How different newspapers reported Trump’s dramatic day in court

Donald Trump has become the first former US president to face criminal charges. A court in New York indicted him Tuesday on 34 felony counts of business fraud.

The charges relate to a $130,000 hush-money payment to former porn actress Stormy Daniels just before the presidential election in 2016 which he eventually won.

Here’s how different newspapers across the globe reacted to Trump’s arrest.

Photos of the former president dominated front pages around the world on Wednesday, with most UK newspapers carrying an image of Trump inside and outside the court under pun-heavy headlines such as “Trump in the eye of the Stormy”.

The businessman has already declared his intention to run in the 2024 presidential election. Following the court hearing, some newspapers highlighted the so-called political benefits of the criminal indictment.

While the German daily newspaper Tagesspiegel used the headline “Nothing but the truth?”, another German publication’s, Der Spiegel, columnist Roland Nelles wrote his indictment was long overdue.

After his court appearance, the politician was released on bail and immediately returned to his Florida house where he delivered brief statements on the case, attacking opponents, critics, and the justice system.

While China’s state-controlled media didn’t offer much heed to the case on its front pages, a number of netizens took to social media to discuss the story.

An analysis by BBC Monitoring found a hashtag on Weibo concerning Trump’s potential imprisonment of 136 years if found guilty on all criminal charges gathered more than 340 million views as of 05:30 GMT on April 5.

However, some Russian dailies used the country’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s views on the arrest in their headlines. She called the arrest “the crisis of liberalism”.