The prosecution of Donald Trump is just a media circus in which he may become the ringmaster, two senior journalists have said.
The former president flew from his Florida home to his birthplace New York on Tuesday for an arraignment hearing on 34 felony charges brought by Democrat District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
They relate to claims by Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen — who was later jailed for tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations — that he paid porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged affair with the billionaire during the 2016 election campaign. Trump later won $500,000 in damages against Daniels for defamation.
After pleading not guilty to all charges, Trump flew back to Florida for a press conference where he denounced the charges as a political witch-hunt and accused President Joe Biden of destroying US standing and bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war.
Jim Hoft told Sputnik that the 34 felony charges against Trump amount to a "castle of sand."
But, he ventured: "Maybe they've already gotten what they want, what they wanted just by being able to say he was indicted."
The journalist said he had recently spoken to Robert Kennedy Jr, the son of senator Bobby Kennedy and nephew of president John F Kennedy, both Democrats who were assassinated.
"He believes that people have the right to free speech. He's like 'I grew up on that, that was one of our premises of being a leftist'," Hoft said. "it's sad to see that we don't have that on the left today. Instead, we have more this mob communist, radical, violent approach to their politics. And [...] I think today's indictment of Trump is another example of that."
Turning to Bragg's charges against Trump, "I just don't see that there's anything there," he said. "I'm not an attorney, but the guy signed a non-disclosure agreement, and I think Alvin is trying to get 34 felonies out of a nondisclosure agreement. And I just don't know how they pulled this off."
The media businessman focused on one detail from the television coverage of Trump's arraignment hearing.
"This young black Trump supporter's like, 'hey, all the American flags over here with the Trump people, I don't see one American flag over on this other side'. That should tell you something."
Jim Kavanagh told Sputnik that Trump's indictment "will only help him in the near term," pointing out that in polling for the Republican primaries, he is already 30 percentage points ahead of his nearest rival Ron DeSantis.
The former president can make "a nice little ad for himself: 'I'm the outsider. You see, they're out to get me.' The outsider is the guy who fights for you. This is going to help him," Kavanagh said. "It's requiring every Republican politician and candidate to come out and support him. And it's casting him in the role of the guy who's going to drain the swamp. And that's why the alligators are coming after him."
The editor recalled his own stint on a grand jury like the one that recommended charges against Trump last week.
"It's interesting to me what they did with this case, because they leaked the results of the grand jury, which is really unheard of," Kavanagh noted. "So you have three or four days of incessant media nonsense about this, both the from the MSNBC crowd and from the Trump and Fox crowd."
"This is a circus. It's created a situation," Kavanagh stressed. "That's the point of it, is to create a situation in which is this is all we talk about and we divert attention from real issues. And this is going to be what it's going to be like for the next two years. It's horrible."
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