The Manhattan district attorney’s charges underscore how profoundly unsuited Trump is for the office he is now again seeking.
The crimes Donald Trump is charged with are a strange fit for the drama and solemnity that ought to accompany the first-ever criminal charges to be filed against a former president. They concern payments allegedly coordinated by Trump to silence women who, in advance of the 2016 election, otherwise might have spoken publicly about their past sexual relationships with him. One of the women paid off is Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model; the other, Stormy Daniels, is an adult-film star. Also involved is a former Trump Tower doorman who allegedly received $30,000 to stop talking about his claim—for which years of reporting have failed to produce any evidence—that Trump had fathered an illegitimate child. The whole business is pure New York–tabloid absurdity.
The case isn’t immediately connected to the survival of American democracy as is the federal investigation into Trump’s responsibility for the January 6 insurrection or the Georgia probe into his efforts to meddle in the state’s counting of the 2020 vote. It lacks the urgent national-security concerns posed by Trump’s ferreting away of classified documents at his Florida estate. And yet it would be a mistake to brush it off as unserious. The Manhattan case, in its own quirky way, underscores how profoundly unsuited Trump is for the office he once held and which he is now again seeking.
For much of yesterday, the day of Trump’s arraignment, the mood around the Manhattan courthouse and on cable news was that of a circus. A group of protesters, counterprotesters, and journalists waited outside. Someone was handing out whistles. Television cameras tracked the former president’s journey by motorcade from Trump Tower to the courthouse, producing footage uncomfortably reminiscent of O. J. Simpson’s 1993 flight from police. Inside the courtroom, though, Judge Juan Merchan had banned cameras and other electronics. One of the few photographs permitted by the judge shows Trump seated at a dark wooden table with his lawyers, chin thrust forward, expression blank. He pleaded not guilty.
At a press conference following the arraignment, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg argued that the case was fundamentally about lies—“like so many of our white-collar prosecutions.” Trump, he alleged, had “lied again and again to protect his interests, and to evade the laws to which we are all held accountable.”
Bragg was, to some extent, on the defensive.
