The former president of the United States, and the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential election, is now a convicted felon 34 times over. In New York on Thursday, 12 jurors found Donald Trump guilty of falsifying business records in order to influence the 2016 election. It is the first criminal conviction for Trump, who has also been charged with felonies in three other criminal cases currently under way in Florida, Georgia and Washington DC. He is the first former president to ever stand trial on criminal charges.
The jury found that Trump, who denies the charges, falsified business records in 2016 and 2017, when he made a series of payments to his lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, to reimburse Cohen for a payment of $130,000 that he had made to Stormy Daniels, a pornographic film actor, in exchange for Daniels’ silence about a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. Paying Daniels to shut up, the prosecution had argued, amounted to a conspiracy to influence the election. Labeling the payments to Cohen, as Trump and his flacks did, as payments of Cohen’s “legal retainer” was a fraud committed in furtherance of that conspiracy.
The trial, which lasted more than six weeks, has largely taken Trump off the campaign trail, and drained funds from both his re-election bid and the Republican National Committee, which have had to pay for his lawyers. Unable to travel to swing states due to his need to be present at the courthouse in Manhattan, Trump has undertaken a series of bizarre endeavors in the heavily Democratic state, seeking to rally support and draw further attention to himself. He held a rally in the Bronx. He even paid a weird visit to a bodega.
Meanwhile, Trump’s antics in and outside of the courtroom frequently threatened to derail the proceedings. He repeatedly violated a gag order that prohibited him from disparaging court staff, witnesses, or the judge’s family, racking up thousands of dollars in fines. He summoned other Republican politicians to court – all dressed like him, in a kind of creepy homage – to spew invective on his behalf.
Even aside from these theatrics, Trump seems to have ushered in his conviction by meddling in the work of his lawyers: throughout the trial, the defense team worked hard to make unlikely, irrelevant claims – like that Trump never actually had sex with Daniels – that fell flat, wasting time and confusing what little argument they had. This, they seem to have done at Trump’s own direction.
In terms of a contest of courtroom performance, it wasn’t even close. The only way Trump would have been acquitted would have been if the jury had been too afraid to convict a former president: based on what they saw in court, there was no way to acquit him as a matter of law. They returned their guilty verdict after just 10 hours of deliberation, evidently unfazed.
Though now a felon, Trump remains free, and odds are good that he will not face prison time, which is not required for these convictions. His sentencing will take place on 11 July, just days before the beginning of the Republican national convention.
The verdict adds a new variable to the ongoing presidential contest: incensed rightwingers, whose media has already spent months working to delegitimize the New York trial as a political witch-hunt, will scream invective – and try to fundraise. Some liberals, anticipating defeat the way an abused dog anticipates being hit by the arm that reaches out to hit him, will also wring their hands, worrying that the verdict will somehow ricochet and wind up working in Trump’s favor.
Don’t buy it. The criminal conviction of a very powerful and flagrantly lawless former president is an unalloyed good. It is good for the Biden campaign, which has needed a boost as a sore economy and the president’s ongoing support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza have enraged voters. But it is also good for the democratic process, which will now be able to proceed in November in full possession of exactly the sort of information that Trump’s hush-money scheme was intended to keep from it in 2016: evidence of the truth of his character.
And it is extremely good news for America’s state institutions, which have long been unwilling to hold Trump to account for many of his crimes. Partly because of the Republican capture of the courts and partly because of a contemptible institutional cowardice, it has long seemed that no one would be willing to make the law apply to Trump – that his money, his shamelessness and his cult of influence had effectively placed him above the law. It took a jury of New Yorkers to say that this was not so.
There are so many things that Trump should go to prison for, which he never will. He should go to prison for what he did on January 6. He should go to prison for what he did to migrant families. If there were justice, he would go to prison for what he did to E Jean Carroll and allegedly to any number of the two dozen other women who have accused him of sexual assault. He might never go to prison, and there’s still a long way to go before anything like true justice is served.
But for those of us who had despaired of a day like this – who had convinced ourselves that to think he would ever be convicted of anything was childishly naive – this is a very good day. We can be happy, among other things, that we were wrong.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
• This article was amended on 31 May 2024. An earlier version referred to Donald Trump violating a gagging order by publicly disparaging the judge and his daughter. The order prohibited Trump from disparaging court staff, witnesses, or the judge’s family, but not the judge himself.
