In days ahead, the criminal protection racket known as the GOP will spend an enormous amount of energy reinforcing Trump’s spin on the crimes of which he was convicted.
The court room was so cold it violated his due process rights.
Any judges who have Democrats in their family are disqualified from presiding over trials of Donald Trump.
It is unfair for a man to be tried in the state where he lived for 70 years of his life, where he built a business, where he committed his crimes.
Trump cannot be prosecuted for cheating to win while he was President and cannot be prosecuted for cheating to win after he lost the presidency.
Trump’s practice of hiring liars to lie for him should immunize him from any criminal liability for crimes committed by those liars.
All of this is nonsense. But it is nonsense that has become an article of faith for members of a cult that make up 40% of the US voting population. All of this nonsense is the price of admission to the Republican Party. And because they all adhere to this nonsense, it serves as a kind of reality for those who adhere to that faith.
I’m of the belief that Trump’s prosecution will only matter if the entire GOP is held accountable for willfully sustaining the Reality Show that says Donald Trump, and only Donald Trump, must be immune from accountability. Indeed, the criminal protection racket must double down now, because if Donald Trump starts being held accountable for his own actions, then the years of coddling his misconduct — the corrupt choices they made to sustain his fiction of invincibility — may start to backfire on all those who made those corrupt choices.
Upholding the fraud Donald Trump has been spinning for eight years has become an object of survival for the entire party. And not just for the party, but for their psyches.
And that’s why it is important to emphasize why Donald Trump lost the case, as was made clear by the single substantive question the jurors had: To re-read four passages of testimony, three involving David Pecker.
Those passages made it clear that Trump was personally involved in efforts to kill stories that would harm Trump’s election chances — and that Pecker refused to kill a third, the Stormy Daniels story, in part because he couldn’t have his tabloid be associated with a porn star.
Q. Around this time, in October of 2016, did you also have any conversations with Michael Cohen about Stormy Daniels?
A. Yes, also a number of conversations.
Q. Can you tell the jury about some of those conversations?
A. Michael Cohen asked me to pay for the story, to purchase it.
I said, I am not purchasing this story. I am not going to be involved with a porn star, and I am not — which I immediately said, a bank. After paying out the doorman and paying out Karen McDougal, we’re not paying any more monies.
Q. How did Michael Cohen take that?
A. He was upset. He said that The Boss would be furious at me and that I should go forward in purchasing it.
I said, I am not going forward and purchasing it. I am not doing it. Period.
Pecker’s testimony, which validated Michael Cohen’s, came from a man who said he still considers Trump a friend. It came from a man who said he viewed Trump as a mentor.
David Pecker spent years spinning fictions. He put that fiction spinning machine to work for Trump’s campaign, attacking his opponents and killing harmful stories.
And then, he told the truth about spinning those fictions. He told the truth about why and how he spun those fictions. He told the truth about Trump’s role in spinning those fictions.
Trump’s success, his persona, has always been a careful creation built on fraud.
And that fraud became criminal in significant part because David Pecker told the truth about the fictions that go into sustaining the fraud.
Update: ernesto1581 reminded me that this account of the epic production efforts that went into making Trump look like a flashy CEO came out yesterday, thanks to the final lapse of the NDA.