Opinion: New York poetic venue for Trump trial

Set aside the politics of it all and there’s poetic justice to the fact that Donald Trump is facing his first criminal charges out of New York. After all, that’s where he was created.

I’m of the opinion that it would have been better to have first charged him with trying to steal the 2020 election, which appears obvious in a recorded conversation with the Georgia secretary of state in which Trump tried to “find” the votes necessary to turn the election in his favor. Or he could have been indicted first for his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, in which he sought to steal the election by force. Or, they could have charged him over those top-secret documents he tried to hide away.

But, no, at the center of his first criminal indictment is hush-money he paid to a porn star — with salacious details coming out last week that will keep us all enthralled in yet another titillating sex scandal.

But what do you expect out of New York City, where an obsession with money and power allowed Trump to rise from a cheating real estate developer to a bad reality-show television star. Manhattan gave rise to Trump Tower and NBC made him a national celebrity — and the rest of us have been paying for it ever since.

How and why rural America — which has turned out to be Trump’s main base of support — bought into his lies I still don’t understand. The “small town values” that I and others were raised with have been compromised by the naïveté and/or cynicism that many of my friends and neighbors have come to embrace.

Not that “big city values” are any better. In places like New York City, gold-plated ambition reigns supreme. The legendary biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah had nothing on the NYCs and LAs of our day.

But it’s not “sexual deviance” that defines NYC or any of our other big cities — it’s wealth and power.

Trump’s dalliance with a porn star isn’t nearly as important as his business and political dealings, but time will tell which will bring him down.

Always the showman, Trump is managing so far to capitalize on the New York indictment. Polls are showing there’s a surge of support for Trump in the Republican Party as the so-called “witch hunt” continues. But I don’t think such support will last. I suspect that, as the Stormy Daniels details emerge, and as the other cases against Trump unfold, even his Kool-Aid drinking base will grow tired of defending the man and his immoral behavior.

Trump’s best shot is to rewrite history, which he and his minions are already attempting to do. Jan. 6 wasn’t a peaceful protest. The election wasn’t stolen from Trump. And if those classified documents in the former president’s possession aren’t a big deal, why did he try to obstruct the investigation at every turn?

Force of habit, I suppose.

As for the Stormy Daniels case, the severity of it pales in comparison to the other pending investigations. But, just as income tax evasion brought down Al Capone, something similar could bring down Donald Trump. We’ll see.

Like Capone, there are other allegations against Trump that are far more serious. Nevertheless, we’re starting with Stormy.

If you ask me, New York is the proper venue in which to begin, since that’s where Trump got his start. But it shouldn’t end there.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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