Fox News hosts fretted Monday over the potential indictment of Donald Trump for a $130,000 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign.
“They better not put my president in prison,” an upset Jesse Watters said on The Five before clinging to Trump’s popular vote count in the 2020 election as some sort of defense. “He represents 74 million Americans. And if he’s the nominee, you’re putting 74 million votes in prison. And that’s how I see it.”
After Watters downplayed Trump’s potential crime as a mere “bookkeeping charge,” he turned his attention to other crimes in New York, specifically violent, antisemitic ones, and accused Manhattan District Attorney Bragg of not seeking harsher sentences in those cases. “He’s emptying the prison—what, to make room for Trump?” Watters exclaimed. “No one else is getting charged with anything.”
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Watters wasn’t done there. Bragg, he continued, has political motivations for bringing a case.
“The guy wants to make a name for himself, obviously, because he wants to be…the first prosecutor to throw cuffs on Trump,” Watters said. “That’ll get you elected pretty much governor in the state of New York. That’s what he’s after.”
And as far as security measures underway in Manhattan in advance of a potential Trump court appearance, Watters contended that it’s all part of an attempt to “trigger another January 6.”
“‘Let’s put up a bunch of cops with a bunch of bars around this place,’” Watters mimicked before instructing supporters of the former president: “Don’t fall for it.”
For his part, Greg Gutfeld said he didn’t want “to live in a world where paying porn actresses hush money is considered a crime.” He continued: “That’s sexist. You pay for the sex and you pay for them not to talk about it.”
Gutfeld argued Bragg “was waiting for the right time” for a possible indictment, “in order to guarantee that Trump gets the nomination.”
“Since Morning Joe and CNN aren’t giving Trump the free media… which effectively drowned out all of his competition [in 2016], this will have the same outcome,” he claimed. Gutfeld followed up by saying that he believes Trump himself may in fact welcome an indictment more than anyone on the left given how the 2016 election turned out.
“And then this is happening at the same time that they are announcing that they are going to arrest 1,000 more people [for] January 6,” Gutfeld continued, referencing how the Department of Justice reportedly told a Washington, D.C., federal court last late year to be prepared for another 700 to 1,200 prosecutions relating to the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“What does that sound like to you?” he said. “It sounds like they are going after Donald Trump, Trump supporters, Trump voters—the 77 million people that they hate.”
“And if you are a New Yorker and you’re ambivalent about politics and don’t even care about Trump,” he added, “you should be pissed because [Bragg] is downgrading crimes that ruined your city while spending all this time upgrading one crime as a full-time vocation.”
Later Monday night on Fox News, Tucker Carlson reacted to the situation by giving his audience some primetime fear-mongering.
A Trump indictment would be the result of the “abuse of law enforcement power” and would mean that “voters will never again determine the outcome of a presidential election,” he said, noting that Trump holds frontrunner status in the GOP primary.
“It’s remarkable, when you think about it,” he added.
