US Politics

A formerly well-connected Republican donor was convicted on Friday of enticing teenage girls with gifts, cash and money in exchange for sex.A federal jury found Anton “Tony” Lazzaro, 32, guilty of seven counts involving “commercial sex acts” with five girls aged 15 and 16 in 2020, when he was 30 years old.The charges carry mandatory minimum sentences of 10 years with a maximum of life in prison.The jury will return to court on Monday to determine what property the government can seize based on each conviction, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.Lazzaro – who contends the charges against him were politically motivated – plans to appeal, a spokesperson for his attorneys said in a statement to the Associated Press.“The unusual application of this federal sex trafficking statute to his activities is frighteningly broad, conflating what is nothing more than arguably an act of prostitution with federal sex trafficking,” Stacy Bettison said. “He believes he has strong grounds for appeal, and he will vigorously seek reversal of his conviction. Mr Lazzaro trusts he will be vindicated.”Lazzaro’s indictment led to the downfall of Jennifer Carnahan as chair of the Republican party of Minnesota.His co-defendant, 21-year-old Gisela Castro Medina, who formerly led the University of St Thomas’s College Republican chapter, pleaded guilty to two counts last year. She testified against Lazzaro.Prosecutors argued during the trial that Lazzaro enlisted Medina, who he initially paid for sex, to recruit other teenagers – preferably minors – who were white, small, vulnerable or “broken”.“He wanted sex, and not just any sex,” federal prosecutor Melinda Williams said during closing arguments on Friday. “He wanted sex with minor girls under the age of 18. And he had a plan to get it.”Lazarro’s attorney, Daniel Gerdts, argued that the government’s “salacious” prosecution was based on “completely unfounded” allegations.“The prosecution clearly disapproves of Mr Lazzaro’s playboy lifestyle,” Gerdts said. “And frankly, as the father of three daughters, so do I. The opprobrium is well deserved, but that is not why we’re here.”Carnahan, the widow of former Minnesota Republican congressman Jim Hagedorn, resigned a week after the charges against Lazzaro were unsealed. She denied knowing about Lazzaro’s crimes but his arrest prompted outrage among party activists.Pictures on Lazzaro’s social media accounts showed him with prominent Republicans, including ex-president Donald Trump and former vice-president Mike Pence. He gave more than $270,000 to Republican campaigns and political committees over the years. More

Brandon Johnson was in his element at Kenwood Academy high school.The bespectacled former social studies teacher and candidate for Chicago mayor sat at a table next to his opponent, former Chicago public schools CEO Paul Vallas, during a recent afternoon debate. In an exhausting series of mayoral debates, Johnson had a home field advantage at Kenwood, where his son attends school.Johnson is a member of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and its former deputy political director. The CTU has thrown its support behind Johnson while Chicago’s cop union, the Fraternal Order of Police, has endorsed the tough-on-crime Vallas. The moderators at Kenwood opened with a question about whether the mayoral race was a proxy war between the Fraternal Order of Police and CTU.Johnson, who now serves as a Cook county commissioner, has joked in the past that he didn’t become a pastor like his father or sister because they weren’t unionized. But it’s clear that his family’s work in the church has shaped his commanding presence in secular spaces – as it did that day.“This is about Black labor versus white wealth. That’s what this battle is about,” Johnson responded. “This is about providing community access to the very public accommodations which Black people fought for, especially after emancipation. It’s what the descendants of slaves in this room are fighting for: public education, public transportation, affordable housing, healthcare and access to jobs.”The Chicago mayoral election is one of the most heated city battles in the country and could serve as a litmus test for police reform policies at a time when the topic of crime and public safety is central to both voters and politicians. Recent mayoral races in the liberal strongholds of New York City and Los Angeles have produced mixed results. In New York, ex-cop Eric Adams claimed victory with a centrist message while the reform-minded former congresswoman Karen Bass won the Los Angeles mayoral race on a progressive platform, though some Black Lives Matter activists criticized her recent decision to reappoint a controversial chief of police.In 2019, Chicagoans had elected Lori Lightfoot based on her message of transparency and reform. Instead, her tenure was marred by a botched police raid as well as drawn-out battles with both the CTU and the FOP.Turnout for the February primary was sluggish, with less than 33% of Chicago voters casting a ballot. Much of the recent mayoral primary map in February broke down along racial barriers: in the primaries García took Hispanic