Butler is a husband, father, grandfather, business executive, entrepreneur, and political observer.
We have all been exposed to the nationally embarrassing circus often labeled the “hush money” trial of former President Donald Trump. But I suspect most of us have not read the actual charges on which he has now been convicted. I am not going to address the claims that the whole trial was rigged or that the verdict was in the bag in some way. But I will simplify these charges and point out some interesting aspects of this travesty.
But first let me state that I am not a Trump supporter (nor am I a Joe Biden supporter). I have voted in every presidential election since turning 18. I did not vote for Trump in 2016, nor in 2020, nor will I vote for him in 2024. I also did not vote for Hillary Clinton or Biden. I think our presidential choices in recent years have gone from bad to worse, and we deserve better.
With that in mind, consider the following distillation of the 34 counts against Trump.
“THE GRAND JURY OF THE COUNTY OF NEW YORK, by this indictment, accuses the defendant of the crime of FALSIFYING BUSINESS RECORDS IN THE FIRST DEGREE, in violation of Penal Law §175.10, committed as follows: The defendant, in the County of New York and elsewhere, on or about [various dates ranging from February 14, 2017 through December 5, 2017], with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof, made and caused a false entry in the business records of an enterprise, to wit, [transaction details and “enterprise” details], and kept and maintained by the Trump Organization.”
All 34 charges are essentially for the same activity spread out over a period of time and involving different types of records and two different organizations. Each count has identical language except for the various dates, the transaction details and the “enterprise” details.
For example, the transaction details and enterprise details of the first four counts are as follows:
- Count one: “… an invoice from Michael Cohen dated February 14, 2017, marked as a record of the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust …”
- Count two: “… an entry in the Detail General Ledger for the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, bearing voucher number 842457 …”
- Count three: “… an entry in the Detail General Ledger for the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, bearing voucher number 842460 …”
- Count four: “… a Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust Account check and check stub dated February 14, 2017, bearing check number 000138 …”
Counts five through seven are of the identical format except that there is one Detail General Ledger entry for the invoice instead of two.
Beginning with counts eight through 10 there is a slight difference in who the records belonged to:
- Count eight: “… an invoice from Michael Cohen dated April 13, 2017, marked as a record of Donald J. Trump …”
- Count nine: “… an entry in the Detail General Ledger for Donald J. Trump, bearing voucher number 858770 …”
- Count 10: “… a Donald J. Trump account check and check stub dated June 19, 2017 …”
Counts 11 through 34 are again identical in nature. For each of nine months from April through December 2017, there is one count for an invoice from Michael Cohen marked as a record of Donald J. Trump, one count for a Detail General Ledger Entry in the records of Donald J. Trump, and one count for a check issued to pay the invoice by Donald J. Trump.
One interesting note on these charges is that they appear to correspond to 11 monthly invoices from Cohen for legal services. The groups of charges start with an invoice (11 of them, issued monthly between February 2017 and December 2017). Each of those invoices has a voucher for a Detail General Ledger entry (two vouchers for the February invoice) and then each of the invoices has a check that was issued to pay the invoices. Media explanations of the transactions say they were presented as monthly retainer invoices for services but embedded in the amounts was a reimbursement for Cohen’s payment to Stormy Daniels.
Evidently the falsification involved classifying these payments as “legal services” instead of marking a portion of the payments as election-related “hush money.”
But more interesting is who these “falsified” records belonged to: the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust and Donald J. Trump the person, neither of which is a “business.” A revocable trust is simply a legal tool for organizing your personal assets and ensuring they are distributed per your instructions when you die. They are used to ensure a deceased person’s estate is not subject to the time and expense of a lengthy probate process whereby a court determines how your assets are distributed. They are a common legal tool not just for wealthy people but for anyone who has a sizable estate. Probate requirements vary from state to state but are typically required when the estate exceeds $100,000 (or much less in some states). Placing your assets in a trust can avoid the probate process. The trust will hold investments including even privately held businesses of which Trump no doubt has many. But the trust itself is not a business. Nor is Trump himself personally a business.
Each of the charges states that the records were “kept and maintained by the Trump Organization” but this is merely an administrative service provided for his benefit and which he presumably pays for. The records themselves are the records of Donald Trump and not the Trump Organization or any other business.
Perhaps the invoices themselves were issued to a Trump business. But paying such an invoice personally would suggest Trump understood they were not business expenses, and he therefore chose to pay them from personal funds.
I am no fan of Donald Trump’s morals or ethics, whether personal or business-related, but I do wonder how he can be convicted of falsifying business records based on records that are strictly personal.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.