US Politics

Donald Trump’s lawyer insists the former president will not be put in handcuffs after a New York grand jury voted on Thursday to indict him over hush money payments made to the adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election.Speaking on ABC’s Good Morning America on Friday, a lawyer representing Trump, Joe Tacopina, said the indictment was shocking to Trump and his team.“I feel like the rule of law died yesterday in this country, and it’s not something I’m happy about,” Tacopina said. “This is unprecedented in this country’s history. I don’t know what to expect other than an arraignment.”Tacopina outlined what could happen: the courthouse will close as Trump arrives, Trump will appear in front of a judge and plead not guilty. His team will file motions against the indictment, arguing against “the legal liability of this case”.“I’m sure they’ll try to get every ounce of publicity from this thing,” Tacopina said. Referring to Trump and prosecutors, he added: “The president will not be put in handcuffs. I’m sure they’ll try to make sure they get some joy out of this by parading him.”Secret Service and New York state and city police are not “going to allow this to become a circus, at least as much as humanly possible”, Tacopina predicted. According to a memo seen by NBC, New York police have been told to report for duty on Friday and be prepared for “unusual disorder”.Since the indictment was still under seal on Friday morning, it was unclear how many charges Trump faces for the payment made to Daniels, for which he reimbursed his then lawyer Michael Cohen, who ended up going to prison for crimes partly related to the case, and has turned on his former boss and testified for the prosecution to the grand jury.Reports say Trump is facing at least 30 counts of business fraud. This is the first time a former US president has ever been criminally indicted.Though it is unclear whether Trump will be handcuffed, he is expected to be fingerprinted and photographed. More

When I was secretary of labor 30 years ago, one major goal was to crack down on companies that employed children, in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. I remember being horrified to discover that even in the early 1990s, children who should have been in school were working, often in dangerous jobs.We made progress. Child labor declined in the United States. But it was a hard slog. By law, the highest fines I could levy against companies that put children to work were relatively small. Some firms treated them as costs of business.Other businesses dragged their feet. The US Chamber of Commerce and other corporate lobbying groups argued that almost any minimum standard of decency at work – whether barring child labor, setting a minimum wage, or requiring employers to install safety equipment – was an intrusion on the so-called “free market” and therefore a “job killer”.My argument was that the nation’s goal was not just more jobs; it was more good jobs, safe jobs, jobs that allowed kids to go to school, jobs that upheld minimum standards of decency.In the years since then, I’ve assumed that progress was continuing on eliminating child labor in America. Sadly, I was wrong.Serious child labor violations are once again on the rise, including in hazardous meatpacking and manufacturing jobs. Children are working with chemicals and dangerous equipment. They are also working night shifts.In just the last year, the number of children employed in violation of child labor laws increased 37%, according to the Economic Policy Institute.You might think that in the face of this mounting problem, lawmakers around the country would rush to protect these children.You’d be wrong. In fact, state legislatures are rushing in the opposite direction, seeking to weaken child labor protections.This month, after young children were found working at a factory owned by Arkansas’s second-largest private employer, Tyson Foods, the Republican governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, signed legislation making it easier for companies to employ children – eliminating a requirement that children under 16 get a state work permit before being employed.In the past two years, 10 states have introduced or passed legislation expanding work hours for children, lifting restrictions on hazardous occupations for children, allowing children to work in locations that serve alcohol, and lowering the state minimum wage for minors.Already in 2023, bills to weaken child labor protections have been introduced in Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio and South Dakota. One bill introduced in Minnesota would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to work on construction sites.Across the country, we’re seeing a coordinated effort by business lobbyists and Republican legislators to roll back federal and state regulations to protect children from abuse – regulations that had been in place for decades.Why is this going on now? Four reasons.Since the surge in post-pandemic consumer demand, employers have been having difficulty finding the workers they need at the wages employers are willing to pay. Rather than pay more, employers are exploiting children. And state lawmakers who are dependent on those employers (such as Tyson) for campaign donations have been willing to let them.A second reason is that the children who are being exploited are considered to be “them” rather than “us” – disproportionately poor, Black, Hispanic and immigrant. So the moral shame of subjecting “our” children to inhumane working conditions when they ought to be in school is quietly avoided, while