USA 2024: -209, Trump, NY trial confirmed, states’ say on abortion

He tried again, and for the umpteenth time, to delay a trial against him, but this time it didn’t work: a New York appeals court yesterday rejected the request to delay the start of the proceedings set for April 15 and to move it out of Manhattan due to what we would call ‘legitimate suspicion’.

However, Donald Trump‘s appeal against the limits imposed by the trial judge, Juan M. Merchan, on his attacks on investigators, jurors, and witnesses in the proceedings, which would violate the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, remains in place.

The move by the tycoon’s lawyers, which was based on the impossibility of having an impartial jury due to high media exposure and widespread hostility towards the former president in New York, immediately appeared “unorthodox” and “desperate” to liberal U.S. media, which had predicted it would be rejected.

At this point, the start of the trial next Monday, for the hush money payments to two women during the 2016 U.S. election campaign to keep them quiet about their past relationships with Trump, seems hardly avoidable: it will be the first time a former U.S. president appears in a courtroom as a defendant in a criminal trial.

USA 2024; abortion, Trump’s shift, no to federal ban, decision up to the states
While continuing to try to evade justice, Trump has broken his silence on abortion by posting a video on the social media platform Truth, where he says no to a federal abortion ban and states that it should be up to the individual states to legislate on the matter.

His stance came after months of contradictory signals from the former president, fearful, on one hand, of displeasing his Christian fundamentalist base, and on the other, of alienating women across the Union.

For Trump, whatever the states decide, that should be “the law of the land”; and he is personally strongly in favor of exceptions in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the mother’s life. In the video, the former president takes credit for the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the previous ruling that protected abortion at the federal level in 2022 – crucially influenced by the opinion of the three conservative and anti-abortion judges he appointed – and states that it is now up to the states to “do the right thing”.

Trump’s stance, in fact, disappoints the Christian fundamentalists, but does not alienate their support. One of the most important anti-abortion groups in the United States accuses him of having “bent to the will of the Democrats.” “We are deeply disappointed by President Trump’s stance,” says Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. However, the organization reaffirms its commitment to “defeating President Joe Biden” and the Democrats in Congress and supporting Trump.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham is “respectfully” in disagreement with the former president, whom he supports. The senator backs the controversial idea of a federal ban from 15 weeks. Trump counters that his openly conservative position in favor of strict abortion limits is politically disastrous for Republicans.

“Many smart Republicans have lost elections because of this issue and people like Graham, relentless, are handing Democrats the dream of winning the House, Senate, and perhaps even the presidency,” the magnate writes on Truth.

Even his former vice president, Mike Pence, attacks him for the shift on abortion, calling it “a slap in the face to the millions of pro-life Americans who voted for him in 2016 and 2020”.

For President Joe Biden, Trump on abortion “is just trying to limit the damage” and “is grasping at straws… Since he is responsible for the overturning of the Supreme Court ruling, he is worried that voters will punish him… They surely will…”.

USA 2024: Trump’s eclipse and Biden’s polls
ANSA – Donald Trump did not miss the opportunity to use the total solar eclipse for electoral purposes: on his social media Truth, he posted a video showing a crowd waiting for the event until the sun is obscured by his profile. “The most significant event in human history will take place in 2024,” is the notice, set to the music of Strauss used for ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’. Then the promise: “We will save America and make it great again”.

This idea is not new. Trump had already exploited it with a video on Twitter in 2017, during a previous eclipse, showing a sequence in which his face progressively advanced to completely overlap and cover that of his predecessor Barack Obama.

In an electoral speech, President Biden instead stated that there are 18 polls showing him ahead of Trump following the State of the Union address a month ago, but that the press is not talking about it. Speaking in Chicago, Biden noted that one poll in Pennsylvania gives him a 10-point lead and said he is “genuinely excited about our good moment”, while Trump is full of “anger and hate” and wants.