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.
Ben Droz
Ben Droz
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.