voters on the West Side, Black voters on the South and West sides remained loyal to the sitting mayor, Lori Lightfoot, while Vallas won over white voters in north-west Chicago. Johnson, meanwhile, commanded white progressives on the North Side.But Johnson’s progressive policies on dealing with crime, which fired up his base in the primary, could leave him vulnerable in the general election. Vallas has seized upon Johnson’s past support of the defund the police movement and Democrats across the country are closely watching to see if that could prove Johnson’s undoing.A finely tuned machineJohnson likes to boast that he started his campaign polling at just 2.3%. But he carries himself like a veteran politician, not an underdog. Johnson is charming, if guarded, and his affable middle school teacher demeanor turns pugnacious in debates and in spin rooms with reporters.With the help of progressive campaign operatives with Bernie Sanders on their résumés, Johnson is now a finely tuned machine picking up support from both leftist and moderate Democrats. He has been anointed by kingmakers like the South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn, who memorably turned around the prospects of Joe Biden during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, and Congressman Danny Davis, the Illinois representative whose protege and former chief of staff lost his county commissioner seat to Johnson in 2018.He also nabbed the endorsement of the renowned political activist the Rev Jesse Jackson, who delivered a speech with Johnson from his Rainbow Push Coalition headquarters in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood earlier this month. It’s clear that Johnson would like to model himself after Jackson. He’s taken pains to characterize his campaign as a continuation of the civil rights movement, repeatedly noting that the 4 April runoff election marks the date of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.When asked by the Guardian which historical or political figure Johnson might liken himself to behind the scenes at the event, Jackson threw up his arms gesturing at himself.“I’m just saying,” Johnson said with a laugh, looking at Jackson. “There is no President Barack Obama without Reverend Jesse Jackson. He changed the rules of the game. There’s a lot of history of progressive ideology and liberation from the city of Chicago.”Johnson also regularly hosted a radio show in Chicago helmed by Santita Jackson, the reverend’s daughter. It’s on that show that one can find a more honest expression of Johnson’s progressive views than on the campaign trail. It was where he made remarks about the defund police movement as an “actual, real political goal”.Johnson has since walked back that statement, saying: “It was a political goal. I never said it was mine.” He recently reversed plans to reduce the city’s nearly $2bn police budget, telling an audience of Chicago business leaders he wouldn’t “reduce the CPD budget by one penny”.‘Turning stress into action’Several prominent figures, including Jackson and late Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis have used the phrase “educational apartheid” to describe the dearth of resources and school closures in Chicago’s Black and brown neighborhoods. Johnson also shared those beliefs with his mentor and colleague, Tara Stamps, who shaped his early career as an educator.Stamps said she met Johnson in 2007 when she interviewed him for his first job in education as a middle school social studies teacher at Jenner elementary, a school serving mostly Black students from the embattled Cabrini-Green housing projects. She described the then 31-year-old Johnson as chubbier with long dreadlocks, a warm personality and a great smile.The apartheid message was not lost on Johnson’s students either, who connected their experiences in CPS with the history of Soweto, Johnson said in a July episode of the Santita Jackson Show. After reading an excerpt from Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, they wrote a play called Black to the Future and collaborated with their art teacher to transform their classroom’s doorway into Mandela’s prison.Johnson and Stamps felt that charter schools were exacerbating segregation. Now, that philosophy underpins his campaign against Vallas, whom he has attacked for promoting charter schools.“These are ideas that Brandon and I shared early,” Stamps said. “We understood the history of Chicago public schools and at the time when we were working together, it did feel like it was an apartheid system because you have a school system that was just separating children based on who was able to receive the best public education, who would not receive the best public education and who then would go to charters.”A conversation with a civil rights-era organizer led Johnson further. During an October 2012 forum with the socialist organization Solidarity, Johnson spoke about meeting Grady Jordan, a former CPS teacher and founder of the Teacher’s Union Black Caucus who marched in the October 1963 “Freedom Day” protests against segregation in CPS. Over greens and soul food one day at a West Side diner, Jordan called on Johnson to take up his fight.