Former President Donald Trump's hush money trial is coming up soon, pending a last-ditch legal motion to postpone it that many experts believe will go nowhere — and his allies are starting to worry he'll get himself in more trouble by running his mouth in court.
The case, brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, centers on Trump's alleged hush payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels to conceal an affair between them, blocking the information from voters ahead of the 2016 election — which Bragg charges as felony business fraud, in service of an illegal campaign finance scheme to manipulate the election.
Trump has denied the allegations, and his legal team has suggested the hush payment scheme was simply to keep his wife from discovering his infidelity — which is not a crime.
According to a Rolling Stone report, MAGA strategists and lawyers close to the former president "have grown anxious about various polls indicating that a criminal conviction this year would greatly harm his chances at winning back the White House. Though Team Trump views the Manhattan DA’s case as easily the weakest of the four major criminal cases against him, they dread the idea of Trump creating a glut of negative publicity at a New York City trial that turns off swing voters — or even helping prosecutors’ case."
Per written communications obtained by the magazine, these figures "have been in touch with one another ... suggesting that they have been tag-teaming efforts to cautiously corral Trump into sticking to an extremely toned-down approach to this trial," with one Trump adviser saying this is necessary to “prevent him from talking his way into a mess." Another said that they are desperate for Trump to “prove the media wrong” and give them “nothing” to work with by going off-script in the courtroom.
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Trump has struggled to control himself in other courtroom settings, often tangling with judges during the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial and the Trump Organization civil fraud case — both of which he lost to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. But this time, he would be in a criminal courtroom, where the consequences of antagonizing the court could be much more severe.
Alan Dershowitz, a former Harvard professor and celebrity lawyer publicly sympathetic to Trump, said, “The Trump team ought to assume that there is going to be a criminal conviction. It’s a terrible case, in my opinion… but any first-year law student could win a prosecution against Donald Trump in Manhattan, so they’re going to have to assume that they’re going to lose this case in front of a jury.”