lawmakers and voters look the other way.Third, some of these children (or their parents) are undocumented. They dare not speak out. They need the money. This makes them vulnerable and easily exploited.Finally, we are witnessing across America a resurgence of cruel capitalism – a form of social Darwinism – in which business lobbyists and lawmakers justify their actions by arguing that they are not exploiting the weak and vulnerable, but rather providing jobs for those who need them and would otherwise go hungry or homeless.Conveniently, these same business lobbyists and lawmakers are among the first to claim we “can’t afford” stronger safety nets that would provide these children with safe housing and adequate nutrition.Yet when it comes to handouts from the government in the form of tax loopholes, subsidies and bailouts, these same business lobbyists and lawmakers claim that the nation can easily afford them and that businesses need and deserve them.Obviously, the Department of Labor needs more inspectors and authority to levy higher fines. But that’s not all that’s needed.America seems to be lurching backward to the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, when workers – including young children – were treated like cow dung and robber barons ruled the roost. The public must demand that child labor once again be relegated to the dustbin of history. More

Stormy Daniels didn’t seem to know what she had. In 2011, when The Apprentice was still getting decent ratings and Donald Trump had drawn attention to himself for racist claims about the birthplace of Barack Obama, Daniels – also known as Stephanie Clifford – started asking around to see who she could sell her story to. Daniels, for years a successful porn performer, had met Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in 2006. According to her, he invited her to his hotel room, offered her work on his TV show and then had sex with her. The two remained friendly afterwards; Trump invited Daniels to the launch of his Trump Vodka brand the following year. It’s the kind of thing you suspect that these two people would have written off as a funny story. Instead, it’s the impetus for one of the most politically volatile prosecutions in the nation’s history: the first criminal indictment of a former president, which was issued on Thursday by a federal grand jury in New York.Stormy Daniels and the illegal, fraudulent machinations that the Trump campaign allegedly undertook to pay her off during the height of the presidential campaign in 2016 have always struck me as the most quintessential of Trump’s many scandals. Trump denies Daniels’ allegations, but in retrospect, with the hindsight of what we’ve come to learn of him, the scene she recounts is almost unbearably true to his character: the gathering of low-rent celebrities, the paltry quid pro quo, the golf, and the sad, adolescent fantasy of sex with a porn star. The whole story drips with Trump’s defining attribute: the desperate and insatiable need to have his ego gratified. Which is why to me, at least, it seems obvious that Daniels is telling the truth.Back then, she offered the interview about it to Life & Style magazine. The piece never ran, but they paid her $15,000. It’s not a lot of money, when you put it in the context of what has happened since, but Daniels seems to have made the same assumption that the rest of us did: that Trump would remain on the C-list, making needful and desperate bids for the attention of the tabloids. Back then, you’d have to have been crazy to think that he could have been president.When it became clear that he might be, Daniels did what any savvy businesswoman would have done: she upped her price. After the Access Hollywood tape broke in October of 2016, Trump’s treatment of women – his leering use of them as props for his ego, his boorish demonstrations of virility for the benefit of other men and, suddenly, a flow of uncannily similar allegations of harassment and assault – gave Daniels another opening.She approached the National Enquirer, which tipped off the Trump campaign. Michael Cohen, Trump’s sweaty and exhausted lawyer and fixer, offered to pay her $130,000 to shut up and go away, which Daniels was happy to accept. Cohen fronted the money himself; initially, he seems to have taken out a line of credit on his own house. Why go through this labyrinthine route? Why have the lawyer pay personally – an unusual and inappropriate arrangement – especially in an amount that was large for Michael Cohen but should have been small for his alleged billionaire of a boss?The theory of the case, and the one that has always been most plausible, is that Cohen, and not Trump, initially paid Daniels off because if Trump had paid her, that payment would have been subject to scrutiny – from campaign finance regulators and from the public. And in the waning days of what was a chaotic and flailing election, this was scrutiny that the Trump campaign could not afford.The Stormy Daniels affair is not the most serious of Trump’s alleged crimes, and so it can seem anticlimactic, and even a little ridiculous, that this is the only bit of his wrongdoing that he has been indicted for. A grand jury in Georgia is investigating a phone call he made to the secretary of state there in the wake of the 2020 election, seemingly imploring the official, Brad Raffensperger, to facilitate election fraud in his favor; at the justice department, a series of investigations into the January 6 riot, which disrupted the transfer of power and left five people dead, are proceeding at a glacial pace. He was impeached for it; he was also