A Man Of His Convictions

The fallout from the jury verdict against Donald Trump begins.

There’s both good news and bad news to report following the jury verdict against Trump yesterday in Manhattan.

So here’s the bad news, and most of it is sadly predictable.

First, the GOP is largely falling in line behind Trump and railing against the jury verdict. There are very few Republicans actually voicing support for our legal system, and those that do are being shouted down. Second, Trump predictably is raking in millions in campaign donations after the verdict, but there’s an eye roll-inducing shift in how he’s doing it. And third, the far right is calling online for armed response and retribution. It isn’t clear how serious these threats are, but the chance for politically motivated violence has definitely spiked in the wake of the verdict.

Now, the good news.

First, Trump is now a convicted criminal felon. That comes with some legal consequences that his opponents should always raise when given an opportunity. Second, against all odds our legal system held firm against nonstop attacks from Trump and his allies. Third, Trump’s chances of being convicted in other jurisdictions have shot up. And finally, there is some hope that the trial result will cause a shift in voter attitudes. While it may hard to fathom, the news of the conviction came as a surprise to most Americans, over half of whom were not paying attention and did not expect him to be found guilty. The verdict and sentencing in July could change perceptions of the ex-president going into the November election among key undecided voters.

Deep breath, here’s the bad stuff

It’s often difficult to bring attention to examples where our country seems to be backsliding, perhaps into very dangerous territory. But my responsibility here is not to sugarcoat the facts. Rather, it is to place them into larger political and social contexts so that we might best respond to and address them head on.

So here goes.

GOP leaders are falling in line behind Trump.

It comes as no surprise that Trump’s allies in the GOP, which now make up most of the party, are rallying to his side. Republican leaders in both the House and the Senate have cast doubt upon the fairness of the proceedings and the legitimacy of the verdict. That’s not great news for our country.

Said Speaker “MAGA Mike” Johnson in a statement,

Today is a shameful day in American history. Democrats cheered as they convicted the leader of the opposing party on ridiculous charges, predicated on the testimony of a disbarred, convicted felon. This was a purely political exercise, not a legal one. 

The weaponization of our justice system has been a hallmark of the Biden Administration, and the decision today is further evidence that Democrats will stop at nothing to silence dissent and crush their political opponents.  

The American people see this as lawfare, and they know it is wrong—and dangerous. President Trump will rightfully appeal this absurd verdict—and he WILL WIN!

As an initial matter, the charges are not “ridiculous.” As I wrote yesterday in The Big Picture, since 2015 the DA’s office in Manhattan has charged 34 individuals with 166 counts of felony falsification of business records. Trump is hardly alone in breaking this law and being held to account for it. Indeed, policing the falsification of business records, in the city that is the financial capital of the world, is both imperative and commonplace.

Nor was the conviction predicated only on the testimony of Michael Cohen. To the contrary, Judge Merchan specifically instructed the jury that it was not permitted to convict solely on the basis of Cohen’s testimony. Instead, it had to find corroborating evidence in support of any conviction. Johnson is intentionally misleading America with this statement, and we shouldn’t let it go unanswered.

Finally, the suggestion that the Biden Administration is involved in a Manhattan court case is ludicrous and made in bad faith. As Johnson well knows, the decision to bring charges rested entirely with the District Attorney’s office, and only after it had presented its evidence to a grand jury which returned a true bill of indictment. The only thing “wrong and dangerous” here is Johnson’s undermining of our system of law and the unanimous verdict of 12 of Trump’s peers, whom his lawyers vetted and screened using their “for cause” and peremptory challenges.

For his part, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was terser but also damaging. He tweeted,

These charges never should have been brought in the first place. I expect the conviction to be overturned on appeal.

This is rich from the man who failed to hold Trump accountable after his impeachment over the January 6 insurrection. McConnell had even argued in defense of his decision to acquit Trump in the Senate that the criminal justice system could later operate to hold Trump to account. Yet when it finally does, he calls the entire process into doubt.

There is a further phenomenon that is perhaps more disturbing than these criticisms of our legal system from powerful GOP leaders. It seems any Republican leader courageous enough to voice support for the verdict now risks coming under attack.