“Black teachers fought hard, this is a direct retaliation to what we built in the 60s and the 70s,” Johnson recalled Jordan saying. “They’re trying to kill you. What are you going to do about it, son?”Chicago’s mayor had taken over the public school system in 1995, giving the administration power over school construction and union negotiations. In 2000, Black teachers made up 40% of CPS educators. By 2018, that number declined by nearly half to 21% of teachers, while Black students made up 37% of the student population, Chalkbeat Chicago reported.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It shook me, like being awakened from a nightmare,” Johnson said during the 2012 forum. “Towards the end of the summer, after having dealt with that conversation, I began to pay attention to these leftists left in charge of this union, and I mean that as a compliment.”Johnson in turn helped form the activist mindset of other young teachers like Asif Wilson. The two met around 2009 when Wilson, now an assistant professor in curriculum and instruction at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was a new teacher in CPS. They protested against school closures in 2013 and participated in a hunger strike to reopen Dyett high school.“That brought us together not only to think about what does it mean to be a teacher in the context of school closure and to protect myself, protect my students, protect my families, and be there for each other, but then what does it also mean to organize and understand the contours and the context of school closure, as well as neoliberal assaults on Black and brown families?” Wilson said.“He was helping me to understand as a union representative, but also then turning the anger, the frustration, the stress into action.”That activism morphed into political power with the Chicago Teachers Union, whose endorsement helped vault Johnson ahead of Congressman Jesús “Chuy” García, a progressive rival who was once considered a frontrunner in the primaries.‘They want to feel safe’While education has shaped much of Johnson’s career, it’s the city’s urgent desire for public safety that could decide this election.Residents in Little Village, a Mexican enclave on the West Side where Johnson held a recent rally, are concerned about gentrification and rising property taxes, but crime remains top of mind, said Enrique Mendoza, a Johnson supporter. Local street vendors have called for more police patrols after repeated attacks from armed robbers. That could give Vallas, who has claimed that hundreds of police officers will return to Chicago’s depleted force under his watch, an advantage. García still won Hispanic voters on the West Side during the primary, but the runner-up in many of those wards was Vallas, not Johnson.“The older generations, it doesn’t matter if they’re Latino, what race they are, they want to feel safe,” said Mendoza. “Their immediate go-to is always police, right? They want the person with the plan who’s catering to those needs.”Public safety is also front and center in Johnson’s own neighborhood. Originally from Elgin, a town just west of Chicago, Johnson has made the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side his home with his wife and three children. His son attends Kenwood, 14 miles from Austin, since he plays the violin and there are no high schools on the West Side offering orchestra, according to Johnson.Austin represents a microcosm of the issues facing many Black Chicagoans. The exodus of Black residents from Chicago is evident in the neighborhood, which has seen a 32% drop over the last 20 years. Despite being the second most populous community in the city, the area is a food desert with little access to grocery stores selling fresh produce. The life expectancy of residents living just over the border in the suburb of Oak Park is 10 years longer. As Johnson himself has noted throughout the mayoral race, Austin is also plagued by community violence.“It seems like, especially for Blacks in Austin, that it’s only a matter of time before we’re ‘extinct’,” said Vernon Cole, owner of the Austin shoe shine and repair shop, Shine King. Cole supported Lightfoot in the primaries but now has a sign for Johnson, one of his loyal customers, in his window.When asked whether he could see a Chicago where police and teachers come together, Johnson rattled off a list of his supporters. They included childcare workers, crossing guards, teachers, county government workers and transportation operators.“Do we know if there are police officers not voting for me?” he asked when questioned about support from police officers.“Working people have surrounded this candidacy because they know that I express and represent their values because they are our values,” Johnson said. “I’m not here if we’re not united.”‘There’s enough for everyone’At Shine King, customer the Rev Michael Stinson said he was just hoping for a unified Chicago. A pastor on the West Side, Stinson sees the city’s divisions as a major challenge for the next mayor.“I don’t know how far we’re going to make it with the police being against the teachers, it’s just not a world-class city,” Stinson said. “We need more programs and jobs to occupy our youth and children. I’m a preacher, so just getting back to God in my sense.”Whether or not Johnson can use his own religious zeal and charisma to motivate voters to get to the polls will become the deciding factor on 4 April.“Let me tell you what’s going to happen: we’re going to a place that is full of milk and honey,” he said at a March event. “The Black labor that has built the wealth of white folks, we get to distribute that any way we please.“And the way we’re going to do it, we’re going to make sure whether you live in Jefferson Park or Morgan Park, whether you live in Garfield Park or whether you live in Humboldt Park, there’s enough for everyone in the city of Chicago.” More

