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Former President Donald Trump gives brief remarks alongside his attorney Todd Blanche at the conclusion of his hush money trial at Manhattan criminal court on July 11.
Judge pushes Trump’s sentencing until after election. Why?
Former President Donald Trump’s sentencing in his New York hush-money case, which had been scheduled for Sept. 18, has been delayed until after Election Day.
Judge Juan Merchan on Friday announced that Trump would not be sentenced until Nov. 26. Merchan said the decision was made to “avoid any appearance — however unwarranted — that the proceeding has been affected by or seeks to affect the approaching presidential election in which the Defendant is a candidate.”
In May, Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in relation to a hush money payment to former porn star Stormy Daniels. Prosecutors argued that the payment was tied to Trump’s desire to protect his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump could be sentenced to up to four years in prison, but legal scholars say this is unlikely given his lack of a criminal record — and the fact this was not a violent crime.
“The court did the right thing in trying to turn down the temperature by avoiding this politically charged sentencing,” says Jon Lieber, Eurasia Group’s managing director for the US.
We’ll also be watching to see how Merchan rules regarding the Trump legal team’s push for the verdict to be overturned and for the case to be dismissed in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision on presidential immunity. Merchan announced on Friday that he was also delaying his decision on this matter until November 12, a week after the election.
A flow chart of possible outcomes to Trump's hush money case
Graphic Truth: How will Trump's hush money trial end?
After weeks of witness testimony in what is likely the only criminal case Donald Trump will face before November’s election, the jury heard closing arguments in the New York hush money trial on Tuesday.
Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment made to former adult entertainment star Stormy Daniels to ensure she did not go public about their alleged sexual encounter before the 2016 election. Under New York law, falsifying business records on its own is a misdemeanor but can be considered a felony if done to hide another crime. If the prosecution can prove that Trump did so to protect his 2016 campaign, then he could find himself in hot water.
Trump’s defensesought to convince the jury that the prosecution’s case relied entirely on an untrustworthy and vindictive Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer who claims he made the payment to Daniels on the former president’s orders.
The prosecution took on the defense’s argument directly, highlighting that much of their evidence relies not on Cohen, but on phone records and the testimony of witnesses who are friendly to Trump.
Outside the courthouse, the Biden campaign directly engaged with Trump’s trials for the first time, staging a news conference with “Goodfellas” actor Robert De Niro and a pair of former police officers. They attempted to hammer home the president’s core reelection argument: That Trump is a threat to Democracy. But this also fueled claims from Trump’s team that the trial is politically motivated.
What’s next? After closing arguments wrap up, the jury could begin deliberations as soon as Wednesday morning. There is no time limit on how long they can take to reach a decision, but all 12 jurors must agree for the judge to accept it. That leaves a lot of room for uncertainty. Here’s how the trial could play out from here.Michael Cohen is questioned by prosecutor Susan Hoffinger in Manhattan state court on May 13, 2024, in this courtroom sketch.
Can the jury trust Trump’s former fixer?
Prosecutors sought to establish how Trump controlled his image (allegedly through payoffs and pressure tactics) and what motivated Cohen to participate so enthusiastically (praise from Trump). He testified that he used his relationship with David Pecker, former CEO of American Media Inc., to buy the life rights to stories that could be damaging to Trump’s campaign, and funnel money through shell corporations to create distance.
Cohen, who served three years in prison for federal crimes including campaign finance violations related to hush-money deals for Trump, was clear that the former president’s interest in killing these stories had little to do with concerns for his marriage. “He wasn't even thinking about [former First Lady Melania Trump], this was all about the campaign," Cohen testified.
The former president’s attorneys will have their turn with Cohen next, and based on their strategy with other witnesses, they’re likely to try to paint Cohen as a known liar. We’ll be watching how he handles cross-examination – and whether Trump sounds off against Cohen on social.
Are bots trying to undermine Donald Trump?
