On Monday, the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president in the nation’s history will begin in a Manhattan courtroom with a defendant, Donald Trump, who is seeking to fight off four separate criminal prosecutions amid his bid to return to the White House.
The Republican Party’s 2024 presumptive nominee’s strategy so far: actively and angrily working to undermine the legitimacy of the legal system in New York and elsewhere in the eyes of tens of millions of Americans.
“This is what you call a communist show trial,” Trump said at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday. “We don't win this election, this country is finished.”
His supporters responded with chants of “we love Trump.”
“I love you too. That's why I put up with this,” Trump responded. “Remember, I’ve been indicted more than Al Capone, the great gangster.”
Trump faces 34 felony charges in his hometown where he built his businesses, first tested his political gifts and crafted the persona that helped propel him to the presidency eight years ago. But it’s also the town where he learned, over the decades, how to use money, intimidation, the media and fixers to make problems go away in a manner Manhattan prosecutors now say crossed the line from keeping one’s personal life to one’s self to the criminal falsification of business records during a presidential campaign.
And it’s the city where a jury recently ruled in a civil trial that he was liable for sexual assault of a woman in the 1990s and where New York state secured a $454 million civil judgement against the former president for defrauding bankers and insurers for years, a decision Trump is now appealing.
Of his four criminal prosecutions — the Manhattan trial, the Florida federal probe into his handling of classified documents, and the Washington federal and Georgia county-level prosecutions centered on his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election — the hush money trial is the most likely to be completed by November. He faces a total of 88 felony charges across the four cases.
The details of the hush money case — which centers on efforts to cover up Trump’s alleged infidelity with an adult film actress prior to running for president in 2015 — and the fact that Trump will spend valuable time during the campaign sitting in Manhattan criminal court are not ideal for the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee. He has made as much clear, having his appeals to move or delay the case repeatedly denied in recent days and railing against the judge, the judge’s daughter, the prosecutors and potential witnesses, including his former lawyer, for weeks on social media and in public appearances.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released last week found 64% of registered voters believe the charges in the hush money case are very or somewhat serious, though that is the lowest number across his four prosecutions. A similar total (63%) said it was “believable” Trump falsified business records and committed fraud, including 29% of Republicans and 62% of independents. About half believe Trump and some Republicans are “working to delegitimize law enforcement to prevent criminal convictions against Trump,” including one-fifth of Republicans and 44% of independents.
Just under a quarter of Republicans said they wouldn’t vote for Trump if he was convicted of a felony by a jury and another 24% said they didn’t know if they would cast their ballot for him if convicted. Just 37% of Republicans said they would vote for Trump if he was serving prison time.
Voters will have their say on Nov. 5. Even if Trump is convicted, there is no law barring a convicted felon, even one in prison, from running for president. He has pleaded not guilty and claims, without evidence, the prosecution is politically motivated and orchestrated by his Democratic rival, President Joe Biden — who has no role in county-level prosecutorial decisions and has uniformly declined to discuss the case publicly.
But, in the end, the question of whether the former president vying to return to power is a criminal in the eyes of the law will be left up to 12 New Yorkers. However peerless a singular figure like Trump may seem, a jury of his peers will begin being selected on Monday.
What Trump is charged with
Last April, after years of speculation, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced a 34-count felony indictment of falsifying business records, the first of any criminal investigation of Trump in his decades of public life to reach that point. Days later, Trump pleaded not guilty in a brief court appearance as thousands of supporters, allies, counter protestors and media members from across the globe gathered outside.
Each of the 34 counts are for falsifying New York state business records “to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing at the time. While falsifying business records is generally a misdemeanor in New York, Bragg bumped the charges up to first degree falsifying business records because, he argued in his April 2023 press conference announcing the indictment, that Trump did so in “to conceal crimes that hid damaging information from the voting public.” While Bragg didn’t charge Trump for those supposed crimes, he said he did not have to for the business records charges to be in the first degree, a class E felony — New York’s lowest level of felony that carries a maximum sentence of four years. New York state prosecutors were involved in nearly 10,000 cases with falsifying business records in the first degree charges between 2015 and April 2023, according to a New York Law Journal analysis of court data.
