| The story of Donald Trump’s hush money payments has been floating around for six years, so a lot of the information coming out is not new – but some of the details are “still jaw-dropping” even to the closest of observers, Cameron says. To have a powerful media executive like David Pecker, who was responsible for the National Enquirer, explicitly admit that he acted as “Trump’s eyes and ears to look out for stories of women who claimed that they had affairs with Trump I think is pretty notable”, Cameron adds. The New York case The hush money trial began badly for Donald Trump last week. The defence’s tactics have been primarily to downplay Trump’s actions and make them “seem a lot more normal, less seedy, and par for the course for what politicians do”, Cameron says. They have been hammering home the idea that hush money payments are not illegal – which is true – while sidestepping the crux of the matter: that the trial is about falsifying business records to cover up payments to former adult film actor Stormy Daniels. To undercut the idea that Trump tried to cover up this story as part of a conspiracy to influence the election, which is illegal under New York state law, the defence will also argue that the cover-up was motivated by a desire to save his family’s reputation from the embarrassment of a sex scandal in the news, not to sway the election. Unfortunately for Trump, Pecker, the former CEO of America Media Inc – which owns the National Enquirer – testified that he bought a story from a Playboy model to bury it so it did not “embarrass or hurt the [Trump] campaign”. He also admitted that he was nervous about whether the payment would violate campaign finance laws. Trump’s team has also already clashed with the judge, who at one point told one of Trump’s lawyers that he was “losing all credibility”. “The fact that the judge is showing that much frustration with Trump’s lawyer, who is supposed to be the most competent and drama-free member of his team, is not a good place to be this early in the trial,” Cameron says. The final argument from Trump’s team is to blame Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, claiming that Trump was not involved with any of the actual paperwork so he would have no knowledge of falsified business records. He just signed the cheques, according to the defence. “So those are a couple of different off-ramps that might get Trump out of trouble – but they don’t have an overarching narrative or an alternate history of what happened,” Cameron says. The defence is not questioning the events as they have already conceded that the hush money payments happened. “The real question is whether they can poke enough holes in the prosecution’s claims that this rises to a felony charge and put enough doubt in the minds of at least one juror to be able to get the hung jury they want.” The hush money trial will probably last another month. In the upcoming weeks, the court will hear testimony from many people who were in Trump’s inner circle at different points, including Cohen, as well as two women who claimed they had affairs with Trump. The supreme court case As all this was happening in New York, another arguably much more serious hearing was taking place in Washington DC. For three hours on Thursday, the supreme court heard oral arguments about Trump’s audacious claim that he should be entitled to blanket immunity from criminal liability during his time as president. More a king than a democratically elected leader, some have claimed. The hearing relates to the stalled federal case against the president for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. A lower court firmly rejected Trump’s argument that a president enjoys absolute immunity for criminal prosecution over anything related to his presidency, but his trial is on hold while the supreme court considers the same question. And while the court has proceeded relatively quickly by its own standards, the justices have frustrated prosecutors by refusing to take the case on an expedited basis – putting the prospect of a result before the November election at risk. Unlike the hush money trial, the hearings went much better for Trump than many were expecting. Trump has made the dubious case that “presidential immunity is imperative, or you practically won’t have a country any more” – and while the court is thought to be generally sceptical of blanket immunity claims, the conservative majority did seem to embrace some of the ideas raised by the former president’s legal team. Three out of the nine judges were appointed by Trump, and skirted around the issue at hand, instead choosing to focus on the abstract impact on future presidents. They also looked open to returning certain issues to a trial court to deliberate and decide whether parts of the indictment were “official acts” that were protected by presidential immunity. If that happens, Cameron says, “it would create more delays – and possibly torpedo the entire case”. In other words: there would be little chance of a meaningful result before election day, even if ultimately his claim of immunity falls apart. | 