As Donald Trump blustered his way through his one-term presidency, dogged by accusations of sexual assault, tainted by a fascination with authoritarian leaders, and widely reviled for his apparent fondness for racists, America’s white evangelical Christians largely stood firmly by his side.Evangelical leaders justified their support for Trump by comparing him to King Cyrus, who in the biblical telling liberated the Jews from Babylonian captivity, despite himself being a Persian ruler who did not believe in the god of Israel.Trump, like Cyrus, was seen as an “imperfect vessel”, according to evangelicals. That meant God was using him for the greater good – in this case to hand political and cultural power back to white conservative Christians, who had watched in horror as the United States became more diverse and less religious.But King Cyrus had never been formally indicted in relation to hush money payments to an adult film star. As of Thursday, Trump has, becoming the first former US president to be criminally indicted.With Trump, who was also the first president to be impeached twice, now expected to be formally charged in the sordid saga, will these white evangelicals finally turn away from their man?No, said Robert Jones, the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute and author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.“The evidence from the public opinion data suggests that it will not make much difference,” Jones said.“When we look back at his favorite ability over time, you know, I think there have been any number of these bright lines, where people thought: ‘Oh, this will be the thing that causes white evangelicals to abandon this candidate.’ But we just don’t see that much movement.”Trump’s favorability with white evangelicals has hovered at around 70% since 2016, according to PRRI polling, even as an Access Hollywood tape emerged showing Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women, even as he failed to denounce white supremacists who had rallied in Charlottesville, and even when the story of hush money payments to Stormy Daniels first broke, in 2018.None of it made any difference. In the 2020 presidential election, 75% of white evangelicals voted for Trump – hardly a huge drop-off from the 81% who pledged for him in 2016.A common interpretation of that support has been that evangelicals were making a calculated decision – they “held their nose” and voted for Trump, and in return got conservative supreme court justices who could, and did, overturn the Roe v Wade decision, removing women’s constitutional right to abortion in the US.But that’s not right, Jones said.“It was never really about abortion. I think that that line is, frankly, a propaganda line for evangelical leaders to try to justify their support for Trump,” he said. “It was a more palatable reason for them to support Trump than what the data indicate the reasons actually were.”The data showed that, actually, evangelicals really liked “the whole world view” Trump brought, Jones said. The slogan “Make America Great Again”, found a particular appeal.“The most powerful word in that mantra was the last one,” Jones said. “What it did is it evoked this powerful sense of nostalgia for an America that many white conservative Christians saw slipping away.”Jones pointed out that in Trump’s 2016 election campaign, “he was railing against Muslims and immigrants much more than he was railing against abortion”.“At every rally he was talking about ‘build the wall’ to keep Mexican immigrants out of the US. He was going to ban travel from Muslim-majority countries. I think it was those kinds of appeals that communicated this worldview that the country was rightfully owned by white Christians, and he was going to protect that view of the country.”John Fea, author of Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump and a professor of American historian at Messiah College, said there was already evidence that Trump’s legal woes will have little impact on his popularity.“You would think you know that paying hush money to a porn star might rile some white evangelicals,” Fea said. “I would say it will have little impact at all on white evangelicals. We’re already seeing that through their social media feeds and through their statements on Facebook,” Fea said.