For example, former Gov. Larry Hogan (R-MD), who is running for a senate seat in Maryland, called upon his constituents to honor the decision of the jury. It was a statement that would have been uncontroversial only a few years ago:

Regardless of the result, I urge all Americans to respect the verdict and the legal process. At this dangerously divided moment in our history, all leaders—regardless of party—must not pour fuel on the fire with more toxic partisanship. We must reaffirm what has made this nation great: the rule of law.

But the Trump campaign began policing the views of the party following the verdict, and Hogan was slammed by Trump’s campaign chair, Chris LaCivita, who is also the new Chief Operating Officer for the Republican National Committee. LaCivita responded, “You just ended your campaign.”

Translation: Fall in line behind Trump, or the RNC will leave you hanging.

Trump is fundraising off of the verdict

Just as he did when the indictments began to land last year, Trump wasted little time using the guilty verdict as a way to raise big dollar amounts from his adoring flock. Yesterday, the WinRed server reportedly even crashed for a time due to the flood of MAGA money coming in for Trump—which, as we know, will in large part go toward paying his continuing legal expenses.

“So many Americans were moved to donate to President Trump's campaign that the WinRed pages went down. We are working on getting the website back online as quickly as possible,” the Trump Campaign posted.

There’s a notable new twist in Trump’s messaging. He has begun to claim that he is now a “political prisoner”—even though he has not been sentenced, and even though it was not his political opponent, Joe Biden, who prosecuted him in Manhattan. I subscribe to Trump emails to keep an eye on the campaign’s messaging, and this is what I received this morning:

Whether the flood of donations continues and for how long remains unclear. After the indictments last year, the initial torrent of money fell back to a trickle. And if another Trump trial were to begin this year, say in D.C., it’s not clear that the enthusiasm to support Trump financially can be maintained. Based on the history of his legal woes, it could prove quite a challenge.

Online calls for retribution and political violence rose sharply

The verdict predictably enraged many on the right, and it drove extremists on sites like Gateway Pundit, Patriots.win and Truth Social to issue threats and demand vengeance. As reported by Reuters,

Some called for attacks on jurors, the execution of the judge, Justice Juan Merchan, or outright civil war and armed insurrection.

“Someone in NY with nothing to lose needs to take care of Merchan,” wrote one commentator on Patriots.Win. “Hopefully he gets met with illegals with a machete,” the post said in reference to illegal immigrants.

On Gateway Pundit, one poster suggested shooting liberals after the verdict. “Time to start capping some leftys, [sic]” said the post. “This cannot be fixed by voting."

It is difficult to determine how immediate any threats may be, and the lack of specificity may indicate this is mostly bravado. Still, given what happened with January 6, authorities are on high alert for any semblance of an organized resistance or in-person gathering of violent extremists. At the Trump trial itself, the crowds that once turned out by the thousands in protest in D.C. failed to materialize.

These threats of violence underscore the great personal risks and costs that the brave judicial officers, staff and the jurors themselves undertook to reach this point. For that, we owe them all an enormous debt of gratitude.

Here’s the good stuff

If you’re feeling ill at ease after the above discussion, there are also several reasons for optimism and hope. Let me highlight just a few.

Trump is now a convicted felon.

Besides being a great way to refer to the ex-president, a convicted felon faces some additional legal restrictions that could be highlighted frequently by Trump’s critics, by the mainstream media, and in the debates.

Convicted felons cannot vote in most jurisdictions. That includes Florida, where Trump resides. He may argue that because he was convicted in the state of New York, which now allows felons to vote following some legal reform measures, he should still be allowed to vote in Florida. Alternatively, he can apply to Gov. DeSantis for some kind of waiver or exemption, or he can switch his residence to New York so that he can cast a ballot in November. But no matter what, the idea that Trump may not even be able to vote for himself as a candidate for president stands in sharp contrast to the bizarre fact that he can still run for that same office as a felon.

Felons also cannot own guns, which to a Republican (and to a father of two gun-toting animal hunters) comes as a blow to Trump’s ego and manhood. In a MAGA world where firearms and masculinity are often equated, Trump will appear castrated in the most ammosexual sense.

