As a former president Donald TrumpAs the first criminal trial begins, one battle takes place in a Manhattan courtroom, where he faces 34 felony counts of falsifying company records.
But there is another battle taking place in the court of public opinion, which concerns a much more fundamental question: what should this process actually be called?
Many media outlets – including The New York Times – have used “hush money trial” as shorthand for the procedure. It’s a nod to the fact that Trump is accused of making a payout and then falsifying company records, to cover up a possible sex scandal involving a porn actor.
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Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has argued that the case is about something much bigger: that the payment to Stormy Daniels was part of an effort to hide information from voters before the 2016 presidential election.
“It’s a case of election interference,” he said in an interview on NY1 in January.
Trump, who has always understood the power of catchy shorthand, is trying to call the case the “Biden trial,” falsely claiming that the allegations were orchestrated by the president to influence the 2024 election.
Disagreement over the most basic facts is a regular feature of American politics, especially when Trump is involved. He describes the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 as a beautiful day. He falsely says the 2020 election was stolen. So it’s not surprising that he has tried to reframe his lawsuit as interference in the 2024 election — even as he tries to turn it to his advantage by using it to attract attention in New York and raise money in the whole country.
Crucially, the judge, Juan Merchan, appears to follow Bragg’s view of the case – and it is his interpretation that may matter most.
“The allegations are essentially that Donald Trump falsified business records to conceal an agreement with others to unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election,” Merchan wrote in a court filing, outlining how he plans to prosecute the case to explain to jurors.
The Bragg framing
When Bragg first announced he was indicting Trump last year, the case seemed legalistic and complex.
Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, Daniels had made a $130,000 payment to buy her silence about a sexual encounter she said she had with Trump, who denies the encounter. Trump, Bragg said, had hidden records of the payments he made to Cohen to repay him.
“True and accurate business records are important everywhere,” Bragg said in outlining the allegations. That’s not the sexiest way to describe the case, which instead became known as the hush money trial.
In that appearance, Bragg never used the exact phrase “hush money.” He argued that the accounting violations were committed to cover up at least one of three different crimes, including the campaign finance violations for which Cohen was convicted in 2018.
“That payment,” Bragg said at the time, “was intended to conceal damaging information from the voting public.”
Bragg and his team spread the idea of influencing the election in key documents in the case, and he brought it up in his public interviews.
“It’s not about money for sex, and that’s not the point,” he said in a radio interview on WNYC in late December. “We would say it involves conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York corporate filings to cover it up.”
It’s a somewhat novel theory that has been the subject of ping-ponging opinion pieces from legal experts, but was validated by a federal judge when Trump’s lawyers tried to move the case to federal court.
The Trump framing
Trump’s lawyers have worked hard to suppress any suggestion that the hush money payment was intended to influence the 2016 election. They say he just wanted to save himself from public shame.
“A candidate’s attempts to keep certain matters personal are neither inappropriate nor illegal,” they wrote in one filing.
But publicly, Trump and his allies have used a different tactic. However, Trump has incorrectly called it the “Biden process.” President Joe BidenHis administration has nothing to do with the case. The case against Cohen was prosecuted by federal prosecutors during Trump’s term in office; the Justice Department never brought charges against Trump himself in this case.
“Bragg is stepping in for what the DOJ failed to do,” said Jed Handelsman Shugerman, a law professor critical of Bragg’s case. But when Trump calls the case the “Biden trial,” he ignores the distance federal prosecutors have deliberately kept from this case.
Yet Trump continues to stand by his baseless claim that the trial is part of a plot by Democrats to influence the 2024 election. In one filing, his lawyers said the case denied the public the right to see Trump’s campaign.
It’s an “I’m rubber, you’re glue” strategy reminiscent of Trump’s claim to the concept of “fake news.” It’s also unfounded and somewhat absurd, experts say.
Calling the prosecution of a political candidate election interference “would allow anyone to frustrate any prosecution of wrongdoing by simply declaring, ‘I’m running,’” said Alberto Gonzales, a Republican who served as attorney general during the Trump administration. elections. President George W. Bush. “To me it’s foolish.”
Dan Richman, a former federal prosecutor and law professor at Columbia University, said: “Trump has been impeached twice for attempting to disrupt the election and now that his hush money payment is also framed that way, Trump seems to think his base is enjoying de A reversal of the playground where others are accused of doing what one is told to do.”
And then there’s everyone else
I asked Ben Protess, Maggie Haberman and Jonah Bromwich, some of my New York Times colleagues who covered the trial, how they preferred to refer to the case. They prefer clearer terms that tell more of the story. They told me that Trump is more accurately accused of a “cover-up of a sex scandal,” or of “falsifying data to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to derail his 2016 campaign.”
And then there is another group that prefers not to refer to the matter at all. That would be Biden and his aides, who are trying to create a contrast with Trump without giving the impression that they are trying to profit from his legal troubles.
But Biden’s campaign has not completely resisted delving into its own shorthand. On Monday, campaign officials emailed reporters a press release ostensibly about abortion rights that contained several striking words. It said Trump’s strategy on abortion will not yield “wins” and said Trump’s campaign was “deeply asleep” on the issue — just as he appeared to be in court at one point Monday.
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