Contrast seen in Trump Supreme, Court, NY cases

By: Dan Horrison
USA Today

WASHINGTON - "We're writing a rule for the ages," Justice Neil Gorsuch intoned as the Supreme Count on Thursday [04/25/2024] took on one of the most important questions a democracy faces: Can a former president be held criminally accountable for actions in office?
..... Simultaneously, at a sometimes grubby courthouse in lower Manhattan, a former supermarket tabloid publisher testified about a former president's effort to quash tales of extramarital trysts with a porn star and a nude model in a case based on $130,000 in hush money payments.
..... At the center of both: the some ex-president, Donald Trump.
..... Even by the frequently chaotic standards of Trumpworld, Thursday's [04/25/2024] proceedings were notable, presenting a stark, real-time split screen of a nation's constitutional law and a billionaire businessman's dirty laundry.
..... Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, faces four separate criminal indictments. he says the charges against him are a political witch hunt by Democrats in New York, Georgia and the federal government.
..... There was no mistaking the elevated tone of the Supreme Court proceedings, nor the lowlife nature of the testimony in New York.
...... In Washington Trump's lawyer D. John Sauer argued that his client shouldn't face federal charges for trying to overturn his 2002 lass to Joe Biden. "Without presidential immunity form criminal prosecution, there can be no presidency as we know it," Sauer told the high court. "For 234 years of American history, no president was ever prosecuted for his official acts."
..... In New York, with Trump watching closely, David Pecker, the former publisher of the "national Enquirer" told a jury about his agreement to catch and kill stores that might damage the businessman's 2016 long-shot presidential campaign. A separate Trump legal team waited to cross-examine/
..... "What a day!" said William Howell, a political scientists at the University of Chicago. "Blanket arraignments on behalf of presidential immunity being advanced at the Supreme court are running simultaneously with state criminal proceedings against Trump for hush money payments made to a porn actress in 2016 election - all while Trump and Biden square off in an incredibly division presidential election."
..... "You have this great, abstract, almost law school argument at the Supreme Court, and this pretty tawdry case where the rubber hits the road," said Andrew Rudalevige, a professor of government at Bowdoin College.
..... For author and historian David Nasaw, the most striking thing about Thursday's [04/25/2024] proceeding - and the New York trial overall - is the fact that Trump's alleged tryst were exposed while he's still a powerful figure.
..... Indiscretions by presidents John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower didn't come to light until after their deaths. "This is happening in real time. Nothing has been as sleazy as this - Playboy models and porn stars," Nasaw said.
..... I" can't count how may judges - some of whom are now sitting on the Supreme Court - have said no man is above the law,: Rudalevige said. "And yet here we are."

..... Contributing: Aysha Bagchi, USA Today.

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