“From August 2015 to December 2017, the Defendant orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant’s electoral prospects,” prosecutors wrote in the indictment. “In order to execute the unlawful scheme, the participants violated election laws and made and caused false entries in the business records of various entities in New York. The participants also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme.”
Trump is accused of lying on 34 documents: 11 checks, 11 invoices and 12 ledger entries.
What Trump is alleged to have done
The case centers on an $130,000 payment arranged by Trump’s longtime fixer and personal attorney Michael Cohen, who later served jail time and flipped on his boss, to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Daniels, who has said she’s been inundated with death threats, says she had an affair with the then-business magnate in 2006, a year after his marriage to his current wife Melania and months after the birth of their son Barron.
For a decade, the alleged affair was never made public. But in fall of 2016, as Trump was in a heated presidential election, the editor-in-chief of the National Enquirer reached out to the longtime tabloid luminary’s lawyer to let him know Daniels was shopping the story around, prosecutors said. The Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., had already helped Trump earlier in the campaign cover up another alleged affair around the same time period with Playboy model Karen McDougal, according to prosecutors and her own public statements.
Cohen and Trump arranged for Cohen to pay Daniels $130,000 through a shell company in exchange for her silence, according to the indictment. At first they tried to delay the payment until after the election, but ultimately Cohen made the payment by taking out a line of credit on his personal home and wiring the money to Daniels’ lawyer in late October with a promise from Trump he’d be paid back, prosecutors allege.
Paying a woman to stay silent about alleged infidelity is not necessarily illegal. But prosecutors are arguing that to conceal the unseemly story from the American public, Trump falsified financial documents as he reimbursed Cohen and agreed to pay him a total of $420,000 for his loyalty. The arrangement, prosecutors wrote, was finalized days into Trump’s presidency in an Oval Office meeting at the White House.
“In February 2017, one month into his presidency, I’m visiting President Trump in the Oval Office for the first time, and it’s truthfully awe-inspiring. He’s showing me all around and pointing to different paintings. And he says to me something to the effect of, ‘don’t worry, Michael. Your January and February reimbursement checks are coming. They were FedEx’d from New York. And it takes a while for that to get through the White House system,” Cohen testified to Congress in 2019. “As he promised, I received the first check for the reimbursement of $70,000 not long thereafter.”
Prosecutors allege Trump and then-Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg (who is now on a second five month stint at New York City’s Rikers Island jail for crimes committed while working for the former president) conspired to falsify 34 distinct business records to make it appear Cohen had a retainer with the company — he did not, according to the indictment — and that invoices for the $420,000 agreement were labeled “legal expenses.” The payments were made with checks from Trump’s personal bank account, Bragg’s team wrote..
Cohen, who began working for Trump in 2007, pleaded guilty to charges of tax evasion, making false statements to a federally-insured bank and campaign finance violations in 2018. The case centered, in part, on Cohen making financial contributions to Trump’s 2016 campaign in the form of the payments to McDougal and Daniels, far exceeding in value the then-$2,700 limit on contributions to presidential candidates.
As part of his plea agreement, Cohen said under oath in court that he arranged the payments “in coordination with, and at the direction of” Trump.
He was sentenced to three years in prison — as well as another concurrent two month sentence for lying to Congress to protect Trump in 2017 — and served his time at a federal prison in Otisville, N.Y., for about a year before being released during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. After a few months of house arrest, he was returned to Otisville until a federal judge ruled the Trump administration retaliated against him for his public heel turn on his old boss.
“Mr. Trump is a conman. He asked me to pay off an adult film star with whom he had an affair, and to lie about it to his wife, which I did,” Cohen told Congress in 2019. “And lying to the First Lady [Melania Trump] is one of my biggest regrets, because she is a kind, good person, and I respect her greatly. And she did not deserve that.”
Cohen is expected to be called to testify by the Manhattan district attorney’s office during the upcoming trial, though he noted in an interview published last week he would rather not.
“I don’t want to testify. I have been extremely clear about it. I have already testified before the Mueller team. I’ve testified before seven congressional committees. I’ve testified to the New York attorney general. I’ve been part of grand jury indictments,” Cohen told Politico. “I’m not asking to be a witness, let alone be referred to as a ‘key’ witness. I am a non-party subpoenaed witness. My intention is to comply with this subpoena, though I would prefer not to.”
