This ruling is meant to protect the office from precisely these types of politically motivated attacks.
Trying to blackmail Ukraine into providing dirt on his political rival by withholding congressional funding, getting rid of Comey, and requesting that some additional votes for him should be found are the top 3 that come to my mind.
I couldn't give two shits about extramarital sex, and I honestly would have expected him to write about said sex on twitter sooner than cover it up. I don't think the campaign donors would have been too steamed about where that money went either. It's not like him dipping into his other charities (which I find more despicable than hush money.)
I wonder why this was the charge that stuck.
The hush payment would not even have been an issue if they didn't use campaign money or Cohen as middle man, that's the illegal part. If Trump just wrote a check directly it would not have been an issue and we would likely never know about it unless NDAs were broken.
It was first. It was also relatively simple in both law and fact, so there were fewer opportunities for delay. Even so, it was more than a year from indictment to conviction.
This has always been possible (Nixon v. Fitzgerald) but has never happened. Choose whatever reason you want: any amount of decency, any sense of shame, low odds of winning, likelihood of terrible retribution from generally good people.
No, we do not. That's the whole point of the checks and balances. If his political opponents are able to prove their case before the courts, showing that the president broke the law, then they should be able to.