Did Trump Just Admit to His Hush-Money Trial Crimes?

Donald Trump’s “bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all” philosophy may have just given his attorneys another headache.

The former president is on trial in New York for allegedly falsifying business records in order to conceal an affair with and subsequent hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, part of an effort to sway the 2016 presidential election.

And on Tuesday, Trump seemed to outright admit he had done so, insisting to reporters crowded outside the courthouse that he marked the expenditures to Daniels via his former fixer and attorney Michael Cohen as a “legal expense.”

“This was a trial that should have never been brought,” Trump said. “I was paying a lawyer and marked it down as a legal expense. Some accountant, I didn’t know, marked it down as a legal expense. That’s exactly what it was … and you get indicted over that? I should be, right now, in Pennsylvania and Florida and many other states—North Carolina, Georgia—campaigning. This is all coming from the Biden White House because the guy can’t put two sentences together.”

“So check it out. It’s called legal expense, that’s what you’re supposed to call it. No one has ever seen anything like it,” he added.

Unfortunately for Trump, payments to porn actresses made in exchange for their silence don’t usually qualify as legal expenses—especially when those payments amount to key details that could influence a voting populace’s choices ahead of a presidential election.

Trump faces 34 felony charges in the case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. He has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

In the year of our lord 2024, the Confederate States of America are still being honored in Mississippi. 

Continuing a decades-old annual tradition, Governor Tate Reeves declared April as “Confederate Heritage Month,” the Beauvoir museum in Biloxi announced on Facebook Friday. The site is the historic home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. 

The tradition dates back to 1993 but isn’t publicized by any Mississippi state official or government agency. The only organization that regularly does so is the Sons of Confederate Veterans, or SCV, who first requested the proclamation 31 years ago.  The SCV owns and operates the Beauvoir museum, promoting the “Lost Cause” myth of the Civil War that downplays the role of slavery and white supremacy in causing the war.

Reeves’s record on race and Civil War history is checkered. As a student at Millsaps College in his youth, Reeves was part of a fraternity that threw Confederate-themed parties where members wore blackface. The governor says he never wore blackface while in the fraternity. 

In 2020, he signed a law retiring Mississippi’s state flag, which honored the Confederate flag, but criticized Black Lives Matter protesters at the same time. And Reeves has also denied the existence of systemic racism in the United States. 

Mississippi is the only state that has dedicated a month to honoring the Confederacy in the last three years, although six other Southern states have done so historically. Mississippi will also recognize Confederate Memorial Day on April 27, as state law requires. But those seeking to protest against these policies will have a tough time: The Supreme Court just effectively abolished protests in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.

Senator Tom Cotton is doubling down on his calls for mass violence against protesters, suggesting online that the proper way for fellow citizens to handle a group of people peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights is to physically assault them.

The alarming post came Tuesday, a day after the Arkansas Republican reacted to a group of activists that shut down traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge for five hours in protest of Israel’s war on Gaza, telling Fox News that the protesters would be thrown off the bridge if the demonstration had occurred in Arkansas.

“If something like this happened in Arkansas on a bridge there, let’s just say that there would be a lot of very wet criminals that would have been tossed overboard, not by law enforcement, but by the people whose road they are blocking,” Cotton said. “If they glued their hands to a car or pavement it would probably be pretty painful to have their skin ripped off, but I think that’s the way we’d handle it in Arkansas.”

“And I’d encourage most people, anywhere, that get stuck behind criminals like this that are trying to block traffic like this, to take matters into their own hands. There’s only usually a few of them, and there’s a lot of people being inconvenienced,” Cotton continued. “It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.”

And his fellow Republican lawmakers don’t seem bothered by that one bit—or at least not enough to condemn him for explicitly endorsing violence between citizens.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough called him out on that, recalling a time when such behavior was deemed unpatriotic and morally reprehensible within the conservative party.

“Because of Donald Trump there is no peer pressure anymore,” Scarborough—a former Republican legislator for Florida—said on Tuesday. “I will tell you, if a senator of either party or a member of Congress of either party said we need to throw people off the bridge, we need to rip the skin off their hands—at any time before Trump—that senator would be apologizing this morning. Now it won’t even leave a mark. He’ll probably raise more money off it.”

“They’re suggesting that violence is conservative,” the anchor continued. “It’s what Tom Cotton is saying, it’s what Donald Trump is saying, it’s what those people who use ‘violence rhetoric’ are suggesting. It’s not. It’s the opposite of being conservative.”

Speaking outside Allentown, Pennsylvania, on Sunday, Donald Trump left everyone confused when he attempted to explain the Battle of Gettysburg, praised (and invented a quote from) Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and generally had no idea what he was talking about.

When his off-the-cuff remarks hit late-night television on Monday, the hosts couldn’t hide their laughter.

“You have to hand it to this guy: On the weekend before his unprecedented criminal trial begins, he somehow manages to overshadow it with this broken-brained interpretation of what happened at Gettysburg during the Civil War,” Jimmy Kimmel quipped.

“What a stirring orator. I look forward to Ken Burns’s updated documentary,” Stephen Colbert said.

“That is plagiarized almost directly from my seventh-grade book report, ‘Gettysburg: Wow,’” said Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

Donald Trump’s knowledge of history has long been suspect—we’re still not sure if he knows who Frederick Douglass is, for example. His remarks on Saturday aren’t even the first time that he’s made this bizarre recounting of the Battle of Gettysburg. Perhaps he should follow in Abraham Lincoln’s footsteps and pay a visit to the actual battlefield—though he clearly didn’t learn much from an October 2016 visit. But how much free time will he have before the election, since he has to be in a courtroom most of the time?

House Speaker Mike Johnson just lost one more party member to the simmering Republican effort to strip him of his job.

Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie announced on Tuesday that he had sided with Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene to rid the lower chamber of Johnson’s leadership.

“I just told Mike Johnson in conference that I’m cosponsoring the Motion to Vacate that was introduced by @RepMTG,” Massie wrote on X. “He should pre-announce his resignation (as Boehner did), so we can pick a new Speaker without ever being without a GOP Speaker.”

And the straw that broke the camel’s back?

“All of the above. This camel has a pallet of bricks,” Massie wrote, following a string of tweets pointing to the Ukraine-Israel-Taiwan foreign aid package, the expansion of a “warrantless” domestic surveillance program, a proposal to ban TikTok, and the lack of a border bill.

Johnson has, according to Massie, already issued his response, telling the Kentuckian that he “won’t resign.”

“I said to him that he is the only one who can prevent us from going through what happened last fall,” Massie posted.

Massie’s defection from the pro-Johnson camp adds incredible pressure to the speaker’s already tenuous position in a monumentally divided House GOP. As of Tuesday, Greene needs just one more conservative defector in order to oust Johnson—or, if the vote takes place after Republican Representative Mike Gallagher takes his leave from Congress on Friday, the pair might be enough to give Johnson the boot on their own.

In March, Greene filed a motion to vacate after Johnson worked with Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to pass a $1.2 trillion omnibus bill, torching him for accomplishing one of the legislature’s primary annual responsibilities: funding the government.

But last week the Georgia Republican ramped up her attacks, circulating a vicious five-page memo calling for his removal while accusing the caucus of ignoring the wills of its constituents via the party’s alleged “complete and total surrender” to Democrats under Johnson’s helm.