Mediaboss Marketing

A supporter outside a fundraising event for Donald Trump in San Francisco on Thursday isn't put off by his conviction. Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

For the first time in American history, a political party is set to nominate a felon as its presidential candidate.

Republicans continue to rally around Donald Trump, who was found guilty in the New York hush money trial on May 30. He will be sentenced on July 11, just days before the Republican National Convention begins in Milwaukee.

The team at NPR's Trump's Trials podcast broke down three ways the GOP is trying to use Trumps conviction to the party's advantage.

Donald Trump participates in a town hall event at Dream City Church in Phoenix, Ariz., on Thursday. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Within minutes of hearing the jurys decision in Trumps hush money case, Republican lawmakers flocked to his defense and attacked detractors.

That wasnt surprising. In fact, after Republican Senate candidate Larry Hogan, who is seen as a moderate and has been critical of Trump, wrote on the social media platform X that Americans should respect the verdict and that all leaders should reaffirm what has made this nation great: the rule of law, Trump adviser Chris LaCivita responded: You just ended your campaign.

Trump is expected to appeal the conviction after he is sentenced. For now, he is continuing to cast doubt on the judicial system.

Trump and his allies have, without evidence, said the case was rigged, accused the justice system of being weaponized by the Biden administration, and claimed the case was politically motivated. In doing so, they are seeking to cast suspicion on the validity of Trumps guilty verdict and further paint him as the victim of a conspiracy led by the Biden administration.

To be clear, the Department of Justice and the Biden administration were not involved in this case. Thats because this was a state case (which also means Trump would not be able to pardon himself if he wins the election in November).

At rallies and outside fundraising events, supporters have started bringing signs reading things like "our favorite felon" and "we stand proud w/ the convicted! Trump 24."

A supporter holds a sign reading "Our Favorite Felon" outside a fundraising event for Donald Trump on Thursday. Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Conservatives' false claims that the trial was rigged are often followed by calls for revenge.

Fox News host Jesse Watters said on X, Were going to get back up and vanquish the evil forces that are destroying this republic. Conservative commentator Megyn Kelly said on her radio show, These Democrats will rue the day they decided to use lawfare to stop a presidential candidate.

Others have suggested pursuing legal action against the prosecutors and judge involved in the hush money case.

Trump himself was asked about retribution in an interview with Dr. Phil on Friday. In the interview, Dr. Phil said he believed that revenge and retribution was unhealthy for the country and Trump did not have time to get even if elected president again. Trump responded by saying: Revenge does take time, I will say that. And sometimes revenge can be justified.

The Trump campaign claims it raised $53 million in the first 24 hours after the verdict, and $141 million for the entire month of May. NPR Senior Political Editor and Correspondent Domenico Montanaro points out, [This] will make a significant dent in helping the Trump campaign catch back up to the Biden campaign, whos had a significant advantage all along.

But Trump may not use all this money on the campaign. As Trumps Trials reported in February, about $50 million, up until that point, had been diverted from one of his political PACs to pay for his legal fees.

Trumps certainly using this conviction, as he did the indictments, to try to help him shore up his base and raise money, Montanaro said. But again, does that mean independents, persuadable voters in key states, are going to look fondly [at this]? We dont know.

What to watch: In the coming weeks, we are expecting the Supreme Court to release its decision on whether sitting presidents have legal immunity. Trump is claiming he cannot be prosecuted for his alleged actions surrounding the attempts to overturn the 2020 election because he was president and therefore immune. The courts decision will determine if the federal election interference case goes to trial at all.

Want to dive more into the details and how the Trump campaign is trying to seize this moment? Listen to the full episode of the Trumps Trials podcast.

Read the rest here:
3 ways Republicans are trying to use Trump's conviction to their advantage - NPR

When a Manhattan jury found Donald J. Trump guilty, it should have sent shock waves through the nation. Yet, though the trial and conviction of a former president was unprecedented in American history, it seems most people couldnt have cared less. As Michelle Goldberg recently noted, only 16 percent of respondents to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll said they had followed the first few weeks of the trial very closely, and when asked how they felt, many replied, bored.

In its way, that must have annoyed Mr. Trump: how insulting, that no one would care. There was media coverage, but no frenzy, no rallies around the world in protest when he was convicted. But to win in the court of public opinion, Mr. Trump must now transform a trial in a run-down Manhattan courtroom from a shoulder shrug into an unforgettable event, with a story powerful enough to keep his supporters energized, if not outraged, and to drum up sympathy from the undecideds.

