What Donald Trump really stole from us

| 7:00 pm EDT March 27, 2024
Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote of a handy (for me) mnemonic for keeping straight the four criminal indictments of Donald Trump. I used the acronym DIGS, standing for Documents, Insurrection, Georgia and Stormy. It had the added advantage of putting the four indictments in order, from most serious to least. Most serious, I say, but not most significant. For significance, the Stormy Daniels case tops them all. A moment’s reflection will tell you why.

As you may recall, as part of his effort to hide allegations of extramarital affairs from American voters, Donald Trump shuffled hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribe money to his then lawyer Michael Cohen. Prosecutor Alvin Bragg charges that Cohen paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels and coordinated with the National Enquirer’s publisher to give the former Playboy model Karen McDougal $150,000, to hide both women’s accounts of their sexual encounters with Trump.

The Stormy Daniels case, as it has become known for convenience, occurred ahead of the 2016 election. The other three cases happened in the final days of Donald Trump’s misbegotten presidential term. Had the Stormy scandal been exposed there’s a real chance it would have dealt Trump’s election chances a fatal blow. Recall that Trump won by a razor thin margin. Stormy might have taken the edge off that razor.

All of which is to say, Donald Trump might have lost the 2016 election, which means he would have had no chance to commit the three other crimes, that is, the DIG portion of DIGS. In other words, we could be living today in a Trump-free world, with Hillary Clinton just now finishing her second term.

It’s an attractively delectable thought. After all, who hasn’t wished that someone had jostled Lee Harvey Oswald’s elbow, causing him to miss, or that alert airport security had stopped the nineteen Saudi hijackers on September 11? History often hangs by a precarious thread, and Stormy Daniels was one of those threads.

The American people were robbed of discovering one more awful truth about the awful, despicable man they narrowly elected. It was election interference par excellence, it was what Trump always does. As with golf and every other game Trump has ever played, he cheated, and it was America’s huge loss.

“[The Stormy Daniels case is] not just about one payment,” Alvin Bragg said, “it is 34 false statements and business records that were concealing criminal conduct.” True enough. But it’s also about a historical chance stolen from us, a last precious chance we very much deserved to have.

Imagine a world where more than a million Americans hadn’t died because of Covid, a world where our allies respected us, a world where Vladimir Putin’s evil agenda had been thwarted at every turn. No insurrection at the Capitol, no weaponised DOJ, no Mueller investigation, no interference with Ukraine, no paranoid attacks on the press as “the enemy of the people,” no hatred and bigotry in the People’s House. We lost that world, and Trump used trickery, lies and misdirection to steal that world from us.

In a sense the Stormy Daniels case is our first chance to get even. It’s a poor second choice, but it’s what we have. The day of reckoning begins on april 15th, and here’s to many more such days in the future. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.

Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.