Defense lawyers are deploying an interesting strategy to win over jurors in former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial.
They’re humanizing the bombastic former president as a concerned family man and boss who, like anyone, just wanted to ward off bad press to protect his reputation and brand.
The idea is to undercut New York prosecutors who must tie a hush-money scheme and alleged coverup directly to the 2016 presidential election.
“At that time, there were all kinds of salacious allegations going out, going around about President Trump, and it was damaging to him and damaging to his family,” defense lawyer Todd Blanche said in his opening statement last week.
“President Trump fought back, like he always does and like he’s entitled to do, to protect his family, his reputation and his brand. And that is not a crime,” he said.
It’s unclear whether jurors will see it that way, given Mr. Trump’s reputation for hard-nosed political tactics. But the strategy dotted the trial’s first week and will likely surface throughout the proceedings.
“We’ll have to see what the jury says, but it is certainly a smart defense,” said David Schultz, a professor at Hamline University who is tracking Mr. Trump’s cases. “What you want to do is cast reasonable doubt at this point.”
Mr. Trump leaned into the family-man image Friday. He said it was former first lady Melania Trump’s birthday and he was excited to fly home and celebrate with his wife in Florida.
“It’d be nice to be with her but I’m at a courthouse for a rigged trial,” Mr. Trump said in the courthouse hallway.
The competing theories — whether Mr. Trump was protecting his personal life or his election chances — are crucial because prosecutors want to prove that Mr. Trump, through his lawyer Michael Cohen, criminally concealed payments to porn star Stormy Daniels through checks and business entries that triggered election and tax crimes.
Mr. Trump faces 34 counts of falsifying business records, and prosecutors must show an intent to commit additional offenses to convince a jury the charges amounted to felonies and not low-level misdemeanors.
Ms. Daniels was shopping around a story that she had a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump in 2006, something Mr. Trump denies.
The trial continues Tuesday with the state expected to resume testimony from a banker who handled Mr. Cohen’s accounts.
Some legal experts don’t expect jurors to accept that Mr. Trump had his family or brand at the top of his mind in combating the unflattering claims.
Robert Sanders, a distinguished lecturer on national security and law at the University of New Haven, said Mr. Trump doesn’t have a track record of empathizing with people unless it gives him a direct and tangible benefit.
“Of course, he did not want his wife to find out, but she was never his principal reason. It was reputation, ego, and the election,” he said.
Prosecutors scored key points earlier in the trial’s first week by getting a former tabloid executive, David Pecker, to testify that efforts to elevate pro-Trump stories and quash negative ones were tied to the 2016 contests.
“They asked me what can I do, and what my magazines could do, to help the campaign,” Mr. Pecker told the jury. “I said what I would do is I would run or publish positive stories about Mr. Trump and I would publish negative stories about his opponents.”
Mr. Pecker said that Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen didn’t mention the Trump family during their conversations about potentially unflattering stories, including one from Playboy model Karen McDougal about an alleged affair.
“I thought it was for the campaign,” Mr. Pecker said.
Defense attorneys countered that many celebrities and politicians have tried to suppress bad press in tabloids such as the National Enquirer so the general concept is not limited to Mr. Trump or the 2016 election.
The lawyers also used testimony from Mr. Trump’s longtime assistant, Rhona Graff, to humanize the ex-president.
Ms. Graff described Mr. Trump as “fair” and “respectful to me.”
Sometimes, she said, Mr. Trump would poke his head out of his office late in the day and tell her to go home to her family.
“He’s not just [the] Donald Trump that you’ve seen on TV and read about and seen photos of,” Mr. Blanche told the jury. “He’s also a man. He’s a husband. He’s a father. And he’s a person, just like you and just like me.”
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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