Florida’s most famous resident adds to his résumé: criminal defendant. Thank a porn star | Opinion

The irony isn’t lost on me.

Florida’s most famous resident added to his résumé the title of “criminal defendant” on Tuesday. What finally caught up to Donald Trump were the Americans his presidency hurt the most: women.

But, for all the women Trump has wronged, including Hillary Clinton, for all he disparaged and diminished, including the immigrant mothers whose babies his administration ripped from their arms, we can thank a porn star who wouldn’t go away quietly for his indictment and arrest.

At last, the man who boasted that he was untouchable is facing justice. He could kill in plain sight on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, he famously said.

Now, a new legal chapter in the saga of Trump and Trumpism is being written, but in places like Florida, the damage is done and, most likely, irreversible.

As the historic indictment, arrest and arraignment of the former president unfolded in a New York City courtroom — a multi-count felony case that arose from the cover-up of his tryst with stripper Stormy Daniels — Florida’s women are fighting for their reproductive lives.

They’re going up against Trump’s creation: a GOP led by Gov. Ron DeSantis that’s abrasive, dominating, intrusive — and close to imposing a near-total abortion ban in Florida.

READ MORE: White House or jail? Historians see Trump arraignment as start of an uncertain chapter

Hush payments

Had Trump not conspired to keep Daniels silent with hush payments disguised as business expenses, the sex scandals could have influenced the outcome of the close 2016 presidential election against the former secretary of state. Clinton, the most qualified candidate of the two by far, won the popular vote, after all.

Without a President Trump, women in Florida and other red and purple states wouldn’t be facing abortion bans or life-altering changes in abortion time limits.

Without Trump’s political commitments, there might not have been a Republican debt to pay to the anti-abortion ultra-conservative Christian base with the appointment of anti-abortionists to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Only Trump would so carelessly appoint another man, Brett Kavanaugh, who like him, was accused of sexual assault (in Kavanaugh’s case, in his youth). And there wouldn’t have been a Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a well-known anti-choice Catholic who lied to the Senate when she said she wouldn’t vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

As a result of those appointments giving anti-choice conservatives a majority, a Florida senator, Lauren Book, and the former Agriculture Commissioner, Nikki Fried, now have an arrest record for staging a sit-in at Tallahassee’s City Hall to protest the state Senate vote.

Clinton gets last laugh

One could say that Clinton got the last laugh Tuesday when Trump became the first former president to be criminally charged.

The boisterous misogynist, twice impeached and twice rescued from shame by fellow Republicans in Congress — infamous for outwitting the law and using the media to his advantage, has gotten what he deserves.

For once, he has to answer before a judge — the well-respected New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Manuel Merchan, and his rants of entitlement to immunity are useless.

According to the indictment unsealed Tuesday, he will stand trial on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records and conspiracy in connection with payments to Daniels and another woman, former Playboy model Karen McDougal, made before the 2016 presidential election. He pleaded not guilty.

He underestimated these women and overestimated how this country would react to this attempt to stop the democratic transition of power in 2020, another shameful first he inflicted on this nation.

But the damage he has done to America’s women while feeding his celebrity ego, hiding his and his company’s grift and keeping himself immune from prosecution with yet a second presidential run is, unfortunately, irreparable in some states.

What would have been unconstitutional under the protection of Roe v. Wade and impossible for the Florida Legislature to pass and legally sustain is now a bill that would ban most abortions in the state after six weeks. This is now likely the reality Florida’s most vulnerable women will face.

Republicans will force them to give birth against their will.

For them, whether Trump has another shot at the White House, or more likely, a stay in Rikers, the damage of his reign is far from over.

And the student Trump leaves, DeSantis, is outdoing his strongman teacher.

The drama of the indicted ex-president will play out for God knows how long from Mar-a-Lago to Manhattan, like an edge-of-your-seat Netflix series.

For Floridians sick of it all, there’s no respite from Trump and his GOP.