Pictures of donald trump sitting in a New York courtroom watched countless front-page stories about the first criminal trial of a former or current US president.
This coverage was not limited to the US. Media outlets around the world picked up the story – buzzing about the man who wants to return to the White House and the case against him.
Trump denies 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 payment made by his lawyer to buy an adult film star’s silence shortly before the 2016 election. She claims they had an affair; he denies the story.
So how is the historic trial being covered, from Beijing to Rome? We asked our colleagues at BBC Monitoring, which tracks and analyzes media around the world.
‘SleepyDon’ trial presents unprecedented problems for US: China
By Tom Lam, BBC Monitoring China expert
Chinese media covered Trump’s trial, but it did not appear as prominently on the news agenda as one might expect. Still, it offered the media another opportunity to showcase what is seen as the chaos and polarization of US politics.
Reports in English focused on the facts of the case. The English edition of state news agency Xinhua highlighted that Donald Trump was the first former president to be criminally tried. It also quoted the accused describing the trial as “political persecution” and saying that the country was “failing”. China Daily, the English-language state newspaper, focused on jury selection, during which more than 50 of the first 96 potential jurors were dismissed after being told they could not be fair.
The state-affiliated, nationally-focused outlet The Paper provided infographics and timelines of the trial, and cited U.S. polls as showing polarized opinions on the issue among U.S. voters. It also amplified conflicting reports about the possible impact on the November general election.
China’s state-run News Service (CNS) spoke of “unprecedented problems” the US judicial system would face if Trump won in November but was also convicted.
The nationalist daily Global Times cited high interest rates, inflation and the crisis in the Middle East as demonstrating Trump’s notion that the world has spiraled out of control under the Biden administration.
But the state tabloid did not spare the Republican either. He provided a colorful report on April 16 focusing on reports that he had fallen asleep in court, posting a meme ridiculing him as “#SleepyDon.”
‘Mesmerized and alarmed’ – Latin America
By Pascal Fletcher, specialist at BBC Monitoring Latin America, Miami
From Mexico and Cuba to Argentina, media coverage reflected the great interest with which political events in the USA are followed south of the border. Several stories about Trump’s trial have emphasized its “historic” nature.
Most reports made a point of publishing striking photos of a stern-looking Trump sitting in what the media highlighted was the “stand of the accused” – this would likely be seen as fair justice by many of his critics in Latin America.
The mere possibility of another Trump presidency is at once mesmerizing and potentially alarming for many Latin American leaders, governments and societies who vividly recall his blunt anti-migrant comments and what they saw as his thinly veiled contempt for developing countries in difficulties during his previous term in the White House.
Argentina-based Latin American news site Infobae published an extensive story about the “Colombian judge who will have the last word in the trial against Donald Trump,” noting that judge Juan Merchan “did not hesitate to issue a gag order against Trump.”
Some of the Latin American reports ended up being commented on, such as the left-wing Mexican daily La Jornada, which said that Mr. Trump was “accused not of being a savior and defender of his country, as he says, but of trying to cover up payments to a porn star who sought to silence an illicit sexual encounter.”
The main Brazilian daily, Folha de S. Paulo, adopted a clearly anti-Trump stance in an April 16 editorial titled “Trump and the unthinkable”, which asked questions about a scenario in which he would be arrested and then pardoned as president. He urged American voters to avoid that scenario at the polls.
‘Fabricated case’ – Russia
By Andrey Vladov, BBC Russia Monitoring Specialist, London
A pro-Trump bias was evident in much of the coverage. On state TV’s main evening news program Rossiya 1, the presenter used the Russian slang “bespredel,” which roughly translates to total lawlessness and abuse of power, in reference to the trial and other criminal charges facing Trump.
The court cases have been consistently linked to the White House race by various media outlets. Olga Skabeyeva, host of Rossiya 1’s political talk show 60 Minut (60 Minutes), said the only chance Trump’s enemies had of defeating him in the elections was to arrest him. “In this regard, a case about bribery for the silence of porn actress Stormy Daniels was invented,” concluded Skabeyeva.
In the state daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Igor Dunayevsky wrote: “Democratic politicians do not hide their hopes that the hunt for Donald Trump will prevent him from participating in the 2024 elections.”
Russian state media has consistently mocked the current US president, calling him “senile” and a person who is not really in control of events. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has had a much easier ride in the pro-Kremlin media outlets.
‘Absurd accusation’ – Europe
Laura Gozzi, Europe Digital Reporter, London
Across the Atlantic, an editorial in Le Temps in Switzerland described the accusation as absurd, questioning whether the revelation of an alleged affair with Stormy Daniels would have actually influenced voters in the 2016 election, given what they already knew about Trump.
“As he once again asks Americans to vote, it would be distressing if Donald Trump were only responsible for falsifying accounting documents in New York and not for the attack on the Capitol and against American democracy,” he said.
The New York reporter for the left-wing Italian newspaper Il Manifesto described the spectacle outside the courtroom and concluded with the incisive observation that it all added up to a “hypnotic reiteration of the normalization, or reduction to an aberration, of Trump’s threat.”
Opinion writer Jędrzej Bielecki presented a broader view in the Polish daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita. He said the trial would be a “spectacular example of the strength of the rule of law in America, to which, at least theoretically, everyone, both the powerful and the weakest, must respond.”
