He doesn’t want women being reminded about his piggish behavior
I’m not surprised he’s having problems getting the money together to pay his massive judgments. He’s such a liar about his net worth and it’s hard to believe that any legitimate financial institution is going to issue a bond for that huge amount required in the fraud case. However, he can sell secrets to rich foreign actors and there’s not much anyone can do about it. I suspect someone is going to bail him out and I don’t know that we’ll ever know who it was or exactly why they did it.
Meanwhile, this piece, also by Haberman, was a delicious little bit of tea about how much Trump hates the hush money case, which may be the only trial that he has to face before the election at this point:
For the past couple of weeks, the spotlight has been focused on the timing of Donald Trump’s four criminal trials and the prospect that at least two of them might not go to a jury before this fall’s election. And the one trial that seems certain to be held before Election Day — his so-called hush money case — has often been dismissed by experts and observers as old, legally dubious and lacking in the sort of weighty issues that sit at the heart of, say, his two election interference cases.
But the hush money case arguably is an election interference case, centering on allegations that, on the eve of the 2016 presidential race, Trump falsified business records as part of a scheme to buy the silence of a porn star to keep her from going public with claims that they had an affair.
And as the trial draws nearer — it is set to start on March 25 in Manhattan — it’s become apparent that prosecutors would like to tell a wide ranging story full of tabloid details, one that could be personally embarrassing to Trump.
The hush money case, which is being prosecuted by Alvin Bragg, the district attorney in Manhattan, has always been an awkward mix of the serious and the profane, based around a seamy tale of extramarital sex, business records and presidential politics. Trump’s aides are blunt that he particularly hates this case given the nature of the story that prosecutors intend to put in front of the jury.
Huh. He doesn’t want to brag that he is the world’s greatest cocksman who bangs porn stars and playmates two at a time? How unusual.
Well good. He should hate it because it’s yet another illustration of one particularly odious aspect of his black character. He has been a disgusting pig toward women his entire life. And apparently, Bragg wants to bring up that fact in the trial
But recently, Bragg and his team asked Justice Juan Merchan, who is presiding over the trial, for permission to tell a much more sweeping tale, one involving not just a single secret payoff but three of them. They also want to relate in detail how Trump used his ties to a publisher of supermarket tabloids to preemptively stop embarrassing accounts about him from seeing the light of day, a process known as “catch and kill.”
And if that were not enough, the prosecutors want to introduce evidence about the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape. In the tape, which surfaced in the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign and captured a conversation from years earlier, Trump spoke openly about grabbing female body parts without permission.
Oh, and by the way, he’s been found guilty of assault and defamation in a federal civil suit and has to pay his victim almost a hundred million dollars. It’s not as if any of this is hard to believe. Everyone knows what he is, even his cult followers who simply admire him for being such a manly man.
They want to bring up Karen McDougal and the doorman they paid off not to say that he fathered a child with his housekeeper (which apparently is not true.) Trump’s lawyers are having a meltdown over this, saying that it’s nothing but an attempt to sully Trump’s reputation with these salacious details which is hilarious. As I said, a jury has already found him to be rapist and he’s on tape talking about grabbing women by the pussy so I think that ship sailed a long time ago.
They’re asking the judge not to allow the prosecution to say anything about trying to influence the election at all ludicrously asserting that he just didn’t want “adverse publicity” coming out about him. Right. I don’t think that’s going to fly since they went to great lengths to conceal the payments with false invoices which they needn’t have done if they weren’t flouting campaign finance laws, which is the heart of this case. It’s not like Melania was pouring over the books.
Haberman looks at the political implications:
When Justice Merchan makes his decision about how much of this extra evidence to allow into the trial, it could have political — and not just legal — ramifications.
Trump’s aides have long regarded the hush money trial as the least legally impactful, given that it relates to allegations of behavior between consenting adults. His supporters viewed the indictment as a partisan attack when it was handed down last March, and that perspective has only hardened as Trump has insisted he’s facing a “witch hunt.”
But the details of Trump’s behavior could also further alienate women and swing voters whose backing he needs in a general election. The details being made public also upset Trump, according to people who’ve spoken with him, and the impact the case may have on his behavior inside and outside court remains to be seen.
It is not in dispute that he paid off those women and he did it in a particularly devious way, working with the National Inquirer. He’ll have to contend with all those details being on the front pages and at the top of the news again and he deserves it. He can insist that it’s a witch hunt all he wants but he can’t dispute the facts. Donald Trump is a pig and the last thing he needs at a time when he’s bragging about banning abortion and IVF being outlawed is for women to be reminded of just how grotesque he really is. You bet he’s losing sleep over this one.
