Donald Trump Is Now a Convicted Felon
Guilty verdict in hush-money coverup case is a triumph for the rule of law.
WITH TODAY’S MANHATTAN JURY VERDICT that Donald Trump is guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal before the 2016 election, Trump is the first former president to become a convicted felon. That is a devastating legacy.
The convictions affirm that the rule of law is alive and well, at least in the nation’s largest and most important metropolis. Whatever one may say about it being a state court conviction, rather than a federal conviction for January 6th-related lawlessness, one thing is sure: The bell of accountability has been struck. It rings loudly around the world.
A jury has said to a former president, No one is above the law here.
This is the man who bragged he could walk away after shooting someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight. Aware of his prior success in flouting rules that others must obey, many feared he could do that again here. But at last a reckoning has come.
ACCOUNTABILITY FOR TRUMP’S MISDEEDS is all the more important given that the U.S. Supreme Court, with its right-wing majority, is AWOL from its most basic tasks: seeking equal justice under law and winning public trust in a prudent and steady system of rules not subject to radical revision based on the whims of recent appointees. The Manhattan case and Trump’s conviction show the strength of our legal process and traditions, and make clear that in one very important corner of our federal system, justice can prevail even in the face of great challenges.
Prominent among those challenges: Trump’s efforts to derail the case by daily public attacks—including against Justice Juan Merchan and his family. Despite the pressure, Merchan oversaw as careful and balanced a proceeding as one could imagine. He bent over backwards to avoid jailing Trump for his contemptuous violations of the court’s restrictions on speaking against witnesses. What we observed defied Trump’s complaints that the trial was rigged, that the judge hated him, and that his rights were abused. Far from it. A New York appellate court has already rejected Trump’s attempt to have Justice Merchan disqualified because of supposed “conflicts” that Trump exaggerated or outright made up.
Nothing about the case remotely supports Trump’s crowning lie that it was all a plot to get him and deny him his basic rights. Trump was in fact accorded every right that defendants can have in our system. That included his engagement of a highly qualified legal team that hotly contested every issue before both the jury and the court. By all accounts, the jury paid close attention throughout the proceeding. The administration of justice operated superbly in the face of Trump’s determined efforts to subvert it.
Despite Trump’s steady stream of falsehoods and the distortions and disinformation pushed by his allies, the mainstream media successfully communicated to the public the facts proven in a court of law. Polls conducted while the trial was underway found that nearly 80 percent of Americans had heard about it and some 56 percent of the public believed from reporting of the untelevised trial that Trump had criminally falsified records to hide information from voters in the immediate runup to the 2016 election. The jury affirmed their understanding.
BEYOND ITS IMPORTANCE as a matter of justice and as a sign of the strength of the rule of law, today’s guilty verdict could also have major political implications—improving the prospects that Trump will not return to power.
In an ABC/Ipsos poll conducted in late April, 4 percent of the respondents who supported Trump said that a conviction in the case would cause them to withdraw their support for him; another 16 percent said it would lead them to at least reconsider their support. A Quinnipiac poll conducted in mid-May while the trial was underway put the number of Trump voters who would withdraw their support at 6 percent. Those could easily be outcome-determinative numbers in a race as close as this one—and that’s even before you get into the effects of a guilty verdict on the crucial vote of undecided independent voters.
That said, now is no time to become complacent. Even with a verdict like today’s, we don’t know what effect it will have on voters or for how long. The criminal justice system, as effective and fair as it is, was never conceived as the primary bulwark against a would-be dictator. Today, as always, that task resides in our own hands.
A FINAL WORD about the prosecutor who brought this case: From the start, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg knew that this was a complicated and difficult prosecution, with innumerable obstacles on the road to success. He took risks to himself and his family. He also put in jeopardy his political future as Manhattan DA by bringing so visible a case which was not easy to win.
It was Bragg’s commitment to the rule of law and his community that led him to put his own interests aside. Bragg planted the law’s firm flag in Manhattan soil, ending up as the only prosecutor who will likely succeed in making Trump answer to a criminal justice jury’s verdict before the election.
We should cherish the accountability that Bragg and his team produced, even as we dedicate ourselves to the essential work of preserving our freedom from a would-be autocrat this November by defeating him at the polls.
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