The trial against Trump – Catch and kill

The public prosecutor did not throw Gone are the days when he called the first witness in the hush money case on Monday morning. It was David Pecker himself, the powerful media mogul who for decades used the National Enquirer tabloid to create celebrities, tear them down and destroy their lives. Pecker was also Trump’s good friend and thought it was an excellent idea that the popular reality star would become president.

How could he help?

No one needs Pecker’s testimony to confirm that the National Enquirer invested heavily in promoting Trump’s candidacy while doing its part to hurt his competitors, first Trump’s Republican primary challengers and then Hillary Clinton. It was the National Enquirer that claimed that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a lie Trump happily repeated in interviews with other media outlets. Hillary eventually became target number one. She was both terminally ill, a lesbian and had probably taken the life of an employee. No one was better at “fake news” than Trump’s close friend.

But not everyone is the rotten lies Pecker served up that make him a key witness for the prosecution. The core of the case, the payment of hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels, probably started with a meeting in Trump Tower in August 2015, shortly after Trump had announced that he would be president. In attendance were Pecker, Trump’s errand boy Michael Cohen and Trump himself, according to earlier testimony from Cohen. The meeting reportedly laid out a strategy for how Pecker could help Trump, not just by smearing his opponents, but by killing stories that could hurt Trump.

The method is called “catch and kill”. It wasn’t invented by Pecker, but he had perfected it to the delight of powerful men like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Harvey Weinstein. Yes, that Harvey Weinstein, the film producer who was eventually exposed as a serial abuser and who gave the impetus to the metoo movement. Ronan Farrow wrote the book “Catch and Kill” about the case and claims that the explanation for Weinstein getting away for so many years was that people like Pecker kept their hands over him.

Now Pecker was to do the same for Trump.

“Catch and kill” is as simple and brutal as it sounds. The National Enquirer pays for exclusive rights to gossip stories, then buries the story. In Trump’s case, it involved a number of women and a doorman in Trump Tower who claimed that Trump had an unknown child. One of the women, Kathleen McDougal, a former playmate, will testify in court. She claims that she had a longer relationship with Trump at the time Melania was pregnant, and that Pecker and co. tricked her into a trap. Because the method is not simply about waiting for someone to offer a story. As Farrow describes it in the book, potential whistleblowers were approached and convinced of what was in their best interests. Whistleblowers rightly feared that Pecker and the National Enquirer could destroy them.

Already in its introduction made it clear to the public prosecutor that the use of “catch and kill” is central to their presentation of evidence. It not only shows illegality in itself, but also motive. Trump did not want to hide the truth from Melania, but from the voters. He was terrified that the many stories about him would ruin his chance to become president, and so he planned thoroughly and well in advance how to gag the women and other stories about him after a long life as a super celebrity.

After the famous “Access Hollywood” tape was leaked to the press a month before the presidential election, where he talks about “grab them by the pussy”, full panic broke out in the Trump camp. Surveys at the time show that especially many of Trump’s Christian conservative voters and Republican women reacted negatively. They couldn’t stand a sex scandal at the top. Stormy Daniels had to be stopped.

Contrary to the stories in the National Enquirer, the prosecution’s case is of course not built on gossip, but on audio tapes, signed payments and other documents in addition to a spectacular witness list. It may seem that Trump has been more careless than usual in covering his tracks.

Still, it sounds like it as most legal experts doubt whether the prosecution will be able to convict him on the most serious charge, illegal election influence. In other words, Trump tried to hide important information with deliberate and illegal methods in order to influence the election in his favor.

It may well be. But after all these years with the Trump phenomenon, it seems that people have become blindsided, to the extent that my American colleagues are debating in all seriousness whether the trial is an advantage for him, just as it was supposedly an advantage for him to have to pay a woman a record compensation for lying about raping her. They may be thinking of the part of the followers who believe he is sent from God.

But I think about Richard Nixon. Now everyone thinks he was a crook, but even after Watergate there were those who doubted it. Then they heard the audio recordings from the Oval Office, and the American people were in shock. The president swore and was racist all at once. They had never heard the mate from a president.

That’s what’s happening with Donald Trump in the courtroom. People can see him for what he is.