FLORIDA — The first former US president to face criminal charges: Donald Trump now holds this dubious and historic record after a court in New York indicted him on 34 counts of falsifying business records.
The charges relate to a $130,000 hush-money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 presidential election.
Trump’s dramatic day in court dominates front pages around the world.
Photos of the former president inside and outside court appeared on the front pages of most UK newspapers on Wednesday, under pun-heavy headlines such as “Donald (in the) Dock” and “Trump in the eye of the Stormy”.
Brazilian newspaper O Globo, meanwhile, published a piece titled “Trump Turns Dock into Election Box After Criminal Indictment”. The paper said his advisers saw the case and vast media attention as “a lucrative campaign ad” and “stimulus for online fundraising”.
Trump has declared he is running in the 2024 presidential election. “With the spotlight on him, he returns to guide the news cycle,” it wrote.
Le Monde also highlighted what it called the “political benefits” of the arrest.
“By playing again the broken record that invariably presents him as the victim of a ‘witch hunt’ and a plot by the ‘deep state’, Trump is forcing his camp to take his side,” the French newspaper wrote in an editorial published last week and promoted again after his arrest.
It accuses the Republican Party of learning nothing, two years after Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, and says his backers are “locked into a veritable cult of personality” around the former president.
“The result is a weakened judiciary and a democracy under increasing strain.”
German daily newspaper Tagesspiegel ran with the headline “Nothing but the truth?” — reflecting Trump’s track record of false or misleading claims — while in another German publication, Der Spiegel, columnist Roland Nelles wrote a piece titled “He Had It Coming”.
“Miracles still do happen,” he wrote about the former president’s arrest. “After eluding the wheels of justice for so long with an unending repertoire of tricks, feints and lies, he now finds himself equal before the law after all.”
After his court appearance, Trump was released on bail and returned to his estate in Florida, where he delivered a furiously defiant speech attacking critics, opponents and the justice system.
“Donald Trump has definitely thrown off the mask,” Italian newspaper La Stampa wrote, saying that while some may have expected “moderation and a step back from the tycoon” after his charges, this “all-attack” speech proved the opposite.
Pro-Kremlin Russian daily Izvestia, however, instead leads its coverage of Trump’s arrest with quotes from Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who called the arrest “the crisis of liberalism”.
“This is when the system, which is declared as absolutely free, ends up devouring or denying itself,” she said.
China’s state-controlled media did not pay much attention to the court case on its front pages. But there was much discussion of the story on social media site Weibo.
According to analysis by BBC Monitoring, a hashtag noting that Trump could face 136 years behind bars if found guilty on all counts saw more than 340 million views and 11,000 comments as of 05:30 GMT on 5 April.
And some users even viewed the case as the beginning of a “civil war” in the US, considering it part of a “political persecution” launched by the Democrats against Mr Trump. — BBC
