GOP senator: Trump only made an illegal hush payment to a porn star because he ‘loves his family’

One of President Donald Trump’s biggest legal liabilities continues to be the hush payments his former attorney Michael Cohen made on his behalf to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy Playmate Karen MacDougal. Cohen has testified that Trump directed him to make those payments, and to lie about them.

But on Wednesday’s edition of CNN’s “New Day,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) offered John Berman an extremely sympathetic take on why Trump did all of this.

“This is a jarring juxtaposition, the president accused of writing payoffs to porn stars at the same time he’s conducting presidential business,” Berman said. “As you look at this, are you okay with all of this?”

“Most of us have a concern anytime you have a president who is trying to work through some very personal matters,” said Rounds. “I honestly think this president loves his family. I think it has as much to do with trying not to have public discussions about something that is, for him, a private matter that he didn’t want to have discussed with his family. I think that’s a lot of it.”

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Leaving aside the question of how much a man really “loves his family” if he is sleeping with other women, it is really convenient to claim that Trump just directed the commission of a federal crime that left his lawyer with a three-year prison sentence out of the kindness of his heart.

One other possible explanation is that Trump didn’t want to be criminally prosecuted in the middle of a presidential campaign. Indeed, Cohen was charged with violating campaign finance laws precisely because the presumption of prosecutors is that the payment was intended to influence the election.

Rounds certainly gets points for creativity — but his explanation of Trump’s hush payments is willfully obtuse.