Politics

All of Trump's biggest 'achievements' as he faces indictment

All of Trump's biggest 'achievements' as he faces indictment
Gasps at Fox News as Trump indicted for Stormy Daniels hush money …
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After weeks of speculation, it’s finally happened – Donald Trump has been indicted by a New York City grand jury.

He is facing charges of falsifying business records stemming from payments he made to adult film star Stormy Daniels to prevent her from revealing an affair he had with her before the 2016 election.

The news came through late on Thursday night (March 30), with sources telling CNN after the indictment became public that Trump reportedly faces more than 30 counts related to business fraud.

It means he’ll go down in history for breaking a number of different unwanted records and setting regrettable milestones in office – none of which you’d want on your CV.

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These are all of Trump's biggest 'achievements' as he faces indictment.

The first former president to face criminal charges

Trump has always denied having an affair with Stormy Daniels in 2006Getty Images

While the specific charges have yet to be made clear, it’s been reported that Trump will face counts of business fraud relating to payments made to Daniels.

Daniels alleges that she had an affair with Trump in 2006. She was paid off to keep quiet about the supposed extramarital activity.

Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison in 2018 after pleading guilty to tax evasion and campaign finance violations in relation to paying Daniels. Trump has strongly denied reports of an affair between himself and the 44-year-old.

It’s the first time a former president has ever faced criminal charges – and Trump has already made it clear that he would not withdraw from the 2024 presidential race either.

Trump said he was “completely innocent” and even accused district attorney Alvin Bragg, who is a Democrat, of trying to damage his chances of beating Joe Biden in the next election.

"This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history," his statement read.

The first president to be impeached twice

Becoming the first president to face criminal charges is a new milestone for Trump, but he already held the record for being the first president to be impeached twice.

The first of his two impeachments came on December 18, 2019 when Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she was opening an impeachment inquiry into an anonymous CIA whistleblower’s tip that he had acted improperly during an official phone call with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky earlier in the year.

The US president had seemingly threatened Zelensky with the suggestion that almost $400m in congressionally-approved American military aid would be withheld unless Zelensky announced a politically-embarrassing anti-corruption investigation into Biden and his son Hunter Biden.

The second impeachment came on 13 January 2021 – just a week before the end of Trump’s time in office – which itself marked a presidential first…

The first president to incite a insurrection

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The House of Representatives voted 232-197 in favour of an article charging Trump with “incitement of insurrection” to mark his second indictment in January 2021.

It came one week on from the storming of the US Capitol Building by a mob of enraged Trump supporters, whipped up by the president’s words at a “Save America” rally staged nearby to coincide with the certification of the previous November’s election results in a Joint Session of Congress.

First president to lose the popular vote twice

Trump beat Hillary Clinton with 306 electoral votes back in 2016, winning him the election. However, he was beaten in the popular vote, with 61.2 million votes to Clinton’s 62.5 million.

Biden had won 306 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 232 in 2020, with Biden winning 81 million votes to beat Trump in the popular vote by more than seven million ballots.

Only the second president to claim the election was stolen from them

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Trump has been repeating the same baseless rubbish about a stolen election for almost 3 years now, but he’s only the second president that tried to claim an election had been stolen from them.

The first was Andrew Jackson in 1824, who disputed the result of a contingent election that was held in the House of Representatives – which saw him beaten by John Quincy Adams.

Writing in a correspondence afterward, “liberty never was in greater danger. . . . Let the Presidency be transmitted by the exercise of a corrupt patronage . . . and we shall soon consider the form of electing by the people a mere farce.”

Two hundred years later, Trump was using similar language to talk about the election result of 2020.

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