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    Will Trump indictment make white evangelicals ditch ‘imperfect vessel’?

    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

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    The Guardian view on Trump’s indictment: he’ll fight the law. Who will win? | Editorial

    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

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    A 2006 encounter and cash for silence: how the Trump-Stormy Daniels case unfolded

    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

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    Trump will not be put in handcuffs for court date, lawyer says

    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

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    Gasp heard on Fox News as Donald Trump indictment announced – video

    The news that Donald Trump had become the first former US president to face criminal charges drew an audible gasp on Fox News, as broadcasters and viewers processed the extraordinary development. ‘We have just gotten word that former president Donald Trump has been indicted,’ the host begins, while a stunned gasp is audible from off-camera. ‘What?’ asks another incredulous voice, as the presenter explains to Fox News’s afternoon audience that Trump will be charged in relation to an alleged ‘hush-money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels’ More

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    Donald Trump supporters surround Mar-a-Lago home after indictment – video

    Supporters of Donald Trump gathered outside his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida to show their support for the former US president after he was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury. The case is centred on a hush money payment made to the adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election. No former US president has ever been criminally indicted. The news is set to shake the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, in which Trump leads most polls More

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    Hush money to a porn star: of course this was how Trump was indicted | Moira Donegan

    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