impeached for holding military aid to Ukraine hostage so he could try to dig up dirt on Joe Biden’s son.Trump also seems to have taken dozens or hundreds of classified documents with him to his tacky resort at Mar-a-Lago, throwing them into boxes like someone stuffing their pockets with tiny shampoo bottles before they leave a fancy hotel. But none of that is what he’s being held accountable for: he’s being held to account for trying to launder his hush money to a porn star.Trump will no doubt claim that the indictment against him on these comparatively trivial grounds is politically motivated, and he’s already got some support from Democrats in making that claim. David Axelrod, the former Obama strategist, characterized the Daniels charges, not unreasonably, as the “least meaningful” of Trump’s offenses. “If he’s going to be indicted in any of these probes, this [is] the one he probably would want first to try and color all of them as politically motivated.”But if anything, what seems politically motivated is the fact that Trump has not been indicted on criminal charges already: his criminality and corruption are so profligate and unconcealed that the failure to charge him – a failure which until Thursday was unanimous among prosecutors across the country – seemed manifestly a result of fear. “No one is above the law” is something prosecutors like to say a lot; but the large-scale impunity for the rich and powerful indicates that they don’t quite believe it.Now that’s changed, at least in a small way. It’s yet to be seen whether any other prosecutors will discover the courage to charge Trump. For now, he’s only been charged on the stupidest and lowest matter possible. Maybe that’s appropriate: Trump the man always seemed a little too small and stupid, his effect on history dramatically outsized to the banality of his character. This isn’t the Trump indictment we wanted, but it might be the one we deserve.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

While the 4 April Wisconsin supreme court race is technically non-partisan, the two candidates have not shied away from taking positions on policies that align with political parties. The Democratic party has spent heavily on the liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz, while conservative candidate Dan Kelly has the backing of Republicans and top conservative donors.The race is already the most expensive state supreme court election in US history, with over $37m in spending. The unprecedented spending and political debate begs the question of why partisan groups are permitted to get involved in the selection of supposedly nonpartisan judges, and why judges are directly elected at all?It’s not uncommon for state supreme court judges to be selected through partisan elections in the United States. Thirty-eight states elect the people who sit on their highest courts in some way, whether it’s partisan elections, non-partisan competitive races, or retention elections where voters get to decide whether to keep someone on the bench.These judges often have the last word on major policy decisions in their states, from reproductive rights to voting policy and redistricting. Since the US supreme court overturned the right to an abortion with its Dobbs decision last year, attention on state supreme court races has intensified, with groups on both sides of the debate recognizing that state courts will have the last say on whether abortion is legal.Douglas Keith, counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice’s democracy program, explained that this political landscape comes at the same time that campaign spending on state supreme court races has already been increasing. Meanwhile, research has shown judges tend to rule in favor of their donors.According to the Brennan Center, the 2019-2020 election cycle set an overall national spending record of $97m. The group is still crunching numbers from 2022, but “I expect to see that we have enter for these races once again,” Keith said.A number of factors have contributed to the record spending, including the fact that the partisan balance of the court is up for grabs.“It’s a little bit of a perfect storm in that we are immediately post-Dobbs and so the awareness of how important these courts are is maybe at a peak,” Keith said, adding that Wisconsin’s election had added significance because it’s a swing state and the winner will determine the ideological leaning of the court heading into the 2024 presidential election.Have US states always allowed voters to elect state supreme court judges?The concept of having voters directly elect state supreme court judges dates back to the mid-19th century when there was a growing frustration that these top decision makers were being selected in “smoke-filled rooms, behind closed doors”, Keith said.