Trump’s Screwed. He Either Has To Enrage Melania Or Risk A Felony Charge By Manhattan D.A.

Donald Trump is in quite the quandary these days. Does he do something to lessen his already mountainous level of legal headaches or does he keep his marriage on an even keel? It’s not an enviable position to be in for anybody, but since Trump put himself there, it’s not a sympathetic one, either.

We speak of the ongoing turmoil over the $130,000 hush money check which was paid to Stormy Daniels so that she didn’t reveal the news of their tryst when Trump was running for president in 2016. The issue now is that Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office is seeking to characterize the $130,000 reimbursement to Michael Cohen as an attempt to cover up an illegal campaign contribution, and that’s a felony. But Trump’s advisers purportedly are telling Trump that he needs to characterize the money as spent to keep marital harmony with Melania. And Trump is reluctant to play that card. As Kellyanne Conway noted, Trump “reserves fear” for Melania. Rolling Stone:

The subject has long been a sore one for the former president. When Trump occupied the White House, it was clear to top aides how much he worried about Melania’s anger related to Daniels’ accusations.

“He at one point called me, after the Stormy Daniels news broke, to ask if we [in the first lady’s office] would be responding to her allegations — and I could tell he was trying to take my temperature to see if his wife was pissed off,” Stephanie Grisham, a former senior official in Trump’s White House, tells Rolling Stone. “He never, ever called me to ask if the East Wing was going to respond to something. Never. And he never did again. It was just so out of character for him to do that that it was clear he was trying to see if his wife was pissed. Our East Wing was known at the time for putting out statements that would shock or anger the West Wing, and for this one, since it was a very personal topic, it was clear he was testing the waters.”

It was also clear to Grisham that Melania was indeed angry about the situation. “I don’t think we ever did put” out a statement about Daniels, Grisham says of Melania Trump’s office. “Mrs. Trump would always say to me: ‘This is his problem. This is his problem.’”

Indeed it is. And this strategy of recharacterizing the nature of the $130K payment is far from fool proof. Maybe that’s why Trump is waffling on it.

Even if Trump’s advisers succeed in getting him to relent and admit the payments were entirely related to not angering his wife with humiliating headlines about a dalliance, it’s unclear that would clear him of any legal woes. “The fact that the false statements in this case relate to payments to hide an extramarital affair, while not a legal defense to a potential charge, nonetheless could be considered by prosecutors as a circumstance weighing against potential charges — and would certainly be considered by the judge at sentencing, when the judge considers the seriousness of the offense,” says Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor who is not involved in this case.

My instinct is that it doesn’t matter either way. Melania has already endured the humiliation of being married to Trump and living in the fish bowl of the White House. I can’t see something this relatively insignificant affecting her in any substantial way. But then again, who knows? Maybe this is the proverbial straw.

My sense of things is that she’ll just go do another spa treatment and wait for the big orange boy to die. I think that’s been her plan all along, why blow it now?