Trump heads into unknown as NY arraignment looms

Donald Trump was expected to fly to New York on Monday for his historic arraignment on criminal charges, taking the United States and the office of the presidency into uncharted and potentially volatile territory.

The Republican businessman-turned-politician was indicted last week by a grand jury on a series of counts related to a hush-money payment made to an adult film star during the 2016 election campaign.

His aides said Trump will decamp from his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida and fly on Monday to New York, his former base of operations.

There, as part of his arraignment scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, he will undergo the standard booking procedure of being fingerprinted and photographed, likely to result in one of the most famous mug shots of the modern era.

Trump, who plans to make public remarks on Tuesday night from Florida, has denounced the legal proceedings as a "witch hunt" and "political persecution", and assailed the judge assigned to hear it.

It remains to be seen whether the famously unpredictable Trump will follow the script, or find a way to upend events, Agence France-Presse commented.

Word of the indictment, arising from an investigation led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, surfaced on Thursday. Trump has called himself innocent and he and his allies have portrayed the charges as politically motivated. Bragg is a Democrat.

Ahead of the extraordinary arraignment, the New York City Police Department is on high alert, anticipating street protests by Trump supporters and detractors.

The force has ordered its 36,000 officers to be in uniform and ready for deployment, NBC News reported citing official sources.

Over the weekend, officers began erecting barricades along the edge of the sidewalks around Trump Tower and the Manhattan Criminal Court downtown, and some other courtrooms will be cleared.

An arraignment is a practiced, established ritual, but there is no road map for a former president's surrender to court authorities.

"It's all up in the air," Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina said on CNN on Sunday.

'Perp walk' unlikely

While a "perp walk" — perp being shorthand for perpetrator, and in which a defendant is escorted in handcuffs past media cameras — is unlikely for a former president under US Secret Service protection, "I anticipate them trying to get every ounce of publicity out of this that they can get", Tacopina said.

But Trump is girding for battle, he added.

US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted an invitation on Sunday to join her at a protest near the courthouse on Tuesday, saying: "They're not coming after President Trump, they're coming after us, he's just in their way."

Former US attorney William Barr, who had a falling out with Trump over the latter challenging the 2020 presidential election results, predicted the indictment would set off a wave of politically motivated prosecutions across the country.

"The real danger of this thing over the long term," he said on Fox News Sunday, is that "we now have thousands" of district attorneys nationally who because "the Rubicon has been crossed, any one of them can find federal candidates or federal officeholders and so forth, can find some state law they want to pursue the person on and get themselves into the national political arena".

Before the indictment, the grand jury heard evidence about a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in the waning days of the 2016 presidential campaign. Daniels has said she was paid to keep silent about a sexual encounter she had with Trump at a Lake Tahoe hotel in 2006. Trump denies the affair.

Trump, 76, served as president from 2017 to 2021. In November, he launched a bid to regain the presidency in 2024, aiming to deny President Joe Biden a second term in office.

Biden, knowing anything he might say could fuel Trump's complaints of a politically "weaponized" judicial system, is one of the few Democrats maintaining silence over the indictment of his political rival.

Republicans have largely rallied around Trump, including his rival in the party's presidential primary, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who called the indictment "un-American".

But some Republicans bristled at the prospect of a twice-impeached president facing multiple legal probes seeking the party's nomination.

Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, who announced on Sunday he is running to be the Republican presidential nominee, openly questioned such a strategy and urged Trump to drop out of the race.

Agencies and Heng Weili in New York contributed to this story.