country, but many of us realized it right away. There are political interests and other special group interest groups that were pretty intertwined with many of those presidential hopefuls. Many of those politicians had to drop from the Primary Presidential race as they could not keep up with the way Trump would frame this opposition.
Classic example, and this happened during the Republican primary leading to the 2016 election. Florida Senator Marco Rubio was one of Trump’s most fervent antagonists during this race. But then Rubio made a huge miscalculation, calling out Trump’s hands as “small” in a euphemism to allude that Trump has small genitalia. That backfired. Trump was well established to get into the mud and fight, and Rubio had all of his major donors pull chocks who dropped the young senator like a pile of 2-week-old leftovers. Good when it was fresh, bad for business now. Rubio was still opposed to Trump for a little bit afterward, but then he did a 180 and became one of Trump’s most fervent supporters. That’s despite the fact that Trump actually nicknamed Rubio as “Little Marco” as a disparagement to his height. Trump is notorious for giving people derogatory nicknames and his base seems to love it and are easily amused by that.
It was obvious during that Primary that Trump was getting away with things that nobody was getting away with in the history of the United States. That was good for Trump, but it is simply not sustainable. The more any person gets away with stuff, the more it becomes normalized, and this normalization leads to recklessness and sloppiness. That’s exactly what happened during this presidency, but this started much earlier and it was the product of the Republican Party. Not even during the campaign trail for the 2016 election- it was much earlier than that. Trump just happened to become the embodiment of what many of those taking points were becoming.
Fox News, for instance, is being sued billions of dollars for perpetuating a lie about the 2020 election. The lie saying that President Joe Biden stole the election when it has been proved in dozens of lawsuits and other means that this election was not stolen. However, by now, the Fox News audience was already very much in tune with a narrative that was not exactly accurate. And, of course, any time they would course correct – especially if it dissented with Trump- then the viewers would tune out and go to another station that was still very much agreeing with Trump. In fact, Trump himself attacked Fox News whenever any flare of news that would not benefit him on air. This, of course, was bad for business for Fox News. Those millionaire opinion hosts will not pay themselves; you know? It takes millions of dollars in advertisement money to keep those talking heads on the air. This was already going for several years, well before Trump took on the Presidential race.
During his presidential tenure, Trump was no stranger to attacking private citizens. And, yes, he got away with it. Largely because a lot of his Republican enablers allowed him to do so. They might be trying to protect the party but, well, it backfired. The Republican party is extremely divided, and a lot of then have moved away from that to become a “Party of Trump” who threatened to run third party, if not elected the Republican Nominee. Trump is not the Nominee but remains the leader of the Republican Party for now. But, despite the fact that Trump’s orbit was no stranger to get a lot of his closest allies going to prison, Trump himself was able to get away with it. Often due to technicalities.
Twice impeached by the- then- Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, and both times acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate. The vote went through party lines and that divide was further errored between factions of the Republican Party. As a result, the Republican Party has under-performed in the last three elections. Most Trump-endorsed candidates did not win in any of the races in the last several races, to include the last midterm elections. Which, by the way, flipped the U.S. Senate to the Democrats, and the House of Representatives to the Republicans, with a very narrow majority.
In either case, during this time in the White House Trump had no shortage of investigations and other problems that were going to follow him out of office. He knew that and the rest of the cognizant world realized the same. That’s why he needs another term. So, he can do whatever he wants to do. As though he was not already doing that, right? Well, no…not that much because, normally, first terms are often a bit of a “moderate” term for any president since they still have another race ahead of them for a second term. So, you don’t want to burn bridges too fast, otherwise you lose any possibility to get reelected. Trump was not very shrewd, politically, during his first term and that is what turned off a lot of the country even though it galvanized his base very fervently. But as wide as his support was, there was a larger group of Americans that did not agree with having Trump in power. Hence, he was voted out.
And this is important to realize- registered Democrats tend to be pretty lazy when it comes to voting. During a lot of earlier elections before the Trump era, Democrats tended to underperform even in races they won. People would just rather stay home and live in blissful ignorance than going to the polls. However, when 2020 rolled around and COVID was destroying the USA and the rest of the world, people voted. Most of them by mail and pushed Trump out of office. And keep in mind that it was not necessarily that they liked Biden, it meant that they disliked Trump more than they disliked Biden. And, for anybody who has not realized it yet, Biden is very much to the right of the left. Biden had a target on his back from the time he started running in the Democratic Primary elections. Obviously, he prevailed, and he is the President now. He won because he got more votes in the popular count and the electoral college.
Trump has never won the popular vote. During his first term, Trump lost the popular vote by more than a million but won the electoral college. Hillary Clinton actually won the popular vote, but the election is called by the electoral college and that is why we had a President Trump in 2016. Trump voters would think that they are a majority because they go to rallies all over the country and stand in line for hours waiting for him to talk, but the Democrats are not quite the same when it comes to show their political fervor in the same way. I’m not saying that one style is better than the other, I am saying that you cannot use the same metric to ascertain support for one or the other the same way. In the U.S., a lot of Democrats will consume media or do research to figure out what is the message. Many Trump supporters are happy to spend hours in a rally to hear it directly from him. Personally, I cannot afford the time to be driving to a rally, standing in line for hours, buy merchandise with candidate regalia, and hear somebody talk in a rally for hours. And I don’t consider myself a Democrat nor a Republican. I don’t care about party loyalty; I care about facts.