“There was a sense that there wasn’t enough transparency,” he added. “That there was political deal-making and horse-trading that people didn’t want in the selection of judges, and there was a movement towards partisan elections.”Each state has a unique history when it comes to deciding who will sit on its top bench. Of the 38 states that currently use some kind of election to select judges for the high court, 16 states empower the governor to appoint judges, who are then reselected in retention elections. Another 14 states have voters select judges in contested, nonpartisan elections and eight states allow voters to select judges in contested, partisan elections.What’s the alternative?A few decades after states moved to partisan elections, some states began taking issue with the political influence involved in these elections and moved towards merit selections. Since 1940, more than half of states have switched at least in part from popular elections or solely appointments to experiment with merit selection.In states that use a merit system, the governor ultimately appoints judges with the help of a nominating commission or board, which is usually composed of a combination of attorneys, other judges, and the general public. The board considers applicants for the position and forwards the best candidates to the governor.Some research has shown that judges selected through a merit process produce higher-quality work than judges selected by partisan elections.The American Bar Association recommends against judicial elections, calling out the “corrosive effect of money on judicial election campaigns” and “attack advertising”.But for the most part, state policy on how to select judges has not changed in recent history, and judicial elections are used to select the vast majority of state judges.“There hasn’t been significant change in a long time,” Keith said. He explained that some states, like Ohio and North Carolina, made smaller changes more recently – both added party labels to their ballots, making these races partisan. But the last state to dramatically change how it selects judges was Rhode Island in 1994.Why have these races drawn such a large increase in spending in recent years?Before recent years, there were sporadic elections that drew large spending. In the 1980s and 1990s, big businesses and trial lawyers were frequently at odds over tort reform, which sometimes led to high-cost elections.The type of spending we see now did not become possible until the 2010 supreme court Citizens United decision, which prohibited the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, opening the floodgates for outside groups to pour money into political races.The Brennan Center has tracked spending in these races through 2020 and found that the 2019-2020 state supreme court election cycle was the most expensive in history, but this year’s Wisconsin race has already broken records for spending in a single election.Is the spending equal on both sides of the political divide?Republicans were first to dedicate vast amounts of financial resources to state supreme court races. In 2014, the Republican State Leadership Committee – which is now the leading spender in state judicial elections – tested whether money could influence the North Carolina supreme court election. The group launched its Judicial Fairness Initiative, a project aimed at backing conservative judges, explaining that it wasn’t enough to elect legislators and governors if they would run into state supreme courts who rejected their policy priorities.It took longer for Democrats to try to match Republicans’ level of spending, but they began to increase spending in state supreme court races as they focused more attention on races that would impact redistricting, especially around the 2020 cycle. According to the Brennan Center, 44% of outside-group spending in 2019-20 state supreme court elections came from groups on the left, marking a higher percentage than in previous cycles.In Wisconsin, Democrats have poured millions of dollars into advertising for Protasiewicz. Of the more than $25m booked in television advertising as of 22 March, Protasiewicz has ordered more than $10m, and outside groups supporting her including A Better Wisconsin Together, Planned Parenthood, and the American Civil Liberties Union have spent an additional $5.4m, giving her a roughly $5m spending advantage in booked advertising over Kelly.Does the increased political spending affect how judges rule once elected to the bench?Though it’s hard to measure the impact of campaign spending and how winning judges will ultimately act on the bench, there has been some research and analysis showing that judges are more likely to rule in favor of major donors and political parties that support them.In their forthcoming book Free to Judge, law professors Michael S Kang and Joanna M Shepherd find that the desire to win re-election results in judges who lean toward the interests and preferences of their campaign donors across all cases.Other research shows that judges tend to be harsher in criminal cases during election years than they are during non-election years, especially when there are more TV ads. 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Donald Trump and his top advisers were caught flat footed by the news of his indictment by the Manhattan grand jury over hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, having expected no charges until at least the end of April and potentially never at all.The former president reckoned – along with his aides – that recent reporting about the grand jury taking a break from next week meant prosecutors in the district attorney’s office were reconsidering whether to seek an indictment over the matter.But that optimism proved to be misplaced when Trump was alerted at Mar-a-Lago to the indictment by his advisers, some of whom had decided to return to Washington after growing tired of waiting with him for several weeks for charges to materialize.The former president issued a pugilistic statement in response to the news and lashed out at the prosecution as political and an effort to hurt his 2024 presidential campaign, before appearing for dinner as usual alongside the other guests at this Florida resort.But in private, Trump was more subdued as he took in the significance of becoming the first sitting or former president to be charged and the changed reality of operating under the threat of