“They clearly see this as a witch-hunt. They see this as a politically motivated prosecution. Almost to a man and a woman that’s how they’re interpreting this.”For decades, white Christians made up a majority of Americans, enjoying the influence that majority allowed – politicians were nearly always white and Christian, as were most top business leaders.But their numbers began to decline through the 1990s, and by 2017, when PRRI conducted a survey on “America’s changing religious identity”, only 43% of the population identified as non-Hispanic white and Christian, and only 30% as non-Hispanic white and Protestant.That sense of decline and of waning control over the country, as white evangelicals watched a black man elected president and same-sex marriage be legalized, continues to contribute to Trump’s support among white evangelicals, Jones said.“Make America Great Again, to white evangelicals means: ‘Make America Christian Again’. Up until this point the Christian right’s agenda has always been tied to a candidate that they see as a ‘candidate of character’,” Fea said.“What happens with Trump is you’ve got a guy who’s going to deliver on all his promises, who’s going to fight for you, but he’s not a man of integrity. So do you side with integrity of character or do you side with the policies? And we learned in 2016 that the policies are much more important.”There is some evidence that the abandonment of integrity has gone beyond just the choice of political candidate.A 2021 survey by PRRI found that white evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to agree with the sentiment: “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”White evangelicals were also the only religious group to majority oppose undocumented immigrants becoming citizens, while a majority of white evangelicals also believed the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.The apparently unbreakable bond between evangelicals and Trump is an affinity that has been brewing for a long time, said Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, and a professor of history at Calvin University.Conservative evangelicals gained power through the 1950s and in the early cold war era, when their views on “traditional” families and cultural behaviors was largely matched by the rest of the country.But in the 1960s the civil rights movement, the feminist movement and the anti-war movement began to change how Americans thought about each other and about politics. Rather than change with their countrymen and women, evangelicals instead “doubled down” on their Christian conservatism, Du Mez said:“In a way that is oppositional, against fellow Americans and feeling like they have this special duty, this obligation as a faithful remnant, to restore America, to restore American greatness and to restore kind of traditional morals. That resentment mobilizes evangelicalism for generations.”The election of Obama, and the changes that happened under his watch, created a “perfect storm”, Du Mez said, and proved a real trigger, as white evangelicals felt they were under threat and in crisis.“This is where they’ve really started talking about religious liberty, and how they are embattled and they need a champion.“So it actually works in Trump’s favor that he is not the kind of Sunday school poster boy. He’s not a man who exemplifies traditional Christian moral values. The fact that he doesn’t: his ruthlessness, his crassness, the fact that he will ‘do what needs to be done’. That makes him perfect for the moment.”The rank and file seem to be on board with Trump, then, but some high-profile evangelical leaders have so far been less enthusiastic about Trump than they were in 2016 and 2020.Robert Jeffress, the pastor of a Dallas megachurch who campaigned with Trump in 2016 and 2020, has said he will “stay out” of the Republican primary. Bob Vander Plaats, president and CEO of the Family Leader, tweeted in November that it was “time to turn the page” on Trump. Everett Piper, a conservative commentator and the former dean of the Christian Oklahoma Wesleyan University, wrote “Trump has to go” in a 2022 column.That has prompted anger from Trump, who in January said it was “a sign of disloyalty” that faith leaders had yet to publicly back his 2024 campaign, and claimed anti-abortion messaging was responsible for Republicans’ poor performance in the 2022 midterms.But the support of evangelical bigwigs might not matter, Du Mez said. In 2015 and 2016 key Christian figures were originally horrified by Trump, before coming round when it became apparent he would win the Republican nomination.“The leaders were supporting people like Rubio and Cruz. And it didn’t matter. Because Trump’s appeal is a populist appeal,” Du Mez said.“If the leaders try to redirect that support, they are the ones who are going to be on the outs.”As Trump prepares to appear in court in New York, and as his legal woes elsewhere grow, one thing can make him rest easy. Whatever he says, and apparently whatever he does, white evangelicals will always have his back. More