When we are able to understand that sometimes party loyalty tends to skew our reality then we are able to understand in a pragmatic manner the merits for a case.
The merits of the case
Trump got indicted on 30+ counts of criminal conduct. Are these charges based on conjecture? Who knows? Likely not, though. Why I say that? Because this was a very long investigation, and it is a long time coming. Also, from what we know some of these charges are linked to other Trump-based cases that ended up in prosecution.
Most notoriously, the $130,000 hush money payment to adult film star, Stormy Daniels. Trump’s at-the-time attorney/fixer, Michael Cohen, lied to Congress about this payment. At the time, Cohen denied any connection from Trump to the hush money payment. Then, it was proven that the payment did happen, and that Cohen lied for Trump. Trump disowned Cohen and then threw him under the bus and did not even offer him a Presidential pardon when his Presidential term was over like he did to other people in his orbit who were prosecuted. Cohen even paid Stormy Daniels the $130K from his own home equity loan and the multimillionaire, Trump, paid Cohen in small ~$30K payment installments. Trump paid those under the guise of attorney fees, and even deducted payments to Cohen in his taxes (Trump’s tax exemptions). Which is fraud. Fun fact: scams are not on the same level of criminality as fraud. I know they sound like synonyms, but they are different things.
The affair (if you want to call it such) with Stormy Daniels was really like a one-night stand according to Daniels. Trump was enticing Daniels with a part in the show “The Apprentice.” According to Daniels, Trump was remarking on her smartness and that if she’s willing to go for it she can show it. For what I’ve gathered from her interviews, Daniels was kind of disgusted by him but did have consensual sexual intercourse with Trump, however brief and unpleasant it was for her. Trump, at the time, was a relatively fresh newlywed, marrying his third wife and the former First Lady, Melania Trump, not very long after she had birthed their son, Barron. I’m not sure what was the former President and former First Lady’s relationship like, however it is being reported that that they slept in separate quarters and there is no shortage of videos showing Melania as less than amicable with the former President. Research it. You don’t have to believe me; you can see it for yourself. How bad did this encounter affect Trump’s reputation? Well, it only became a point of contention for him as it got closer to the 2016 campaign. Daniels was not the only woman Trump had an extramarital encounter with, consensual or otherwise. There are other women that have come forward about this.
Trump would say to an alleged rape victim (allegedly raped by Trump) that she (the victim) was “not his type.” Some of his supporters thought that was a phenomenal zinger. That is not an answer, though. Does that mean that if she was, in fact, “his type” then she would have been at risk to be raped by him? He said something similar about Stormy Daniels calling her “horse face” and denying that a sexual encounter between them ever even happened. Except that it has been proven that it did happen. His former attorney, Michael Cohen, went to prison for that exact Stormy Daniels case.
So, it is unprecedented for a U.S. President to be indicted in a criminal court. Yes, absolutely. Is it unusual for Donald J. Trump to be indicted? Not at all. As of 2016, USA Today stated that Trump and his businesses were involved in 3,500+ legal cases spanning federal and state jurisdictions. Sometimes he was the defendant, sometimes he was the plaintiff, sometimes he was on some other type of legal procedures such as bankruptcy, settlements, or others. Was he able to get away with a lot of them? Sure, but he also had to pay a lot of money for stuff his lawyers were not able to bail him out. With that said, he has never been actually arrested.
I am not going to get too deep on Trump’s history of litigation. First off, because it is super long, and this article is already long enough. Also, because not all of those cases are as relevant to this particular article, except for the fact that it presents a pattern that could be very well-utilized for attorneys to prove intent and cognition if he is indeed found guilty of these allegations. We will know for sure in the near term. Trump is supposed to be fingerprinted and have his mug shot taken this Tuesday [April 4, 2023].
Meanwhile, there have been many of his ardent supporters who are very much in tune with condemning anybody involved in this indictment. They call it political prosecution. Actually, these are all before the time Trump was in office. Litigation of this magnitude surely takes long enough. Afterall, Trump had four years of presidency in between. And, yes, that gave him a lot of immunity on a lot of other cases that were happening before his presidency- and some were going to continue afterward.
Now, the most speculative thing would be the fact that seems to fit in this narrative of defending Trump is as follows: What do the people defending Trump from justice have to hide? Do they have something to lose if he loses? Again, I don’t know for sure, but I am sure somebody does especially if an investigation has been conducted, it is very likely that some information – even if circumstantial- will involve other people in the collateral environment for these criminal allegations.
Those could be career ending circumstances, and the fact is that a lot of Trump supporters have gone to prison. Even those who were not in a high place. For example, there were hundreds of prosecutions linked to the January 6 insurrection. And, on the latter, even though there are literally weeks worths of footage from all kinds of camera angles- to include some of the people who stormed the capitol themselves- people seem to think it was not a significant day in American history. That is very disconcerting. But it shows that the bias for one person can blind others to the empirical reality if the bias is strong enough. This is what we call a cult of personality.
All I can do is wait to see what the next step will be. In the meantime, there is only speculation. But I hope this context will help you understand the significance of this event or, at the very least, use it as a chronical of what was going on during this time in our American history. HLC