Former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan believes that former President Donald Trump should be indicted and prosecuted.
However, she wrote for the Wall Street Journal, the business fraud case over the $130,000 hush payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels is the wrong case to get him on — and would undermine the whole mission to get justice against him.
"Have we totally lost our marbles? An American grand jury is apparently about to criminally indict, for the first time in history, a former president of the United States. This is a weighty and meaningful act. It couldn’t have more gravity. And so the charge will be ... falsely accounting for hush money paid to a porn star?" wrote Noonan. "The nature of the charges is below us. The players in the drama aren’t people of import who stand for big things, they’re not fate-of-the-republic people, they don’t have any size. They’re tacky lowlifes doing tacky lowlife things."
By contrast, she argued, the other cases against Trump — the Georgia election investigation and the federal probe of January 6 — are much more important.
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"On and in the days leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump encouraged and unleashed an assault on our Constitution. Before that he appears to have waged a concerted and thuggish effort to overturn a democratic outcome in the state of Georgia," wrote Noonan. "For these things he deserves it all — the indictment, the handcuffs, the mug shot, the hauling into court, the bail hearing. Georgia and Jan. 6 are big and serious events, worthy of the strictest legal approach and subject to all legal remedies. These events are being investigated, the former through a state grand jury, the latter through a federal special counsel. You say, but those cases aren’t ready! Then wait. Allow a serious process to play out seriously."
Noonan's argument echoes that of many analysts on both sides of the aisle, who are concerned the Stormy Daniels case, both in terms of the wrongdoing committed and the potential sentence, are an odd sideshow.
But some disagree; in a recent analysis for Popular Information, independent journalist Judd Legum argued the hush payment was the linchpin of a larger scheme that let Trump get elected under false pretenses in the first place, meaning that this small crime effectively changed the entire course of American history.