an eventual criminal trial, several sources close to him said.The private response showed that for all his outward bravado – including claims that he wanted to be arrested and handcuffed for a “perp walk”because he wanted to project defiance if he was ever indicted – deep down, Trump has always feared the prospect of being criminally charged and its consequences.The charges remain sealed, but are expected to touch on $130,000 that Trump made to Daniels through his then-lawyer Michael Cohen in the final days of the 2016 elections campaign. Trump later reimbursed Cohen with $35,000 checks, and Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal charges over the money.Trump’s mood towards the hush money investigation has fluctuated in recent weeks – from criticising the prospect of criminal charges, to growing impatient and insisting they should charge him already, and then going back to attacking the investigation with vehemence.After the first rally of his 2024 campaign in Texas, Trump told an NBC News reporter he was not frustrated by the case despite appearing quite frustrated.“I’m not frustrated by it. It’s a fake investigation,” Trump said. “This is fake news, and NBC is one of the worst. Don’t ask me any more questions.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump became more optimistic this week, believing – based on no actual evidence – that reports about the grand jury taking a break for most of April could mean the district attorney was having doubts about prosecuting the hush money case and that it was “all over”.Some of Trump’s advisers took that as an opportunity to get out of Palm Beach where they had been waiting with him for weeks for an indictment to arrive.Shortly after 5pm on Thursday, his 2024 campaign advisers learned from a New York Times alert that Trump had been indicted, catching them off guard in part because they assumed they would hear about it first from the Trump lawyers, who had themselves assumed they would confidentially hear it first from prosecutors.Though Trump had indicated that he expected to be one of the first people to be told if he was charged in the hush money case, the sources said, when the news actually arrived, Trump appears to have been one of the very last people to find out. More

For Democrats, Donald Trump’s indictment was proof that no one, not even a former president, was above the law. For Republicans, it was the culmination of a years-long political witch-hunt designed to take down Donald Trump.The unprecedented move by a Manhattan grand jury triggered a wave of predictably partisan responses, reflecting a nation deeply divided over Trump and his presidency, which ended after his failed attempts to cling to power culminated in a deadly assault on the US Capitol. News on Thursday that Trump had become the first ever former US president to face criminal charges drew an audible gasp on Fox News, as broadcasters and viewers processed the extraordinary development.Though the charges remain under seal as of late Thursday, the case centered on payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign to silence claims from the porn star Stormy Daniels and the former model Karen McDougal that they had extramarital affairs with Trump. A spokesperson for the Manhattan district attorney’s office confirmed the indictment and said prosecutors were working with the president’s legal team to coordinate a surrender.Trump, who is running again for president, reacted angrily in a lengthy statement that denounced the grand jury vote as “Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history”.He framed the indictment as part of a long litany of investigations he has faced since he “came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower” to announce his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015. He was the first president to be impeached twice, first over his efforts to pressure Ukraine’s president into announcing a criminal investigation into Joe Biden, and later for his role inciting the violence that unfolded in his name on 6 January 2021.“The Democrats have lied, cheated and stolen in their obsession with trying to ‘Get Trump,’ but now they’ve done the unthinkable – indicting a completely innocent person in an act of blatant Election Interference,” he said. “Never before in our Nation’s history has this been done.”Trump ratcheted up his attacks on the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, accusing him of “doing Joe Biden’s dirty work” while failing to prosecute crime in New York. Many top-ranking Republicans followed Trump’s lead.The notional field of 2024 Republican presidential candidates have treaded carefully around Trump’s legal woes even as they prepare to challenge him for the nomination.Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is seen as Trump’s strongest potential opponent should he declare his candidacy as is expected, called the indictment “un-American” and assailed Bragg as a “Soros-backed” Manhattan prosecutor who was “stretching the law to target a political opponent”.He added that as governor of Florida, where Trump has lived since leaving the White House, he would not oblige an extradition request should Trump refuse to surrender voluntarily, which the former president is expected to do on Tuesday.Nikki Haley, who served as Trump’s UN secretary and is now running against him for the nomination, has attacked the investigation. So too has Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice-president who is contemplating a run for president.