Donald Trump isn’t first ex-president to face legal trouble

Donald Trump has made history so many times. The first president without government or military experience. The first to be impeached twice. The first to aggressively challenge the certification of his successor. Now, he adds another: Even as he hopes to return to the White House in 2025, he is the first former president to be indicted. The latest line crossed by Trump challenges again the aura of the American presidency, nurtured in the infallibility of George Washington but made human over and over, through scandals born of greed and the abuse of power, corruption and naivete, sex and lies about sex. Trump is hardly the first president, in or out of office, to face legal trouble. In 1974, Richard Nixon may well have avoided criminal charges on obstruction of justice or bribery, related to the Watergate scandal, only because President Gerald Ford pardoned him just weeks after Nixon resigned the presidency. Bill Clinton’s law license in his native Arkansas was suspended for five years after he reached a deal with prosecutors in 2001, at the end of his second term, over allegations that he lied under oath about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Some historians wonder about President Warren Harding’s fate had he not died in office, in 1923. Numerous officials around him would be implicated in various crimes, including Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall, whose corrupt land dealings became known as the “Teapot Dome Scandal.” “The walls were closing in on him,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said of Harding. Trump’s indictment in New York reportedly is linked to how business records were mischaracterised in connection with paying porn actor Stormy Daniels USD 130,000 in 2016, shortly before Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton for the presidency, to keep Daniels from going public about a sexual encounter she said she had with him years earlier. Trump denies having sex with her. Trump also is being investigated for allegedly a