In an exclusive investigation into online disinformation surrounding the reaction to Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, GZERO asks whether bots are being employed to shape debates about the former president’s guilt or innocence. We investigated, with the help of Cyabra, a firm that specializes in tracking bots, to look for disinformation surrounding the online reactions to Trump’s trial. Is Trump’s trial the target of a massive online propaganda campaign – and, if so, which side is to blame?
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Adult film actress Stormy Daniels testified on Tuesday against former President Donald Trump, detailing her sexual encounter with Trump in 2006 and her $130,000 hush money payment from Trump's ex-attorney Michael Cohen before the 2016 election. In the process, she shared explicit details and said she had not wanted to have sex with Trump. This led the defense team to call for a mistrial. Their claim? That the embarrassing aspects were “extraordinarily prejudicial.”
Judge Juan Merchan denied the motion – but also agreed that some of the details from Daniels were “better left unsaid.”
The trouble is, plenty is being said, inside the courtroom and in the court of public opinion – aka social media. With so many people learning about the most important trials of the century online, GZERO partnered with Cyabra to investigate how bots are influencing the dialogue surrounding the Trump trials. For a man once accused of winning the White House off the steam of Russian meddling, the results may surprise you.
Bots – surprise, surprise – are indeed rampant amid the posts about Trump’s trials online. Cyabra’s AI algorithm analyzed 7,500 posts with hashtags and phrases related to the trials and found that 17% of Trump-related tweets came from fake accounts. The team estimated that these inauthentic tweets reached a whopping 49.1 million people across social media platforms.
Ever gotten into an argument on X? Your opponent might not have been real. Cyabra found that the bots frequently comment and interact with real accounts.
The bots also frequently comment on tweets from Trump's allies in large numbers, leading X’s algorithm to amplify those tweets. Cyabra's analysis revealed that, on average, bots are behind 15% of online conversations about Trump. However, in certain instances, particularly concerning specific posts, bot activity surged to over 32%.
But what narrative do they want to spread? Well, it depends on who’s behind the bot. If you lean left, you might assume most of the bots were orchestrated by MAGA hat owners – if you lean right, you’ll be happy to learn that’s not the case.
Rather than a bot army fighting in defense of Trump, Cyabra found that 73% of the posts were negative about the former president, offering quotes like “I don’t think Trump knows how to tell the truth” and “not true to his wife, not true to the church, not true to the country, just a despicable traitor.”
Meanwhile, only 4% were positive. On the positive posts, Cyabra saw a pattern of bots framing the legal proceedings as biased and painting Trump as a political martyr. The tweets often came in the form of comments on Trump’s allies’ posts in support of the former president. For example, in a tweet from Marjorie Taylor Greene calling the trials “outrageous” and “election interference,” 32% of the comments were made by inauthentic profiles.
Many of the tweets and profiles analyzed were also indistinguishable from posts made by real people – a problem many experts fear is only going to worsen. As machine learning and artificial intelligence advance, so too will the fake accounts and attempts to shape political narratives.
Moreover, while most of the bots came from the United States – it was by no means all of them. The location of some of the bots does not exactly read like a list of usual suspects, with only three in China and zero in Russia (see map below).
Cyabra
This is just one set of data based on one trial, so there are limitations to drawing broader conclusions. But we do know, of course, that conservatives have long been accused of jumping on the bot-propaganda train to boost their political fortunes. In fact, Cyabra noted last year that pro-Trump bots were even trying to sow division amongst Republicans and hurt Trump opponents like Nikki Haley.
Still, Cyabra’s research, both then and now, shows that supporters of both the left and the right are involved in the bot game – and that, in this case, much of the bot-generated content was negative about Trump, which contradicts assumptions that his supporters largely operate bots. It’s also a stark reminder to ensure you’re dealing with humans in your next online debate.
In the meantime, check out Cyabra’s findings in full by clicking the button below.
