Trial Day!

Campaign stops in New York.

After numerous attempts to delay his criminal trial, former president Donald J. Trump will appear in Manhattan Superior Court. The jury selection is today and many of the prospective jurors must be impartial and able to serve six to eight weeks.

Judge Juan M. Merchan has issued a gag order barring Trump from commenting publicly about witnesses, prosecutors, court staff and jurors in his upcoming hush-money criminal trial, citing the former president’s history of “threatening, inflammatory, denigrating” remarks about people involved in his legal cases.

He continues to violate the gag order.

This criminal trial is based on election and campaign finance violations in which the former president ordered his former lawyer to issue payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal through shadow payments by AMI Media.

Trump's former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen and AMI Media's David Pecker will be witnesses as well as Daniels and McDougal.

This a hush money case is going to be a challenge for Alvin Bragg, the county district attorney. Bragg must prove that Trump deliberately wanted to pay women who he had affairs with to not tell their stories. In order to stifle an embarrassment, he ordered illegal payments  to be conducted through shadow payments.

This is a historical first. 

A former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee is being criminally charged.

Trump is very definition of white privilege.

It’s the first criminal trial of any former U.S. commander-in-chief and the first of Trump’s four indictments to go to trial.

Because he is also the presumptive nominee for this year’s Republican ticket, the trial will produce the head-spinning split-screen of a presidential candidate spending his days in court and, he has said, “campaigning during the night.”