Donald Trump became the first former president to be charged with a crime when he was arrested with 34 felony counts for falsifying New York business records. The scandal spotlights Trump’s controversial reputation at a time where only 21% of Americans trust the government to do the right thing at least “most of the time,” according to Pew Research Center.
According to USA Today, Trump’s arrest and subsequent arraignment centered around hush money payments that he allegedly directed his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to make to adult film star Stormy Daniels as well as payments made by American Media Inc. (AMI), to former Playboy model Karen McDougal and a doorman who worked at Trump Tower. Trump later reimbursed AMI.
The payments were to suppress information, such as the women’s alleged affairs with Trump during his marriage, that could have marred his 2016 campaign run.
Daniels, McDougal, and the doorman were paid $130,000, $150,000, and $30,000 respectively. Making hush money payments is not illegal in the state of New York where Trump is being charged, but the accusations against him of attempting to cover up those payments constitute fraud.
“I think the fact that he would bribe people and take advantage of his power and money is unacceptable and despicable in a way that gets me really angry. It’s absolutely insane to me that he even has that power,” said Tina Sum, a sophomore at Carlmont.
The case is being led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who asserted in a press release that Trump “repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal crimes that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.”
Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to eight counts of tax evasion, bank fraud, and campaign finance violations. Two of these counts were related to hush money payments to two women, widely believed to be Daniels and McDougal, that he made at the direction of a “candidate,” believed to be Trump, to influence the 2016 election.
However, not everyone is convinced the former president is guilty. Trump has already called for his supporters to protest his arrest, and many Republicans are rallying behind him, denouncing the charges.
“If you ask Democrats, they think he’s guilty and that this is showing the justice system works — not even a former president is above the law. If you ask Republicans, this is a political witch hunt, with a Democratic district attorney going after a former Republican president, and that it is a complete collapse of our criminal justice system,” said Greer Stone, an AP United States Government and Microeconomics teacher and the vice mayor of Palo Alto.
The case is still in its early stages, but prospects of the former president being convicted or harshly punished are unlikely.
Eric Smith, a retired professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), predicts the same outcome with Trump as in the case of Senator John Edwards, who was also prosecuted for paying hush money to an ex-mistress. The jury found him not guilty on one count and eventually the Department of Justice dropped the other charges.
“If an ordinary person were to pay off a sex worker with $180,000 and then write it off as a business expense in state tax returns, I would expect that person to be tried, convicted, and probably sent to prison. But presidential candidates aren’t ordinary people. They are held to different standards, although there is no written law that says that they should be,” Smith said.
The charging of a former president with a crime is unprecedented and calls into question the morality of Trump and other politicians defending him in the eyes of some people.
“I won’t say this about all politicians, but I’ve certainly lost faith in a lot of them because they fail to listen to the people that they’re governing. Instead, they push what they want, not what the people that they’re representing want,” Sum said.
Yet high-profile politicians having public scandals is not new and neither is their impact on the public.
“Scandals just confirm the inherent bias people already have that politicians are sleazy and will say anything. This is just going to increase political apathy and probably turn more people off from public service and politics,” Stone said.
Furthermore, Trump’s arrest comes at the dawn of the 2024 presidential race, of which he is the frontrunner to receive the Republican nomination. However, the scandal may be boosting his campaign, not hurting it, at least in the short term.
“The arrest could really help Trump with the primary, because it seems like some Republicans who were considering jumping into the race are now rallying behind him,” Stone said.
Overall, scandals can contribute to the sense that the government is filled with dishonest politicians. According to Stone though, regardless of whether there was corruption or not, if the public perceives its existence, that is where the issue lies.
“The government and politicians need to do a better job of addressing that perception of corruption because it’s crucial that people feel there’s integrity in the system, so that they can trust it. Otherwise, there’s nothing really holding it together — just the fact that we all put faith in the system and allow it to govern us,” Stone said.