Stormy Daniels is questioned by prosecutor Susan Hoffinger before Justice Juan Merchan during former President Donald Trump's criminal trial.
Stormy embarrassments about the wrong things
Of all the salaciously sloppy moments in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial unfolding just a short walk from GZERO HQ — and there are a lot – one stands out.
No, it’s not the anecdote about Stormy Daniels allegedly spanking Trump with a magazine — a detail that unintentionally evoked nostalgia for the fading benefits of print media. Try spanking a candidate with a digital edition!
No, it’s something far more modest. As the adult entertainer poured out presidential peccadillos about his penchant for satin pajamas, Trump’s lawyer declared that it all was so embarrassing that the jury was now prejudiced against his client. He demanded a mistrial.
State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan had to rule on the nature of embarrassment. What level is so harmful that it erodes the system, in this case, forcing a mistrial? In a sense, this is the core question of our confessional culture: Are there conventions of decorum that preserve human dignity and, if so, how do we adhere to them?
Merchan didn’t ponder this too long. He denied the mistrial but admitted that much of Daniels’ testimony was “better left unsaid.”
It was a cultural comment on the age of oversharing and a flimsy protest against the strategy that Steve Bannon once called “flooding the zone with shit,” but it warrants some attention. Would it help our political culture if some things were left unsaid, or are we actually leaving the most embarrassingly important things unsaid?
It was not lost on anyone that the judge presiding over a case about an adult film star, a president, and a tabloid catch-and-kill hush-money case is perhaps not in the best position to be setting standards of decorum inside the courtroom, let alone outside of it.
Justice Juan Merchan long ago lost control over Donald Trump’s conduct, reduced to threatening him with jail if the former president keeps speaking publicly about witnesses and the court. Trump has already been fined 10 times and doesn’t appear to give a gavel’s bang what Merchan says.
Does jail time scare Trump? Why would it? He’s already turned one mug shot into a fundraising tool. Jail time might be a campaign bonanza.
If there is one quality that the judge and jury take as a given, it’s that Trump is unembarrassable. Long before he defeated Hillary Clinton, he first had to defeat shame itself. And he has.
Caught on tape talking about grabbing women by the “p****,” he went on to win the election. Found guilty of sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and forced to pay her over $83 million in punitive and compensatory damage, he’s now the front-runner in the 2024 campaign.
So it is not like details of this case will prejudice anyone, as the judge ruled. As Trump’s supporters like to say, they want him as their president, not their priest. He’s not the first. Bill Clinton – whose supporters try to forget the blue dress and the cigar – didn’t exactly elevate the office with his behavior, but he remains a powerful political force.
Back in 1992, while visiting some grade six schoolkids in New Jersey for a spelling bee, then Vice President Dan Quayle misspelled the word potato, adding a fateful “e” to the end. That tiny goof ended his political career. He was dubbed a dummy and that was it. Imagine a time when making a simple spelling error was enough to disqualify you from the presidency.
Quayle was embarrassed by it, but, more remarkably, the country was embarrassed that a veep couldn’t spell a basic word. They wanted a leader who was better, and who embodied the standards and ideals the country promises to live up to. That’s the hope that renews the sordid, shabby political process we call democracy and what all great leaders tap into. They are embarrassed not to be better.
This all sounds pretty naïve right now. This week, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem is trying to burnish her bona fides as a potential running mate for Trump. She published a book called “No Going Back,” in which she describes gunning down her 14-month-old puppy, a wirehair pointer named Cricket. Poor Cricket had an “aggressive personality” and had allegedly killed some chickens. So the guv took Cricket to a gravel pit and shot him.
Later that day, she also shot a mean old goat.
Noem admits in the book that “if I were a better politician, I wouldn’t tell the story here.” True. Some things, like shooting your puppy, are better left unsaid. And undone. But she is far from embarrassed. While her book also includes a blatant lie about meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Noem presses ever onward. Judging by the number of talk show appearances, the book is just as likely to sink her politically as it is to turn her into a national figure, a victim of the woke left condemning a hard-nosed politician with a penchant for shooting pets. The shamelessness is breathtaking.