“I think the unprecedented indictment of a former president of the United States on a campaign finance issue is an outrage,” Pence said. “And it appears for millions of Americans to be nothing more than a political prosecution.”The House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, said in a statement that Bragg had “irreparably damaged our country in an attempt to interfere in our Presidential election”.“As he routinely frees violent criminals to terrorize the public, he weaponized our sacred system of justice against President Donald Trump,” McCarthy said. “The American people will not tolerate this injustice, and the House of Representatives will hold Alvin Bragg and his unprecedented abuse of power to account.”Ohio congressman Jim Jordan, one of Trump’s fiercest allies in Congress, tweeted simply: “Outrageous”. Jordan has sought to use his perch atop the powerful House judiciary committee to attack the legitimacy of the various investigations into the former president, while pointing his gavel at the Biden administration.Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Trump loyalist, suggested the House retaliate by impeaching Biden “now that the gloves are off”.“Enough of this witch-hunt bullshit,” she concluded.Republican Lindsey Graham, the senior senator from South Carolina, issued a statement calling the indictment “one of the most irresponsible decisions in American history by any prosecutor”. “The chief witness for prosecution is a convicted felon, Michael Cohen, whose previous lawyer said he is untrustworthy. Upon scrutiny, this case folds like a cheap suit.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe White House declined to comment on the indictment of Biden’s predecessor and potential opponent in 2024. But many Democrats, including those who had sought to hold Trump accountable for his conduct as president, sounded a note of satisfaction after years of insisting that no one was above the law.Nancy Pelosi, who presided over the House as speaker during both of Trump’s impeachments, said: “The grand jury has acted upon the facts and the law. No one is above the law, and everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence. Hopefully, the former president will peacefully respect the system, which grants him that right.”Democratic leaders were more muted in their response. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said there should be “no outside political influence, intimidation or interference in the case” and urged calm in response to the indictment.California congressman Adam Schiff, the Democrat who led the prosecution in Trump’s first impeachment trial, said Trump’s “unlawful conduct” was unprecedented in American history.“A nation of laws must hold the rich and powerful accountable, even when they hold high office. Especially when they do. To do otherwise is not democracy,” Schiff said.Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a watchdog organization in Washington, called Trump the “most corrupt president in American history”.“He has spent his entire political career dodging accountability for his wanton disregard for the law. It is finally catching up to him,” its president, Noah Bookbinder, said in a statement. “The charges in New York are the first ever brought against him, but they will not be the last.”This is not the only legal challenge Trump is facing. He remains the subject of three separate criminal investigations, involving his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election that culminated in the January 6 assault on the US Capitol as well as handling of classified documents that he improperly kept after leaving the White House.Clark Brewster, a lawyer representing Daniels, said Trump’s indictment was “no cause for joy”.“The hard work and conscientiousness of the grand jurors must be respected,” he said. “Now let truth and justice prevail. No one is above the law.”Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and a key witness who testified that he arranged the payments to Daniels on Trump’s behalf, said he took “solace in validating the adage that no one is above the law, not even a former president”.“Today’s indictment is not the end of this chapter, but, rather, just the beginning,” said Cohen, who was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to campaign finance charges related to his role in arranging payments for Daniels and McDougal ahead of the 2016 presidential election.Meanwhile, Yusef Salaam, who was exonerated in the infamous Central Park jogger case more than a decade after Trump placed full-page newspaper ads in several New York newspapers calling for the death penalty for him and four other Black and Latino teens wrongly accused of raping a white woman, issued a one-word statement: “Karma”. More

Comedian Chris Rock gazed out at the audience at an awards ceremony in Washington earlier this month. “Are you guys really going to arrest Trump?” he asked bluntly. “This is only going to make him more popular!”Donald Trump has not yet been arrested but is now the first person to occupy the Oval Office to then be charged with a crime. It also raises the prospect of the Republican favorite for the 2024 presidential race to be running for the White House while also being criminally prosecuted – something likely to bring even more chaos to America’s already deeply fractured political landscape.It emerged on Thursday that a Manhattan grand jury has voted to indict Trump over a hush money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential election campaign.Florida-based Trump is now expected to surrender himself on Tuesday to the Manhattan district attorney (DA) to be fingerprinted and photographed for a mugshot – something guaranteed to delight his many opponents, appall his fans and divide the United States even more.30 March 2023 is therefore a day for the history books. It offered an affirmation of the Magna Carta principle that no one, not even the onetime commander in chief, is above the law. The 45th president of the United States is set to stand trial and, if convicted, could find himself behind bars instead of running for re-election.Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said on the MSNBC network: “Tomorrow, in terms of American history, we will be waking up in a different country. Before tonight, presidents in this country were kings.”But while the law is clear, the politics are murky. A criminal charge or even conviction does not prevent someone running for the White House, and Trump is currently leading in opinion polls for the 2024 Republican presidential primary.In the pre-Trump universe, an indictment over a hush money payment to an adult film star would have been career-ending. Candidates have withdrawn from election races for much less.But since 2016, Trump has been a political judo master, turning the weight of opponents and allegations against them to his own advantage. The bigger the alleged crime, the louder he airs grievances and the more he plays the victim – and so far the Republican party has been mostly willing to indulge him.That is the role he will play with an indictment hanging over him. At a campaign rally in Waco, Texas, last weekend, he claimed: “The Biden regime’s weaponization of law enforcement against their political opponents is something straight out of the Stalinist Russia horror show.” He suggested that it is the most serious problem facing America today.In a statement on Thursday following his indictment, Trump said: “This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history… The Democrats have lied, cheated and stolen in their obsession with trying to ‘Get Trump,’ but now they’ve done the unthinkable – indicting a completely innocent person in an act of blatant Election Interference.”Trump will now doubtless set about putting the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, on trial in the court of public opinion. He has already used dehumanising and racist language. A social media post, later removed, showed a photo of Trump holding a baseball bat and apparently looming over Bragg, raising fears of violence against him.America’s tragedy is that the tactic will work with many Republicans. That Bragg is a Democrat from New York will trigger a Pavlovian response in Trump’s favor. That the case is seven years old, based on an untested legal theory and has Michael Cohen, a convicted criminal, as a key witness will provide further ammunition.This pattern came into a focus earlier this month when Trump falsely predicted his own arrest. Republicans leaped to his defence and he reportedly raised $1.5m in three days; on Thursday night he quickly sent out another fundraising email.The drama put Trump back where he wants to be: at the centre of the news cycle. Not coincidentally, it also gave him a boost in the Republican primary polls, extending a lead over Ron DeSantis, even as the Florida governor was on a book tour trying to promote his own brand. Everyone was talking about Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSo it was that, after news of the indictment emerged on Thursday, Republicans again came to his aid. Trump ally Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House of Representatives, accused Bragg of “irreparably” damaging the country “in an attempt to interfere” in the election.JD Vance, a Republican senator for Ohio, described the indictment as “political persecution masquerading as law”, “blatant election interference” and “a direct assault on the tens of millions of Americans who support him”.But the most telling reaction came from DeSantis himself. This could have been the moment for him to break from Trump and prove statesmanlike, calling for dignity and unity in a solemn moment for the nation. Instead he went full Maga.DeSantis said: “The weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda turns the rule of law on its head. It is un-American.” Blowing an antisemitic dog whistle, DeSantis twice linked Bragg to philanthropist George Soros, adding that Florida would not assist in “an extradition request” to send Trump to New York.The spineless responses suggested that, in the short term at least, the indictment will provide a rallying cry for Trump and help rather than hurt him in the 2024 Republican primary. In the for-us-or-against-us binary of American politics, the party base will be for him and against the perceived Democratic elites and the deep state.Yet again, he has thrust America into the political unknown, a twilight zone where precedents do not apply and everyone has to respond on the fly. Can the Manhattan court assemble an impartial jury, and will the timing of the trial collide with the Republican primary?Then, what about the other major legal perils threatening Trump: over the January 6 insurrection, over election interference in Georgia and over the mishandling of classified documents? These cases are arguably more clear-cut and consequential – but not necessarily in the eyes of Republicans. Will he recklessly incite unrest among his supporters?The lesson of the Trump era is that most predictions are wrong. The only certainty is that Thursday will go down as the day when Trump’s age of impunity, in which he was never legally held to account, is over. The man who rose to power leading chants of “Lock her up!” is about to get a taste of his own medicine. More