It doesn't matter what I think or believe. What matters and what we know is that nearly half of America's electorate does not think that these allegations have any merits. The rest are free to believe or speculate whatever they want to.

What matters more is what's actually true.

My personal farfetched alternative theory is the "Earth X" theory.

Earth X was a comic (lol) with one interesting idea — if enough people preceive "A" as "B", "A" becomes "B".

In the case of Trump, he despises the left wing camp for kicking him off Twitter and prosecuting him. As such he takes their nightmares that they believed in term one and makes them real as personal revenge. For an old man, it is no doubt the most satisfying possible end of his life possible.

Far fetched but more realistic than "He's being blackmailed". Do you really believe the man has any shame?

Yes, the 34 felony counts against Trump proven in court beyond a reasonable doubt were about falsifying business records to pay hush money to pron star Stormy Daniels over their sex affair: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormy_Daniels%E2%80%93Donal...

If he had no shame, he would have kept the money.

This is a good point but I was thinking about the context in his second term, not his first. Clearly he knew that, at some level, he was bulletproof in term #2. People literally brought him back after his partisans' actions on Capitol Hill. He's so old that there is no way he ever spends time in jail.

All of these machinations are, to me, an effort to avoid legal prosecution when he thought they could be effective against him. At this point, you could share the supposed piss tape and no one would care.

In one sense, a lot of what he does is to avoid shame. The man is insanely thin skinned.