John Fetterman has left Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after six weeks of inpatient treatment for clinical depression, with plans to return to the Senate when the chamber resumes session in mid-April, his office said on Friday.In a statement, Fetterman’s office said he is back home in Braddock, in western Pennsylvania, with his depression “in remission”, and gave details on his treatment – including that his depression was treated with medication and that he is wearing hearing aids for hearing loss.It was the latest medical episode for the Democrat, who won last fall’s most expensive Senate contest after suffering a stroke that he has said nearly killed him and from which he continues to recover.Fetterman, who has a wife and three school-age children, said he is happy to be home.“I’m excited to be the father and husband I want to be, and the senator Pennsylvania deserves. Pennsylvanians have always had my back, and I will always have theirs,” said Fetterman said. “I am extremely grateful to the incredible team at Walter Reed. The care they provided changed my life.”Fetterman, 53, will return to the Senate the week of 17 April.Fetterman checked into Walter Reed on 15 Feburary, after weeks of what aides described as Fetterman being withdrawn and uninterested in eating, discussing work or the usual banter with staff.In an interview that will air on CBS Sunday Morning, Fetterman said the symptoms gathered strength after he won the November election.“The whole thing about depression,” he said, “is that objectively you may have won, but depression can absolutely convince you that you actually lost and that’s exactly what happened and that was the start of a downward spiral.”He said he “had stopped leaving my bed, I’d stopped eating, I was dropping weight, I’d stopped engaging in some of the most – things that I love in my life.”At the time, Fetterman was barely a month into his service in Washington and still recovering from the aftereffects of the stroke he suffered last May, which left him with an auditory processing disorder and a pacemaker. Post-stroke depression is common and treatable through medication and talk therapy, doctors say.Fetterman’s return will be welcome news for Democrats who have struggled to find votes for some nominations, in particular, without him in the Senate.Fetterman’s office also released details of his treatment under medical professionals led by Dr David Williamson, a neuropsychiatrist.When he was admitted, Fetterman had “severe symptoms of depression with low energy and motivation, minimal speech, poor sleep, slowed thinking, slowed movement, feelings of guilt and worthlessness, but no suicidal ideation”, the statement attributed to Williamson said.The symptoms had steadily worsened over the preceding eight weeks and Fetterman had stopped eating and drinking fluids. That caused low blood pressure, the statement said.“His depression, now resolved, may have been a barrier to engagement,” it said. More

The US Capitol attacker who infamously wore a horned headdress and was nicknamed the “QAnon Shaman” is no longer in federal prison over the deadly January 6 uprising.Jacob Chansley, 35, was sentenced to three years and five months in prison on 17 November 2021 after pleading guilty to helping a mob of Donald Trump supporters try to prevent the congressional certification of the former president’s defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.Federal prisoners often complete their sentences sooner if they demonstrate good behavior, and Chansley was scheduled to be released in July. Yet ahead of that date, prison officials transferred Chansley to a halfway house in his home town of Phoenix, Arizona, federal records showed on Friday. His sentence is now scheduled to end on 25 May.There is no indication that the updated timeline of Chansley’s release is related to impassioned remarks from his attorney, Albert Watkins, on Fox News recently. Watkins went on the network and claimed that security footage from the Capitol attack, which the network aired earlier in March, showed Chansley did not have all of the material he needed to knowingly decide whether to stand trial or plead out.Watkins did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.Federal halfway house residents in general are required to find a job and may be allowed to drive or use a cellphone for employment purposes. They can also get a pass to engage in recreational weekend activities, and may later be moved from the group halfway house to confinement at a private residence.Before the Capitol attack, Chansley was a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which believes Trump is locked in mortal combat with an elite cabal of cannibalistic, pedophilic and satanist Democrats.The former president gave a fiery speech falsely claiming that he had lost to Biden because of widespread electoral fraud, and Chansley joined a large group of Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol that day in an attack that has been linked to nine deaths, including the suicides of officers who defended the building and were left traumatized.Investigators later arrested Chansley, who was widely photographed at the Capitol attack in his outlandish garb with red, white and blue facepaint while also holding an American flag. He told them he had broken into the chamber of the US House because he was a “patriot” and Trump had requested it. While in-custody mental examinations revealed Chansley had transient schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety, he ultimately pleaded guilty to obstructing an official proceeding.More than 1,000 people have been arrested with roles in the Capitol attack as of Friday, and many of them have pleaded guilty. Trump is not one of them, though a New York state grand jury on Thursday charged him with allegedly making an illegal hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign that he won. More

