Trump’s efforts to coax angry supporters into the streets to protest indictment fall flat | Opinion

Former President Donald Trump worked hard for this moment, and no one should be surprised that he was reportedly “relatively excited” en route to his Tuesday arraignment in Manhattan, where he raised a fist to the crowd, just as Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley had done to egg on January 6 seditionists.

Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of filing false business records in connection with “hush money” payments to two women to improve his chances of winning an election. What you think of the case against him almost certainly depends on whether you think it’s holding a former president accountable under the law or failing to do so that would be worse for our democracy.

Opinion

If the fact that this man, under investigation on and off since the 1970s, has at last seen the inside of a courtroom proves that this whole thing is political, then how canny of New York Democrats not only to see 50 years into the future, but to start going after him back when he was one of their own.

Though Trump was cruelly deprived of the perp walk he had spoken of so hopefully, and was denied, too, the handcuffs that would have goosed his fundraising, his presidential campaign was at least cashing in on the indictment by hawking tee-shirts adorned with a fake mugshot of him.

Some faithful members of the party that Donald Trump wolfed down whole, smothered in ketchup, seven years ago, turned out in New York to support him. One woman in the crowd told ABC News that for a former president to be indicted, “there should be a body.”

His ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-GA, kicked off Holy Week by comparing a man charged with paying off a porn star to Jesus Christ: “Trump is joining some of the most incredible people in history being arrested today… Nelson Mandela was arrested, served time in prison. Jesus — Jesus was arrested and murdered by the Roman government.”

Still, Greene did not have as much company on the streets today as she and her role model had hoped. Despite Trump’s best efforts to coax angry supporters into the streets, the “death and destruction” he threatened has not materialized.

And no one has attacked Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg with a baseball bat since our former commander-in-chief shared a picture of himself holding a bat next to a photo of Bragg’s head.

Though Trump’s polling with Republicans has improved since his indictment, the long-term political implications are unknowable, and that’s OK, since they should also be irrelevant.

After the arraignment, Bragg told reporters that in the financial center of the world, prosecutors have a long history of trying similar cases. DAs in New York, he said, have “charged hundreds of felonies” for the falsification of business records. In fact, he said, that’s the “bread and butter” of his office’s white collar work.

In Trump’s case, Bragg said, records were falsified “to cover up crimes relating to the 2016 election” and “hide damaging information from the voting public.”

Specifically, the records were made to look as though Trump was paying Michael Cohen for legal services, when he was instead reimbursing him for money spent to keep porn actress Stormy Daniels from revealing an affair she had with Trump soon after his wife Melania gave birth to their son. He’s also accused of conspiring to keep a second woman from talking about their sexual relationship.

This case has often been compared to the prosecution of former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, who was tried on charges that he illegally spent campaign money to pay a woman whose child he had fathered while his wife, Elizabeth, was fighting the breast cancer that eventually killed her..

Edwards was not convicted, and Trump may not be, either. But no Democrat accused Edwards’ prosecutors of pursuing him for political reasons. (Also, no one compared him to Jesus.) And whatever the outcome of this case, neither politics nor power and privilege should ever have kept Trump or anybody else from being subject to the law.