‘Heads, we win; tails, you lose’: how rightwing hush-money trial coverage boosts Trump

Donald Trump has retained much of his political support amid his ongoing hush-money trial in part due to a combination of the courtroom’s ban on cameras and conservative media echoing his claims that both the prosecutor and judge are corrupt, media analysts say.

The experts suggest that the former president could retain political support on the right even if the jury determines he is guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records related to his reimbursements to Michael Cohen for a payment to Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Conservative media like Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network are “running a sort of ‘heads, we win; tails, you lose’ play”, said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a leftwing advocacy group. They are portraying the trial as a “witch-hunt ginned up by Joe Biden, and obviously because of that”, they say “he will be found not guilty, but at the same time, they are arguing that if he is found guilty, it will be because the jury and the judge are partisan and corrupt”.

The trial in New York concerns one of four criminal indictments Trump faces, but will probably be the only one that concludes before the November election.

As of this month, Trump leads Biden in several recent polls.

A camera ban in the Manhattan courtroom is hardly unique to the Trump hush-money case. In the US, only the District of Columbia is more restrictive than New York in terms of allowing audio-visual coverage of court proceedings, among 48 jurisdictions reviewed in a report by the Fund for Modern Courts. And a shortage of in-house visuals means the public has to rely on courtroom sketches and secondhand accounts of what occurred during trial proceedings.

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