(The Epoch Times)—Elon Musk has called the New York “hush money” trial against former President Donald Trump “obviously a corruption of the law” and an act of “lawfare,” as the first-ever criminal trial against a former U.S. president kicked off in a Manhattan courtroom.
Mr. Musk made the remark in a post on X in response to a post by former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who offered his own critical commentary on a trial that he believes is “tearing our country apart.”
President Trump’s trial got underway on April 15 in a case officially known as The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, in which the former president is accused of hiding so-called “hush money” payments to an adult film actress by falsifying business records.
He has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and, before he entered the courtroom on Monday, reiterated his position that the case is politically motivated.
“This is really an attack on a political opponent. That’s all it is,” President Trump told reporters outside the courtroom before going inside.
‘Legal Stretch’
In the case, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged President Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records.
Such charges would normally be a misdemeanor but Mr. Bragg elevated them to the rank of felonies by claiming that the payments were part of a scheme to influence the 2016 election by burying potentially embarrassing news coverage of President Trump’s alleged tryst with adult film performer Stormy Daniels in exchange for $130,000 in “hush money” payments.
The former president has denied the affair and on April 10, he shared a photograph on social media of a document bearing the heading “Official Statement of Stormy Daniels” that’s dated Jan. 30, 2018, and bears her signature.
“I am not denying this affair because it was paid ‘hush money’ as has been reported in overseas owned tabloids,” the undersigned statement reads. “I am denying this affair because it never happened.”
Ms. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has since recanted the contents of the letter, claiming she signed it under pressure from her representatives, before writing a salacious “tell-all” book about the alleged affair, from which she’s made an undisclosed sum.
She owes President Trump around $670,000 in court fees and interest from several failed lawsuits, including one in which she accused the former president of defamation over a tweet.
Ms. Daniels recently told Jeffrey Toobin, the former CNN legal analyst who quit after he was caught masturbating on camera during a work-related Zoom call, that she has no intention of paying up and is “prepared to go to jail” before sitting for a deposition about her finances and filling out a form listing her assets.
Prosecutors have the option of calling Ms. Daniels as a witness in President Trump’s criminal trial after the judge denied the former president’s request to block testimony from her and his former personal attorney Michael Cohen.
Meanwhile, a number of people have raised objections to Mr. Bragg’s legal maneuver to spin the misdemeanor charges into felonies, including Mr. Ramaswamy, who in a video posted on X on April 15 called the trial “a joke” and Mr. Bragg’s moves a “legal stretch.”
‘Lawfare’
Mr. Ramaswamy said that for Mr. Bragg to be able to elevate the 34 alleged instances of falsifying business records to felonies, he needs to prove that the records were falsified to advance an underlying crime.
Mr. Bragg has claimed that President Trump essentially defrauded voters in the 2016 presidential election by allegedly paying Ms. Daniels to keep quiet about the alleged affair and so preventing negative news coverage.
Mr. Ramaswamy sees this reasoning as invalid and politically motivated.
“It’s almost as though they decided this is the person we’re going to prosecute,” Mr. Ramaswamy said in the video. “And then we’re going to figure out what we’re going to charge them with after the fact.”
“Well, guess what, that’s exactly what happened,” he continued, adding that Mr. Bragg was elected as district attorney on the promise of going after President Trump for some crime or other.
“This is a politician keeping his campaign promise,” Mr. Ramaswamy said. “That is a bastardization of our legal system.”
He warned that the same tactic could be used by the other side in the future, a tit-for-tat that threatens to tear the country apart.
“The same shoe can fit the other foot and if we keep going down this direction, we’re not going to have a country left in the complete absence of a legal argument,” he said.
“To even bring this case against Trump isn’t just embarrassing to Alvin Bragg,” he continued. “It’s embarrassing to our country.”
Mr. Musk posted his agreement with Mr. Ramaswamy’s take.
“This case is obviously a corruption of the law,” the Tesla CEO wrote.
“Lawfare,” he added.
Mr. Bragg’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
