Freddy Gray

The 45th president of the United States of America — and the leading Republican contender to win back the White House in 2024 — may or may not be arrested today or tomorrow.  According to his former-lawyer-turned-legal-nemesis Michael Cohen, Donald Trump should escape the indignity of handcuffs but could well be ‘fingerprinted, swabbed [and] mugshotted.’ Cohen insists he doesn’t want to see images of Trump doing a ‘perp walk’ because, he says, ‘he respects the institution of the presidency.’  Trump may despise Stormy Daniels, but he would surely respect the hustle   Cohen, a convict himself, is hardly the most credible source.

How will it look, for the health of American democracy, if the former President Donald Trump is put in handcuffs next week over charges that he paid ‘hush-hush money’ to the porn star Stormy Daniels?  The man himself seems to be bracing for legal persecution over what he calls ‘The Stormy Horseface Daniels Extortion Plot.’ He says he expects to be arrested on Tuesday and blames his ’sleazebag’ former lawyer Michael Cohen, who claims Trump paid him £230,000 to pay off Daniels and another woman called Karen McDougal, who was voted America’s second ‘sexiest playmate of the 1990s.’  Trump has always denied the allegations and says the whole Daniels case is ‘ancient and now many times debunked.

Everybody knows that free speech is protected in America under the First Amendment of the nation’s constitution. It’s quite striking, then, to see the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer demanding that a major television network stop its leading anchor from airing footage he doesn’t like.   ‘I don't think I've ever seen a primetime cable news anchor manipulate his viewers the way Mr. Carlson did last night,’ said Schumer, referring to Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, who this week began showing new security camera images from the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. ‘I don't think I've ever seen an anchor treat the American people and American democracy with such disdain,' he said. ‘Fox News, Rupert Murdoch: tell Carlson not to run a second segment of lies.

It’s by now well-established that Fox News, the American media behemoth, is no longer on the Trump Train. Trumpworld’s union with Foxworld was never altogether easy and, ever since that fateful election in November 2020, it has fallen apart. Trumpists despise Fox for, as many see it, helping Joe Biden steal the election. And the top brass at Fox News have sought to distance themselves from the Trump movement and what they regard as its increasingly toxic politics. Rupert Murdoch has had enough of the Orange One, by all accounts. What hasn’t been made entirely clear is the extent of the break-up. One senior Fox figure has let slip, however, that Donald Trump is effectively ‘banned’ from appearing on Fox News at present.

It was only a matter of time before Joe Biden made a ‘surprise’ visit to Kiev. In the year since Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the choreographed walkabout with Volodymyr Zelensky has become the must-do photo-op for western global leaders. It’s the 21st century equivalent of an audience with the Pope – a symbolic news happening which shocks no one.  That’s not to say it’s not important. It signals, yet again, that America – the most powerful military and financial player on planet earth – is firmly behind Zelensky and his efforts to repel the Russian invasion.