For months, Mr. Trump has been laying the groundwork, spinning his tale of tyranny and martyrdom (his own of course) and styling himself as the victim of an administration that has to play dirty to eliminate a rival as formidable as he. That story of persecution has only grown louder in recent days. Moments after hearing the jury pronounce him guilty, he predictably called the trial rigged, the judge conflicted, and a trial by jury as well as government institutions like the justice system irrelevant compared with the verdict that galvanized voters will presumably hand him in November. Politics, not the law, is his mtier, and history is not his concern. His preoccupation, and his talent, is storytelling.

Instinctively he grasps the kind of broader stories that break through from the courtroom to the public. These stories fueled what pundits, particularly in the 20th century, frequently dubbed the trial of the century trials that captured the hearts and minds of the public, that sold newspapers, and that would grip the whole nation, if not the world, with their cultural significance. Each of these trials riveted the country by bringing to the foreground moral values and failings that affected all Americans.

Take the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee in 1925, about a new law that barred the theory of evolution from being taught in public schools, which became a showdown between a three-time presidential candidate, the eloquent politician William Jennings Bryan, and the famous defense lawyer Clarence Darrow. Covered day after day on the front page of newspapers coast to coast, it even found its way into Hemingways novel The Sun Also Rises. The issue here was faith and reason, or what passes for both, and whether government could mandate belief. A young high school teacher, John Scopes, purposefully broke the recently passed law to show, as the brilliant attorney Arthur Garfield Hays argued, that such laws result in hate and intolerance, that they are conceived in bigotry and born in ignorance ignorance of the Bible, of religion, of history, and of science.

There was the trial of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants accused of robbery and murder in Massachusetts, which caused such international indignation that rallies against their execution were held from London to Johannesburg. Edna St. Vincent Millay published a poem titled Justice Denied in Massachusetts in The New York Times to protest the handling of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, and Felix Frankfurter called the misrepresentations, suppressions and misquotations of its presiding judge disgraceful.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit andlog intoyour Times account, orsubscribefor all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?Log in.

Want all of The Times?Subscribe.

Read more here:
Opinion | Trump's Most Dangerous Gift - The New York Times

Seated in front of a computer at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Donald Trump will be asked to explain, politely, why he is a man who can be trusted.

The former president has been judged by a jury of his peers, being found guilty of 34 felonies. It is now time, in the eyes of the New York criminal justice system, to devise a fitting punishment. Accordingly, a probation officer on Monday will ask Trump, via video conference, whether he accepts responsibility for his crimes; they will assess his finances (and his mental health); they will consider his family life and ties to community; and they will want to know whether the presumptive Republican nominee continues to associate with criminals.

The list of past and present members of Trumps inner circle who have been found guilty of serious crimes is long and growing. Just this year, two of his former White House aides, Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, were sentenced to prison for defying congressional subpoenas. Allen Weisselberg, former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, is currently on Rikers Island. Paul Manafort, Trumps 2016 campaign manager, and MAGA dirty-tricks specialist Roger Stone each received multi-year prison sentences only to be freed by Trump pardons.

"[Former] President Trump has surrounded himself with a bunch of killers who work every day to help him win," as Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung put it to Axios in March. If thats still the case come July 11, when Trump is due to be sentenced by Judge Juan Merchan in his hush-money case, that could be a serious problem

Theres nothing wrong with his telling the probation office, I didnt do anything wrong, and Im not admitting guilt, and Im planning on appealing, Andrew Weissmann, a former federal prosecutor, told MSNBC. Every defendant has a right to do that.

More difficult, Weissmann said, will be the question about whether Trumps still associating with criminals.

Hes going to have to discuss whether he still coordinates with Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon. Remember, all those people have been found guilty by a jury and are felons themselves, Weissmann noted.

In March, CNN reported that Manafort was in discussions with Trumps campaign team about a possible role going forward. But last month, citing the media and its desire to use me as a distraction, Manafort said that he would not be doing any formal campaign work but helping from the sidelines every other way I can.

But as for Stone, hes been a frequent presence at Mar-a-Lago lately, Axios reported in March, noting that he attended Trumps victory party there on Super Tuesday.

Going forward, such a celebration could land Trump behind bars himself.

Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney who teaches law at the University of Michigan, told MSNBC that the terms of probation that Trump will likely have to comply with may prove difficult. A prohibition on associating with other convicted felons, typical in cases of other offenders, would in particular be challenging for him.

But if hes not willing to comply with those kind of conditions, his alternative is prison, McQuade said. Given his other legal troubles, and his repeated contempt violations in the hush money case, its possible hes headed that way regardless. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg would at least be justified in requesting it, according to McQuade.

I think in light of the way that Donald Trump violated the gag order in this case and his continued lack of remorse in this case, she said, [it] would lean heavily in favor of requesting at least some prison time.

Read more

about Trump's legal problems

The rest is here:
Legal expert: Probation terms may prove "challenging" for Trump but "his alternative is prison" - Salon

Former President Donald J. Trump used a dubious accounting maneuver to claim improper tax breaks from his troubled Chicago tower, according to an Internal Revenue Service inquiry uncovered by The New York Times and ProPublica. Losing a yearslong audit battle over the claim could mean a tax bill of more than $100 million.

The 92-story, glass-sheathed skyscraper along the Chicago River is the tallest and, at least for now, the last major construction project by Mr. Trump. Through a combination of cost overruns and the bad luck of opening in the teeth of the Great Recession, it was also a vast money loser.

But when Mr. Trump sought to reap tax benefits from his losses, the I.R.S. has argued, he went too far and in effect wrote off the same losses twice.

The first write-off came on Mr. Trumps tax return for 2008. With sales lagging far behind projections, he claimed that his investment in the condo-hotel tower met the tax code definition of worthless, because his debt on the project meant he would never see a profit. That move resulted in Mr. Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, The Times and ProPublica found.

There is no indication the I.R.S. challenged that initial claim, though that lack of scrutiny surprised tax experts consulted for this article. But in 2010, Mr. Trump and his tax advisers sought to extract further benefits from the Chicago project, executing a maneuver that would draw years of inquiry from the I.R.S. First, he shifted the company that owned the tower into a new partnership. Because he controlled both companies, it was like moving coins from one pocket to another. Then he used the shift as justification to declare $168 million in additional losses over the next decade.

The issues around Mr. Trumps case were novel enough that, during his presidency, the I.R.S. undertook a high-level legal review before pursuing it. The Times and ProPublica, in consultation with tax experts, calculated that the revision sought by the I.R.S. would create a new tax bill of more than $100 million, plus interest and potential penalties.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit andlog intoyour Times account, orsubscribefor all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?Log in.

Want all of The Times?Subscribe.

See original here:
Trump May Owe $100 Million From Double-Dip Tax Breaks, Audit Shows - The New York Times

Donald J. Trump, the onetime president, and Stormy Daniels, the longtime porn star, despise one another. But when Ms. Daniels returned to the witness stand at Mr. Trumps criminal trial on Thursday, his lawyers made them sound a lot alike.

He wrote more than a dozen self-aggrandizing books; she wrote a tell-all memoir. He mocked her appearance on social media; she fired back with a scatological insult. He peddled a $59.99 Bible; she hawked a $40 Stormy, saint of indictments candle, that carried her image draped in a Christ-like robe.

During Thursdays grueling cross-examination, Mr. Trumps lawyers sought to discredit Ms. Daniels as a money-grubbing extortionist who used a passing proximity to Mr. Trump to attain fame and riches. But the more the defense assailed her self-promoting merchandise and online screeds, the more Ms. Daniels resembled the man she was testifying against: a master of marketing, a savant of social-media scorn.

Not unlike Mr. Trump, she said on the stand, though unlike him, she did it without the power and platform of the presidency.

Ms. Danielss appearance plunged the proceeding into turmoil as the defense pleaded with the judge to declare a mistrial in the first criminal trial of an American president. Ms. Danielss graphic account of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, they argued, had inflicted irreparable damage on the defense.

But the judge, Juan M. Merchan, rejected the request and rebuked defense lawyers, noting that their decision to deny that the tryst had even occurred had opened the door for much of her explicit testimony. Ms. Daniels offered jurors a first-person account of the encounter with Mr. Trump, helping prosecutors bolster belief in an incident that underpins the case.

Here is the original post:
Stormy Daniels, Echoing Trump's Style, Pushes Back at Lawyer's Attacks - The New York Times