Stormy weather in court

It happened again. The discussion at the weekly class on political news in the lifelong learning pro- gram called LifeQuest became richly topical and instructive.

Once we got started, there was no way we were going to find time during the 50-minute class for Tom Cotton’s snarling absolutism or for the exploitation on the right and the evasiveness on the left about whether transgender girls should be allowed to compete with other girls in school sports.

So, I decided readers would be served by being cut in on what we hung up on, which was mainly sex.

It began with my saying the evangelical conservative affinity for Donald Trump has been strengthened by these criminal prosecutions.

The cases and multiple counts strike many on the evangelical right as persecutions of Trump by secular and liberal forces for making himself their champion, albeit a highly imperfect and indeed breathtakingly cynical one.

I explained that I was offended and dismayed that, on the day before, porn star Stormy Daniels had testified in Trump’s trial in New York in an imaginative case for which I have little respect. She told the court and the nation that she spent her intercourse experience with Trump lying on her back and looking indifferently at the ceiling for what was a blessedly short time.

I said that the testimony ridiculed the egomaniacal madman, and no doubt amused many who hold Trump in deserved disdain, but that it was irrelevant to the case, thus gratuitous. I predicted it served mainly to galvanize evangelical beliefs that Trump is a victim of enemies weaponizing the courts for political purposes.

The case is weak legally. It begins with a sex act, an adulterous sin but not a crime. It continues with the payment of hush money to keep the sex act secret, an NDA, essentially, meaning a nondisclosure agreement, also not a crime. It extends to charges of fraudulently moving money around in business accounts, which are misdemeanors under New York law, to hide the hush-money expenditure.

Imaginatively, state prosecutors allege that the whole point was to serve Trump’s presidential campaign, thus meaning that he committed the state misdemeanors in connection with felonious misdeeds, federal ones, making his state misdemeanors felonies under state law via federal law.

It’s the first time such a parlay has been tried— seeking to call misdemeanors a felony under state law because they’re tied to a higher crime, but not one under a state law, but a federal one.

It is true that the first step in this supposed criminal scenario was that Daniels had to testify as to what happened between her and Trump that caused Trump to pay her for silence.

Here’s how to do that: “I went to his room. We had intercourse. I left his room.”

A former prosecutor in the audience said he considered the presentation of the sexual details—including that a condom was not used, and that Stormy thought she might have blacked out briefly before winding up on the bed—a reversible error as prejudicial.

A woman in class countered that some sex detail was needed to show credibility to the story. She added that there was valuable disturbing testimony about Daniels’ state of mind and whether she felt implied force.

But this is not a criminal case of rape, and Daniels says the interaction was passive on her part, but consensual.

A chronically insightful class member said the testimony was helpful in a prosecutorial narrative showing Trump to be a “sleaze bag” as well as in “humanizing” Stormy. But it is not a crime to be a sleaze bag, nor, in Trump’s case, is it a matter of revelation or dispute.

I already knew Daniels was human. I now know she can be snarky and sympathetic, which has no bearing on whether state business misdemeanors can be turned into state felonies by wrapping them in a federal campaign law.

Someone mentioned after class that there was a counterpoint to my saying the vivid detail in Daniels’ testimony would strengthen the evangelical base for Trump. It was that the picture painted of Trump might push over the line some decisive swing voters who were previously going to vote for him, knowing he was no-account—just not how thoroughly no-account.

I can see that and would not mind at all the electoral effect. But I can’t help thinking that reaping that political bounty from irrelevant prejudicial testimony in a flimsy criminal case is what some refer to as “weaponizing” the criminal justice system for political gain.

The class provoked significant thought but only this conclusion: If I am right that politics in the United States must bottom out before we can begin to rebuild, then we can take heart that we made progress last week on our descent.