Donald Trump has built his career on brazenness. A man without shame, he has hurtled on apparently unstoppably, through serial scandals, two impeachments, electoral rejection and an armed insurrection by his supporters. Now he is setting another grim precedent, as the first former US president in history to be charged with a criminal offence. Half a century after the first investigation into his business dealings, a New York grand jury has voted to indict him. But even if he cannot bluster or bully his way out, he will keep fighting the law, and the law may not win.That the case relates to paying hush money to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels is at once apt and disconcerting. Apt, in that its tawdriness and banality encapsulate the man. Disconcerting, in that it appears almost inconsequential beside the damage he has wrought upon the nation. He still faces multiple other civil and criminal cases: on the latter score alone, he is being investigated in relation to potential mishandling of classified documents; attempts to overturn his loss in Georgia in the 2020 election; and obstructing the transfer of power, as part of the justice department’s probe of the January 6 insurrection. Many would rather have seen charges brought against him on one of these grounds.The indictment is still sealed, but reportedly includes more than two dozen counts. While Mr Trump has admitted authorising a $130,000 payment on the eve of the 2016 election, he still denies an affair with Ms Daniels, claiming to be a victim of extortion. Though his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to campaign finance charges relating to the money, the case looks far from straightforward legally. That has fuelled concerns that it may be unsuccessful and could even strengthen him. Yet by breaking the taboo on indicting a former president, some think, it could encourage other prosecutors to take action.Any charges would play to the martyr myth of Mr Trump’s supporters: he is already exploiting the case in fundraising and it is expected to boost him in the Republican primaries. His rival, Ron DeSantis, was quick to denounce the indictment; Fox News, which had distanced itself from Mr Trump in recent months, fell back into line. But the tackiness of this matter makes it perhaps less potent than an election-related case – and it’s unlikely to help him in the general election with former supporters who stayed at home or peeled off to Joe Biden in 2020.The former president, barefaced as ever, has decried the charges as “election interference”, accused the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who is Black, of being racist, and drawn on antisemitic tropes. His incendiary rhetoric is not only vicious but dangerous. He had already written of “potential death and destruction” if he were indicted. His supporters have amply demonstrated their propensity for violence. But he has also demonstrated his propensity to hype the threat of force.To shy away from bringing charges because they will increase divisions and might unleash violence would be wrong. As both businessman and politician, Mr Trump has spent a lifetime seeking to avoid legal consequences for his conduct. To allow him to sidestep them for fear of his reaction and that of his supporters would be to bolster his message that truth and the law are for little people, and that lies and might will triumph. That would surely be a far greater blow to American democracy.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

The Stormy Daniels affair, which this week made Donald Trump the first US president ever to be criminally indicted, first reached the White House in February 2017.“So picture this scene,” Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, said in congressional testimony two years later. “One month into his presidency, I’m visiting President Trump in the Oval Office for the first time.“It’s truly awe-inspiring, he’s showing me around and pointing to different paintings, and he says something to the effect of … ‘Don’t worry, Michael, your January and February reimbursement cheques are coming. They were FedExed from New York and it takes a while for that to get through the White House system.’”“As he promised, I received the first cheque for the reimbursement of $70,000 not long thereafter.”But what Cohen has described as “a biblical-level sex scandal” involving those cheques, which reimbursed a hush money payment to a porn star, had actually begun years before and has finally come to a head years later with Trump running for the White House again.How did it all happen?Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, is a star in the world of adult film. In 2006, when she was 27, she attended a celebrity golf event in Utah, where she met Donald Trump. Then 60, he was a New York real estate billionaire and a reality TV star, via the NBC show The Apprentice.According to Daniels’ memoir, Full Disclosure, she spanked Trump with a copy of Forbes magazine featuring him on the cover. He said she reminded him of his daughter, Ivanka, and floated a slot on The Apprentice. Trump also reassured Daniels that he and his wife, Melania, who has just given birth to a son, slept in separate beds.“Oh fuck,” Daniels thought. “Here we go.”They had sex.According to Daniels, the two met again – once repairing to a Beverly Hills hotel room to discuss Trump’s fear of sharks. But they never had sex again.In 2011, Trump flirted with running for president and Daniels tried to sell her story, but Cohen threatened to sue, quashing a magazine interview. A gossip website picked up the thread but no one pulled it.In 2015, Trump did run for president. In 2016, as he dominated the Republican primary, Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, sold her own Trump affair story to the National Enquirer. It was a “catch and kill” deal, worked out by Cohen and David Pecker, the chairman of American Media. The story never ran.In October 2016, a month before election day against Hillary Clinton, Trump’s campaign was upended by the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about groping women. As more women accused Trump of misconduct, an agent for Daniels contacted the Enquirer.Cohen worked out a deal: Daniels would get $130,000 in return for silence. In a CBS interview in 2018, Daniels said she accepted the deal because she was afraid for her family, including her young daughter.Cohen worked out the deal with Trump and Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization chief financial officer now imprisoned for tax fraud. Cohen paid $130,000 but was reimbursed $420,000 in payments recorded as “legal expenses”, including a bonus and $50,000 for a payment to a firm that produced rigged polls.In congressional testimony, Cohen said: “Mr Trump directed me to use my own personal funds from a home equity line of credit to avoid any money being traced back to him that could negatively impact his campaign. I did that.”In April 2018, the Wall Street Journal broke the Daniels story. Cohen claimed it never happened. Trump also lied, saying he was unaware of the deal. A month later, he admitted paying Cohen “a monthly retainer not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign”, concerning “a private contract between two parties known as a nondisclosure agreement”.Trump denies having sex with Daniels.But Trump also disappointed Cohen, failing to give him a White House role. And as the federal investigation of links between Trump and Russia continued, Cohen landed in an uncomfortable spotlight. In April 2018, FBI agents raided his office in New York.“Am I El Chapo all of a sudden?” Cohen would write later of the moment.He wasn’t a Mexican drug lord but he was a prize eagerly sought by the law: the man who knew where the bodies were buried in Trump’s world. Cohen flipped.In August 2018, he pleaded guilty on eight federal counts including tax evasion and campaign finance violations linked to the Daniels payments. In December 2018, he was sentenced to three years in prison. The same month, Daniels was ordered to pay Trump $300,000 over a dismissed defamation suit filed by her then (now disgraced) attorney, Michael Avenatti.But the story continued. In February 2019, in testimony to the House oversight committee, Cohen described the Daniels affair and much more.In New York, investigations of Trump’s financial affairs continued. One Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr, bequeathed an investigation to another, Alvin Bragg. Weisselberg pleaded guilty to tax fraud and was jailed. No Trump indictment emerged.Mark Pomerantz, an experienced prosecutor working for Bragg, resigned and criticised the DA for not moving against Trump, who Pomerantz said was guilty of “numerous” felonies. This February, Pomerantz released a book in which he described the Daniels payment as a “zombie case”, because it would not die.Shortly after that, it emerged that Bragg was moving towards an indictment arising from the Daniels payment, reportedly involving falsification of business records, tax fraud and campaign finance violations.On Thursday, news broke of an indictment, reportedly on 34 counts, covering the cheques Trump sent to Cohen.Trump denounced the charge, complaining of political persecution.Cohen told CNN: “It’s a lot of counts, no matter how you want to slice it. Thirty-four is a lot of counts.”Daniels said: “Thank you to everyone for your support and love! I have so many messages coming in that I can’t respond … also don’t want to spill my champagne.” More

Speaking to George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s Good Morning America, the former US president’s lawyer Joe Tacopina also said Trump would not be put in handcuffs for a court date after a New York grand jury voted to indict him over a hush money payment made to the adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential election campaign More