And here’s a fun fact: There are many countries that will not admit felons across their borders. This includes, apparently, Canada. Trump cannot even travel to many countries, including some of our closest allies, and yet he hopes to represent the United States. The absurdity of this stuns.

The system held.

At great personal risk, 12 ordinary citizens voted unanimously to convict the most dangerous man in America. While many were doubtful that the panel would remain untainted by even one secret MAGA holdout, in the end no such individual arose to hang the jury and throw the trial. And to our great collective relief, no juror decided to seize a golden ticket by becoming a darling of the right forever by going rogue.

Instead, the jurors listened attentively, considered the evidence, asked for critical parts of testimony to be read back, and deliberated for two days before reaching a verdict of guilty on all 34 counts. This was how things are supposed to work, and as I had emphasized in my writings, this was actually the likely and expected result, given the strength of the state’s case. It is telling that many on the right sought to pin their hopes on a holdout juror who would ignore the law and the evidence in favor of an extralegal allegiance to Trump. That’s not the rule of law; it is the subversion of it.

Judge Juan Merchan deserves high praise for running a tight courtroom, finishing the trial in a timely way, and not allowing the nonsense of the defense to derail the proceedings. He even ruled during the course of the proceedings that Trump had violated the gag order no less than 10 times. While those resulted in mere fines of $1,000 each—the statutory maximum—Judge Merchan may have the last laugh. As he well knows, Trump’s behavior, history and character can all be taken into account when sentencing happens on July 11. The judge would be well within his discretion to impose incarceration, even if briefly, given Trump’s history of misbehavior, violations of the gag order, and utter lack of remorse.

And this was the hard case.

The Manhattan case was largely considered the weakest of the four charged against Trump. It relied precariously upon the testimony of a different convicted felon, Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen. It was sordid because of the hush money payments to an adult film actress, and it was challenging for the state to articulate why this case should matter in a larger sense.

But the Manhattan DA’s office managed to set the stakes up well and make this as much about election interference as it was about the porn star hush money cover up. Both were deeply connected to an illegal catch-and-kill scheme to defraud voters and steal the 2016 election. Americans who were paying attention saw the pattern clearly: Trump is a cheat, a liar and a crook. The jury agreed.

And if the 12 jurors and those Americans who tuned in can arrive at that from these facts, then the other cases likely will prove far more dangerous to Trump. Indeed, if Trump and his team couldn’t beat these charges in New York, they will have trouble beating the others in DC, Florida and Georgia.

Trump is quite fortunate that the GOP-leaning Supreme Court and Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida are themselves playing catch-and-kill with his federal cases. But eventually, if Trump is defeated in November, he will have to face justice once again in these other jurisdictions. And his prospects in all of them look dimmer after yesterday’s verdict.

Peeling off support

Finally, the guilty verdict could cost Trump critical support among undecided voters. In a close election, even a few percent could prove decisive. 

I won’t speculate about whether polls showing him losing a good chunk of his voters are accurate or will remain so over time. Instead, I want to draw attention to the fact that most Americans simply were not paying attention to the case and actually expected a different result. 

According to a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll earlier this month, 55 percent of Americans were paying little to no attention to the trial. That might help explain why most Americans—some 51 percent of those asked—believed Trump would not be convicted of any charges, according to a CAPS-Harris survey in late April.

That means that Trump’s conviction has the potential to shake loose some long held ideas about Trump, including that he can get away with anything and always will. Now that he has been brought down by a jury and faces potential jail time, his aura of invincibility could diminish significantly. Voters, particularly those who remain undecided, may begin to see him as tarnished rather than untouchable. 

Trump has long traded upon the idea that he is a strong leader for whom the normal rules don’t apply. The New York state felony convictions and impending possible jail sentence could begin to erode that image. This will be particularly important to gauge among key swing voters in the battleground states, especially among suburban women for whom a criminal conviction and potentially long rap sheet is a good, common sense reason to stay clear of a man. 

Once the import of the conviction begins to seep in and voters realize what it actually means to cast a ballot for a convicted felon for the highest office in the land, we could see support around the edges of Trump’s base begin to fray. Whether the conviction and label of felon will be enough, on top of everything else, to keep him from the White House remains the big question we all face in just over four months.

But from where I sit, it certainly does not help him.