Other potential witnesses could include the former Enquirer editor-in-chief Dylan Howard, former AMI CEO David Pecker, Daniels and McDougal themselves, and former Trump employees and political advisors — including former director of Oval Office operations Madeleine Westerhout, whose lawyer confirmed to ABC News she has been subpoenaed to testify.
Trump’s lawyers indicated they may call Bradley Smith, a former chair of the Federal Election Commission, to testify on campaign finance law and prosecutors said they may call Adav Noti, the executive director of the nonprofit watchdog Campaign Legal Center, according to court documents.
And Trump said on Friday that he may testify himself.
Trump’s defense strategy
As he has through his public life and political career, Trump has so far adopted an aggressive and hostile public relations and legal strategy, lobbing insults and appeals at the court in the hopes to delay the trial — or scuttle it altogether.
Last week, three of Trump’s appeals to delay the case were shot down by a New York appeals court as he fought to remove Judge Juan Merchan or relocate the case out of Manhattan.
He continues to maintain his innocence and depicts the trial as political persecution orchestrated by his political enemies to keep him from returning to power.
“They're weaponizing government, they're trying to harm your favorite president, hurt him, so that we can't win an election. They've weaponized elections, like a third world country, like a banana republic,” Trump said in Pennsylvania on Saturday. New York’s “legal system is shot. It's a joke all over the world. But when I walk into that courtroom, I know I will have the love of 200 million Americans behind me, and I will be fighting for… the freedom of 325 million Americans.”
At the Pennsylvania rally, Trump called Merchan “crooked,” “corrupt” and “highly conflicted.” Bragg was a “Soros appointed prosecutor” -— a reference to the Jewish billionaire and Democratic donor who is held up as right-wing bogeyman and who donated to a liberal group working to elect progressive prosecutors that ultimately supported Bragg in his 2021 election.
Last month, Merchan issued a gag order on Trump, restricting him from publicly commenting on potential witnesses, Bragg’s team, court staff and the family members of court staff and prospective jurors. After Trump repeatedly attacked Merchan’s daughter, a Democratic operative with no other connection to the case, the judge expanded the gag order to include his and Bragg’s family members. Attacks on Merchan and Bragg are allowed.
“This pattern of attacking family members of presiding jurists and attorneys assigned to his cases serves no legitimate purpose,” Merchan wrote in a April 1 ruling. “It is no longer just a mere possibility or a reasonable likelihood that there exists a threat to the integrity of the judicial proceedings. The threat is very real.”
While he has yet to face penalties, Trump has attacked a potential witness in recent days. On Saturday, Trump needled Cohen, his former attorney, by name in a social media post.
“There’s no agenda here,” Merchan told the Associated Press in March. "We want to follow the law. We want justice to be done."
How Bragg may make his case
The prosecution is headed up by Bragg, Manhattan’s district attorney and a Harlem Democrat first elected in 2021 who ran, in part, by claiming he was the best candidate to take on Trump — a point he made in a Spectrum News-hosted debate at the time.
Once in office, Bragg slowed down the already existing investigation as federal prosecutors were conducting an ultimately fruitless probe of their own. His office’s top two prosecutors leading the case, tapped by his predecessor, resigned in protest. The indictment eventually came anyway.
In revealing the charges last spring, Bragg previewed some of the case his team will make to the jury: Trump’s alleged crimes are notable not just because they covered up other malfeasance, but because New York — and specifically Manhattan — is “the business capital of the world” and records must be reliable or the system will falter.
“We have a distinct, strong, profound interest in New York state,” he said. “We regularly do cases involving false business statements, but the bedrock of that, the basis for business integrity and a well-functioning business marketplace is true and accurate recordkeeping.”
In a radio interview with WNYC in December, Bragg said the core of the case “is not money for sex.”
“We would say it's about conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up,” he told host Brian Lehrer.
For months, Bragg has fought successfully against Trump’s legal challenges, even as death threats poured in and white powder was mailed to his offices.
What comes next
Jury selection begins Monday as the attorneys for both sides will attempt to whittle down prospective jurors to 12, with six alternates. Merchan has scheduled appearances for Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, as well, and the court indicated this week the trial could last around six to eight weeks meeting each weekday except for Wednesdays.
New York law requires criminal defendants to be present in court for the duration of the trial.