Monday briefing: How Donald Trump plans to survive hush money trial with his campaign intact
Good morning. Keeping track of Donald Trump’s trials, hearings and campaign stops could make anyone feel like the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia meme where Charlie stands, looking altogether unhinged, in front of a bulletin board covered in conspiratorial red tape.
Last week, Trump’s legal issues stretched across the United States. In New York City, his hush money case began in earnest. In Washington DC, supreme court judges heard his astonishing plea for absolute immunity for any action committed while he was in office. And on the same day in Arizona, a grand jury charged 18 Trump aides with felonies associated with trying to subvert the 2020 election in that state.
For today’s newsletter, I spoke with Cameron Joseph, the writer of the Guardian’s weekly Trump on Trial newsletter (which you can sign up for here), about the former president’s legal troubles. That’s right after the headlines.
Five big stories
Immigration and asylum | The Home Office will launch a major operation to detain asylum seekers across the UK on Monday, weeks earlier than expected, in preparation for their deportation to Rwanda. Lawyers and campaigners said the detentions risked provoking protracted legal battles, community protests and clashes with police.
SNP | Humza Yousaf’s leadership hangs by a thread as he approaches a confidence vote this week, with the Scottish Greens remaining unequivocal that he no longer has their support after he axed their power-sharing agreement. Amid reports that Yousaf is now considering his position, Scottish Green co-leader Lorna Slater told the BBC: “We will vote in support of a vote of no confidence against Humza Yousaf.”
Public finance | Senior Whitehall officials fear Thames Water’s financial collapse could trigger a rise in government borrowing costs not seen since the chaos of the Liz Truss mini-budget, the Guardian can reveal. Concerns over the potential impact have led officials to believe that Thames should be renationalised before the general election.
Ukraine | Russia has consolidated recent battlefield gains in the east of Ukraine, and is attempting to break through Ukrainian defensive lines before a long-awaited package of US military assistance arrives at the frontline. After a surprise Russian attack in the rural settlement of Ocheretyne, Ukrainian security officials described the situation in the Donbas region as “very difficult”.
Air travel | A 101-year-old woman has been regularly mistaken for an infant because an airline’s booking system was unable to compute her date of birth. The woman, named only as Patricia, was born in 1922, but the American Airlines system apparently does not recognise that year, defaulting instead to 2022.
In depth: ‘Time is of the essence’
The story of Donald Trump’s hush money payments has been floating around for six years, so a lot of the information coming out is not new – but some of the details are “still jaw-dropping” even to the closest of observers, Cameron says. To have a powerful media executive like David Pecker, who was responsible for the National Enquirer, explicitly admit that he acted as “Trump’s eyes and ears to look out for stories of women who claimed that they had affairs with Trump I think is pretty notable”, Cameron adds.
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The New York case
The hush money trial began badly for Donald Trump last week. The defence’s tactics have been primarily to downplay Trump’s actions and make them “seem a lot more normal, less seedy, and par for the course for what politicians do”, Cameron says. They have been hammering home the idea that hush money payments are not illegal – which is true – while sidestepping the crux of the matter: that the trial is about falsifying business records to cover up payments to former adult film actor Stormy Daniels.
To undercut the idea that Trump tried to cover up this story as part of a conspiracy to influence the election, which is illegal under New York state law, the defence will also argue that the cover-up was motivated by a desire to save his family’s reputation from the embarrassment of a sex scandal in the news, not to sway the election. Unfortunately for Trump, Pecker, the former CEO of America Media Inc – which owns the National Enquirer – testified that he bought a story from a Playboy model to bury it so it did not “embarrass or hurt the [Trump] campaign”. He also admitted that he was nervous about whether the payment would violate campaign finance laws.
Trump’s team has also already clashed with the judge, who at one point told one of Trump’s lawyers that he was “losing all credibility”. “The fact that the judge is showing that much frustration with Trump’s lawyer, who is supposed to be the most competent and drama-free member of his team, is not a good place to be this early in the trial,” Cameron says.
The final argument from Trump’s team is to blame Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, claiming that Trump was not involved with any of the actual paperwork so he would have no knowledge of falsified business records. He just signed the cheques, according to the defence.
“So those are a couple of different off-ramps that might get Trump out of trouble – but they don’t have an overarching narrative or an alternate history of what happened,” Cameron says. The defence is not questioning the events as they have already conceded that the hush money payments happened. “The real question is whether they can poke enough holes in the prosecution’s claims that this rises to a felony charge and put enough doubt in the minds of at least one juror to be able to get the hung jury they want.”
The hush money trial will probably last another month. In the upcoming weeks, the court will hear testimony from many people who were in Trump’s inner circle at different points, including Cohen, as well as two women who claimed they had affairs with Trump.
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The supreme court case
As all this was happening in New York, another arguably much more serious hearing was taking place in Washington DC. For three hours on Thursday, the supreme court heard oral arguments about Trump’s audacious claim that he should be entitled to blanket immunity from criminal liability during his time as president. More a king than a democratically elected leader, some have claimed.
The hearing relates to the stalled federal case against the president for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. A lower court firmly rejected Trump’s argument that a president enjoys absolute immunity for criminal prosecution over anything related to his presidency, but his trial is on hold while the supreme court considers the same question. And while the court has proceeded relatively quickly by its own standards, the justices have frustrated prosecutors by refusing to take the case on an expedited basis – putting the prospect of a result before the November election at risk.
