For all the saturation coverage that Donald Trump’s hush money trial in New York is receiving, the airing of the sordid details about his sex life from almost 20 years ago in court appears to have helped him politically.
The former president and presumptive Republican nominee fumed outside the courtroom once again on Monday (Tuesday AEST) after the 16th day of his criminal trial in Manhattan, berating the New York legal system and Democrats for dragging him through an allegedly politicised, baseless trial.
Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who used his home equity loan to pay $US130,000 to pornstar Stormy Daniels back in 2016, took the stand in Manhattan for the first time, swearing that he made the payment at Trump’s direction.
The comments of Cohen, the prosecution’s star witness and now a sworn enemy of Trump, followed a week of steamy allegations in court from Daniels about her alleged tryst with Trump in California in 2006. But it seems voters so far don’t care.
Since his State of the Union address in March, Joe Biden has enjoyed a modest bump in the polls and political betting markets, even overtaking Trump as favourite to win the presidential race in November, after months of languishing, according to an average published by RealClear Politics.
A week ago, as the trial ramped up, Trump took the lead again after a week of news focused solely on his hush money trial, by a margin of 45 to 42 per cent based on estimated probabilities of winning.
The latest New York Times/Siena poll, released on Monday, showed Trump leading Biden in five out of six battleground states that both candidates must win in order to get a second term in the White House in November.
Trump led the President by margins outside the margin of effort in Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania, being behind only in Michigan.
After years of saturation speculation and reporting, not much new has emerged after 16 days of the trial. Daniels was paid to keep quiet about her 2006 encounter with Trump a decade later. The payments were recorded as “legal fees” in Trump’s financial statements.
That’s all been well known for many years, and hush money isn’t illegal. The prosecution has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Trump knowingly ordered the payments to hide the news from voters ahead of the federal election, which would be a campaign finance law violation.
Two business records misdemeanours, well outside the statue of limitations, equate to a felony if the purpose was to influence the 2016 presidential election.
How that would have affected that outcome, given the damning Access Hollywood tapes of “grab ‘em by the pussy” fame, had already emerged month before the election is anyone’s guess.
Apparently for many Americans, it is making a joke out of the US legal system. Judge Juan Merchan, whom Trump has lambasted daily for his alleged bias against him, even agreed that Daniels’s testimony was unnecessarily salacious and superfluous to relevant legal issues.
Journalist Alex Berenson, formerly of the New York Times, suggested Trump should walk out, ignore the trial, abscond to a Republican state and dare New York to try to successfully extradite him.
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