The indictment of Donald Trump in New York is "embarrassing" to the US but driven by "deep state" fear of his peace-making stance towards Russia, two pundits have argued.
New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced charges against the 45th president on Friday after a Grand Jury voted to indict the former president over claims he paid porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged affair between them.
That has prompted the accusation from Trump, his allies and commentators that the prosecution is aimed at knocking him out of contention against President Joe Biden in the 2024 election.
Ed Martin told Sputnik that the charges were "as trumped-up as you can imagine" and it was "really embarrassing to America that this has happened."
"The Democrats hate Trump so much they will literally do anything to try to take him off the playing field," Martin said. "The Russia hoax, how COVID was handled."
He pointed out that Bragg was trying to "bump-up" a misdemeanour accounting offence to a felony as 'furtherance' of another crime under federal campaign finance laws, which was "not in his purview."
Garland Nixon said the motives for Trump's indictment went deeper, to his "questioning of NATO" and the US military presence in South Korea.
"He wanted to get a deal with the North Korean leader and make and lower the tension on the Korean Peninsula," he said, which was a "valid and reasonable thing to do for America."
"Those foreign policy things are the reason they're going after him," Nixon said. "The hate against Trump was after the Deep State went after him with the Russiagate hoax, after they went after Trump for foreign policy, which is what infuriated them."
The broadcaster said authorities were "weaponizing rage" against Trump so "the people will support the deep state quest" to prosecute him. "You heard what he's been saying, 'hey, we got to stop all this World War Three stuff and we've got problems in the deep state' that has to be stopped."
Martin argued that while "the larger Trump vision is one that threatens a lot of power," during his four years as president he "failed on a number of things that we thought he would stand up to."
"Trump moved the Republican Party in some ways that no one else could have done," he argued, challenging "the Neo-con vision of dominance in the world, which is aided and abetted and part and parcel with... the military industrial complex."
But he disagreed with other pundits who say the indictment would only improve Trump's chances of returning to the White House in 2025, saying: "very rarely you get a knockout blow. It's death by a thousand cuts."
Nixon said the indictment would garner Trump "a certain degree of sympathy," while Biden's foreign policy would to "get less popular, particularly with what's happened in Ukraine."
He said Biden's continued support for Volodymyr Zelensky's regime in Kiev was "not a good idea" with "Donald Trump already having taken the position" that the conflict must end.
"I'm a lefty. I hate both parties. I'm an independent, but his position is far more attractive to me, even though I'm not going to vote for either one of them, than the Democrats," Nixon stressed.
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