US ‘going to hell’

Donald Trump offered a full-throated defense of his conduct Tuesday in his first public remarks since being charged over hush money payments to a porn star, blasting the criminal prosecution as “an insult to our country.”

Hours earlier the 76-year-old former US president pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts in a dramatic hearing in New York that transfixed the nation — and began the countdown to the first ever criminal trial of an American president.

“I never thought anything like this could happen in America — never thought it could happen,” Trump told an audience of several hundred donors, political allies and other supporters after returning to Mar-a-Lago, his beachfront mansion in southern Florida.

“The only crime that I’ve committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it… It’s an insult to our country,” he said. “Our country is going to hell”.

Trump — the frontrunner in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination — said from a stage festooned with American flags in an opulent gold-and-cream ballroom that “radical left” prosecutors were out to get him “at any cost.”

The bizarrely celebratory mood in the room seemed at odds with the gravity of the day’s events in Manhattan, with Trump reprising the applause lines that his supporters hear regularly at his rallies — and being rewarded with the same boisterous cheers and clapping.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is prosecuting Trump for cooking his company’s books to hide payments he arranged for adult film actress Stormy Daniels days before the 2016 election, to cover up an alleged sexual encounter a decade earlier.

“While we are living through the darkest hours of American history, I can say that at least for this moment right now, I am in great spirits,” Trump said.

The twice-impeached Republican is the first sitting or former American president to be criminally indicted.

Earlier in the Manhattan courtroom, he answered “not guilty” to all charges in a clear voice, sitting with hunched shoulders and at times looking annoyed but mostly listening cooperatively.

Judge Juan Merchan said a trial could potentially start as soon as January — a month before the presidential primaries kick off — although Trump’s lawyers have indicated they would want it pushed back to next spring.