Unlike the hush money trial, the hearings went much better for Trump than many were expecting. Trump has made the dubious case that “presidential immunity is imperative, or you practically won’t have a country any more” – and while the court is thought to be generally sceptical of blanket immunity claims, the conservative majority did seem to embrace some of the ideas raised by the former president’s legal team.
Three out of the nine judges were appointed by Trump, and skirted around the issue at hand, instead choosing to focus on the abstract impact on future presidents. They also looked open to returning certain issues to a trial court to deliberate and decide whether parts of the indictment were “official acts” that were protected by presidential immunity. If that happens, Cameron says, “it would create more delays – and possibly torpedo the entire case”. In other words: there would be little chance of a meaningful result before election day, even if ultimately his claim of immunity falls apart.
What else we’ve been reading
The latest departing MP to be interviewed for G2’s Goodbye to all that series is Ben Bradshaw (above) – and it’s astonishing to look back at how far the country’s attitudes and treatment of sexuality has changed during his two decades in parliament. Toby Moses, head of newsletters
Has Jeremy Clarkson mellowed? Is he even … happy? He is reluctant to admit it, but Charlotte Edwardes’ interview for Saturday magazine leaves you thinking he might be – for reasons that may bemuse those who have found him an obnoxious public presence for years. “I don’t have to think, ‘Right, I’m going to say something stupidly provocative now,’” he says. “That’s relaxing.” Archie
Lauren Bensted writes in unflinching detail about what happened when, after giving birth, an unexpected disease and surgery changed her body and transformed her life for ever. Nimo
In a truly astonishing interview last week, Reform UK’s deputy leader Ben Habib suggested that people crossing the Channel in small boats who find themselves in the water should be left to drown. The interview was just part of the “hourly deluge of outrage and nonsense that passes for the national conversation”, John Harris writes – but also the result of years of dehumanising rhetoric that has been mainstreamed. Archie
The hit Netflix series Baby Reindeer has taken the internet by storm – but its creators and actors are pleading with the public to stop behaving like private investigators after social media sleuths tried to hunt down the real people the characters depicted. Vanessa Thorpe dissects the legal and moral fallout, and how it could change real-life drama. Nimo
Sport
Premier League | Arsenal (above) survived a second-half comeback from Tottenham Hotspur in the North London derby, hanging on to win 3-2 after cruising to a 3-0 lead in the first half. The result kept them on top of the Premier League table – but Manchester City kept up the pressure with a 2-0 win away to Nottingham Forest and are only a point behind with a game in hand. Meanwhile, Bournemouth secured a comfortable 3-0 victory against Brighton and are now 10th in the table.
Women’s Super League | A stoppage time strike from 16-year-old Issy Hobson salvaged a 1-1 draw for Everton against Arsenal and dealt a major blow to Arsenal’s faint hopes of winning the title. Manchester City extended their lead to six points with a 4-0 win at Bristol City that relegated their hosts after only one season.
NFL | Former rugby union player Travis Clayton has been selected by the Buffalo Bills in the 2024 NFL draft. The Englishman, who has never played a game in the sport, has played eighth-tier rugby for his home town club Basingstoke and was selected from the NFL’s international player pathway programme as an offensive lineman.
The front pages
The Guardian’s page one splash is “Home Office to detain UK asylum seekers in shock Rwanda move”, while the Daily Telegraph goes with “UK attacks EU double standards on migrants”. “Tens of thousands ‘exploiting hidden asylum loophole’” is the claim in the Daily Mail. The Financial Times has “Kremlin scoops €800mn in taxes from foreign banks that remained in Russia”.
“Bitter harvest ‘to hit UK in pocket’” – the Metro leads on beer being one thing that will go up in price after wet weather hit grain crops. “Sunak to resist early election as Tory rebels on manoeuvres” – that’s the i adopting a bit of military parlance, while the Daily Mirror insists “Time is up, Mr Sunak” and says he ought to call one. The lead story in the Daily Express is “Dame Esther: I am fighting for my family and a lot of others”. “Depressed and anxious face losing their benefit” the Times reports, saying the Tories will draw a line between themselves and Labour on welfare reform.
Today in Focus
Have open marriages gone mainstream?
From therapy sessions to bookshelves, interest in non-monogamous relationships seem to be soaring
Cartoon of the day | Edith Pritchett
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The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
The Martha Mills young writers’ prize, a competition for talented young writers, has opened for entries for a second time.
Named for the daughter of Guardian journalist Merope Mills and Paul Laity, an editor at the London Review of Books, who died in 2021 at the age of 13, the prize will see three winners each receive £200, a selection of books and a “special souvenir”. This year’s theme is “a secret” – with those entering encouraged to let their imagination run wild.
“We are looking for writing that is lively, unusual or otherwise original,” said the judges, who include renowned author Philip Pullman. “It doesn’t have to be perfect or finished – we want to see the work that you’re most proud of or most excited about. Don’t worry if you haven’t written much before or don’t know if you’re a ‘writer’”.
Entries close on Friday 19 July, and more details can be found here.
Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