This is not a defense of some old school culture of shame, which has led to much misery for generations of marginalized groups like the LGBTQ community, and people with mental health or addictions. Their lives, identities, and struggles have been pushed into the dark for fear of being shamed and it still happens today, where suicide rates among LGBTQ kids run rampant. Speaking out and saying the once unspeakable is one of the great cultural advances of modernity.
But that doesn’t mean everything needs to be said, especially by political leaders, and it also doesn’t mean the public shouldn’t demand that leaders be embarrassed by their misconduct.
Apologize. Get help. Resign. Don’t run again. Leaders caught in embarrassing moments have options that can lead to wider cultural benefits like raising standards and enforcing accountability. Not every playbook needs to be about pushing through the noise, blaming others, declaring yourself the victim, and generally transforming all politics into a social media campaign for clout and clicks.
But this is all a tired culture war, isn’t it? The truth is, the most embarrassing things about our culture all too often remain unsaid. Let’s go back to poor Dan Quayle for a moment and his inability to spell. Instead of making it a forgotten political joke, it actually opens a space to talk about something truly shameful: literacy rates.
One in five American adults, or 43 million Americans, are functionally illiterate. They cannot complete a basic test designed to measure “the ability to understand, evaluate, use and engage with written texts.”
Over half of US adults have a literacy rate below the sixth-grade level, according to the National Literacy Institute. If you think education is expensive, the cost of not educating kids is higher. Three-quarters of people on welfare can’t read, while kids who drop out of school end up costing society over $40 billion a year in social services and lost tax dollars. Numeracy rates are even lower.
Has this stuff been mentioned on the campaign trail? I must have missed it.
I think one reason no one talks about things like literacy is that it’s just too embarrassing to admit that, in the richest countries in the world, literary rates are so low. Talking about a president's sex life is now normal, but when it comes to reading and writing … it seems that’s better left unsaid.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump walks amid his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments, at Manhattan Criminal Court on May 7, 2024, in New York City, U.S. Trump has been charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records, which prosecutors say was an effort to hide a potential sex scandal, both before and after the 2016 presidential election. Trump is the first former U.S. president to face trial on criminal charges.
Trump flirts with detention
American cable news has been riveted for weeks by the courtroom spectacle of former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump. That was even before Stormy Daniels, the famous porn star at the center of the so-called “hush-money” trial, took the stand on Tuesday to offer provocative details about an encounter with Trump that he insists never happened.
But this trial’s most consequential questions of the moment are …
- Will Judge Juan Merchan finally jail Trump for repeatedly defying a gag order that blocks the former president from speaking publicly about potential witnesses and most people associated with the court and the prosecutor’s office?
- What happens if Merchan does order Trump into detention?
On Monday, the judge fined Trump for the tenth time, this time for a Truth Social post complaining about his lawyer’s lack of time to prepare for a witness – in this case, the aforementioned adult entertainer. Merchan warned that, “Going forward, this court will have to consider a jail sanction.”
Trump removed the offending post, but how long will he resist the temptation to again violate the judge’s order?
If Merchan does give the confinement order, Trump will likely be held in a room, with security protection, within the courthouse itself. He may well be released after just a few hours.
If this happens, we’ll be watching to see whether Trump is chastened by the experience or becomes more defiant – and what Judge Merchan will do if Trump violates the order again.
What the Trump trial circus is missing
On the first day of the first criminal trial of a former US president, I couldn’t resist. The courthouse is 15 minutes from my desk here in New York, so I jumped on the 6 Train and headed out to the scrum of protesters, counterprotesters, journalists, police, and other gawkers in Lafayette Park outside the courthouse.
