Trump should quit 2024 race if indicted in New York, Republican rival says

Donald Trump should quit the race for the Republican nomination in 2024 if he is indicted in New York over a hush money payment to a porn star during his victorious run in 2016, a prospective rival said.

Like other relative moderates, Hutchinson is a vanishingly small presence in polls regarding the nascent field.

Widespread reporting has said an indictment is expected soon in the hush money case, which involves the payment of $130,000 to Stormy Daniels, an adult film maker and actor who says she had an affair with Trump in 2006.

Trump denies the claim, often abusing Daniels in misogynistic terms. But the man Trump directed to pay Daniels, his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, is due to testify before a grand jury on Monday.

Trump has also been invited to testify, a sign an indictment is near. The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, is reported to be preparing to criminally charge Trump for false accounting business records with an intent to defraud, in relation to New York election law.

Trump claims Bragg is politically motivated, as a Democrat, and racist because he is Black.

Trump also faces federal investigation of his election subversion attempts, incitement of the January 6 attack and retention of classified records. A state investigation of his election subversion in Georgia is well advanced.

In New York, his business faces a civil fraud suit and his chief financial officer was sentenced on tax charges in January. Trump also faces trial in a defamation suit from a writer who says he raped her.

Trump denies all wrongdoing, claiming witch hunts by his political enemies.

Polling has shown how a split field could hand Trump the nomination without a majority, as happened in 2016.