There was lots – lots – of yelling. Just as I arrived, a guy in a “Gays for Trump, You got a problem with that, Bitch!” T-shirt was at the center of a smartphone scrum screaming at a woman holding a “Trump is the Definition of Depravity” sign that she was a “pedophile.”
Before long, content creators from both sides of the national divide were on the scene, livestreaming and shouting at each other about Hunter Biden, about inflation, about child labor, about immigration. Even Triumph the Comic Insult Dog barked into the mix, asking one of several Proud Boys stalking the scene in wraparound shades: “If Trump is convicted, do you think he’ll be sentenced to four years … in the White House?”
The only people not screaming, as I recall, were four elderly Chinese-American ladies in huge sunglasses, sitting on a bench under a leafless sweetgum tree, holding hand-painted signs that read: “Kangaroo Court, Banana Republic.”
It was, in all, the usual performative mayhem about the usual subjects. But the one thing that almost no one was actually yelling about was the thing that was going on inside the building 100 feet away: the trial itself.
All that circus, and hardly a word about the elephant in the ring.
But isn’t that how a lot of us talk about Trump’s trials and titillations these days? We argue about the politics rather than look at the merits. And that’s a bad thing.
For Trump, the political cage matches keep the focus right where he wants it: on the narrative that he, as a popular threat to a corrupt establishment, is the victim of a political witch hunt. That the ruling party is using the justice system to silence a political rival. That those ladies with the big sunglasses under the sweetgum tree are right.
On the other side, people talk about the long-coming legal downfall of a demagogue seen as a threat to the Republic itself. The Capone of politics nabbed on his own kind 0f tax rap.
“People know what verdict they want in this case,” says Richard Klein, a professor of law at Touro Law School and a longtime trial criminal defense lawyer. “But few people are focusing on DA Bragg’s case against Trump. They're focusing on all the noise around it.”
To review, briefly. Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg alleges that Trump falsified business records to conceal a payment that was made, in the fall of 2016, to a porn star who says she and Trump had a fling.
“Hush money” is bad, but that’s not actually what the trial is about. Paying someone to keep quiet isn’t necessarily a crime, and fiddling with business records in New York isn’t a felony.
Bragg’s case elevates the charges by arguing that this book-cooking was done with the intention of committing other felonious infractions – including, it seems, a conspiracy to influence the outcome of the 2016 election and commit tax fraud.
To prove this intent, Bragg will bring various witnesses, including Trump’s former lawyer and fixer-in-chief Michael Cohen, who made the payments, as well their recipient, the actress known as “Stormy Daniels.”
Legal scholars like Klein say Bragg’s approach is something of a high-wire act. He is linking dozens of lower-level crimes – some of which Trump appears to have admitted publicly – to harder-to-prove felonious ones, and then asking a jury to decide that Trump did all of this to sway an upcoming election rather than, say, simply to save his marriage or protect his kids from scandal.
The key witnesses, moreover, aren’t exactly folks with an unblemished reputation for truthtelling. Cohen has already admitted to lying under oath previously.
How much does this matter? If Bragg fails to convince the jury, Trump will be vindicated – look, he’ll say, these kangaroo court prosecutors came at me and 12 very good people of New York saw through it. This will color the politics of the other three cases he faces.
If Trump is convicted, of course, it may not move the needle for the 35% of “you got a problem with that bitch!”Americans who are unwaveringly fanatically loyal to him.
But about half of Americans say if Trump is convicted he should not be president again. That includes 14% of Republicans and, perhaps more importantly, a third of independents who say a guilty verdict would sway their vote. In a tight election – and this one will be tight – that could certainly be the difference.
As I went to file this, news broke that the jury has been set for the trial. And so we’re off. I may not be able to resist heading down to Lafayette square for some good mayhem again in the coming weeks – but as a society it’s a mistake to let that political circus distract us from the real drama in the courtroom itself.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump arrives at Trump Tower, after his indictment by a Manhattan grand jury following a probe into hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels, in New York City, U.S April 3, 2023.
What We’re Watching: Trump’s day in court, Turkey stuffing Sweden, Egypt buddying up
Trump’s arraignment
Donald Trump has a busy day ahead of him Tuesday. He returned to the Big Apple Monday night and, after getting some shut-eye in Trump Tower, the former president will head to the Manhattan courthouse on Tuesday for his indictment. After his court appearance and a quick photo-op, he’ll jet back to Mar-a-Lago before an evening news conference.
Sound like an orchestrated plan? That’s because Trump’s team wants to capitalize on the publicity blitz around his arrest to bolster his bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. There’s reason to believe this is working: Since the news of his indictment dropped, his campaign claims to have raised $7 million, and his polling numbers have soared above other Republican candidates.
On March 30, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg brought the results of his investigation before a Manhattan grand jury, which voted to indict the former president. Trump is expected to plead not guilty on Tuesday.
While the charges against him have not been revealed, they likely involve Trump's reimbursement to his former attorney and “fixer,” Michael Cohen, who paid adult film star Stormy Daniels $130,000 in exchange for her silence ahead of the 2016 election. The Trump Organization then filed Cohen’s $420,000 reimbursement and bonus as a “legal expense.”
Falsifying business records is only a misdemeanor in New York, but if it is done with the intent to commit or cover up another crime – namely, violating campaign finance laws – then Trump could be looking at a Class E felony and a minimum of one year in prison.
Trump will be the first former US president to be indicted on criminal charges. But whether his indictment will push the GOP to jump ship in favor of another candidate, or what it means for the campaign if they don’t, remains unclear.
Turkey keeps stuffing Sweden — why?
On Tuesday, Finland finally joins NATO, lengthening the alliance’s border with Russia by 800 miles and adding to its ranks some of the world’s most fearsome snow snipers. Good work, Mr. Putin!
But remember who isn’t joining the club? Sweden, whose accession bid remains blocked by NATO member Turkey, who says Stockholm still hasn’t done enough to quash Kurdish terrorist groups that are at war with the Turkish government. Note that Turkey dropped similar objections about Finland last week but is still squeezing Sweden.
Why? For one thing, Turkey’s pugnacious President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan faces a very tough election in May, and flexing against the West like this can stoke nationalist passions in his favor. He may also seek concessions from his Western partners elsewhere, say, on Washington’s refusal to sell him state-of-the-art fighter jets, or its support for Kurdish militias in Syria.
For years, Erdoğan has played a shrewd game – as a NATO member but friend to Putin; a European partner on the migrant crisis but at a price. By greenlighting Finland while holding back on Sweden, he’s showing he’s willing to be reasonable but that he expects his pound of flesh too. Will it work?
A battered Egypt searches for friends
Times are tough – economically speaking – in Egypt, and President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi is looking to mend and shore up relations across the region. On Monday, el-Sissi traveled to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, aka MBS, the country’s de facto leader.
El-Sissi's visit comes as the economy of import-reliant Egypt is reeling as a result of economic mismanagement and Russia’s war in Ukraine. (Egypt has been forced to devalue its currency three times over the past year.)
While Riyadh has long doled out funds to help keep cash-strapped Egypt afloat, it recently said that it will no longer hand out blank checks and that Cairo should implement reforms to receive aid. El-Sissi likely wants to convince MBS that he’s already making some changes as part of a deal with the International Monetary Fund.
Another big topic on the agenda? Reintegrating Syria, deemed a pariah by the West, into the Arab League. This comes just days after Egypt and Syria held high-level talks for the first time in a decade as Cairo looks to reestablish diplomatic ties with Bashar al-Assad. Indeed, Egypt is just the latest Arab country to welcome Syria back in from the cold, with reports that el-Sissi hopes to eventually win lucrative contracts to help rebuild the war-torn country.