Donald Trump

Good morning. Donald Trump is a convicted criminal. A jury in New York unanimously found him guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in an attempt to cover up the alleged sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels that threatened his bid for the presidency in 2016. Trump is the first former president to be convicted of a crime, and he could yet be the first convicted felon to be elected president. This is a historic moment, and its reverberations have barely begun to be felt.Today’s newsletter explains what it all means: the verdicts, the instant fundraising emails, and the consequences still to come. Here are the headlines.Five big stories
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In depth: Trump humbled – but seeking to take advantageView image in fullscreenDonald Trump’s convictions all relate to a $130,000 hush-money payment made to Stormy Daniels at the end of the 2016 campaign so that she would not go public with her claim of a sexual encounter. The payment was made by Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, but Trump later reimbursed him.Prosecutors alleged that Trump committed a crime by falsifying records to classify illegal payments as legitimate business expenses, and that he did so to improperly influence the outcome of the election. Yesterday, after deliberating for less than ten hours, the jury unanimously agreed.Lauren Aratani’s guide from last month is a useful primer on the case. Here’s what you need to know about what just happened.The verdictsThe jurors had to reach a unanimous decision, and although the judge explained that they did not need to agree about which laws Trump broke to find him guilty, he said they had to agree on the fundamental charge: that Trump falsified records to conceal a crime. That meant three possibilities: a unanimous conviction, a unanimous acquittal, and if even one juror disagreed, a mistrial.The jury has been subject to unending scrutiny over the last six weeks, including claims that one member “made friendly eye contact with Trump” – and there has been a great deal of speculation that a single politically motivated juror could deny the necessary unanimity.But in the end, they agreed, and pretty quickly, on all 34 charges – separate batches relating to checks Trump signed, invoices from Cohen, and accounting records. Although nothing will stop Trump’s claims that the process was a witch-hunt based on a false premise, that rapid and absolute consensus makes those arguments harder to reasonably sustain.The aftermathView image in fullscreenAbout those witch-hunt claims: immediately after the verdicts were delivered, Trump – said by reporters to have looked downcast in the courtroom – appeared outside and gave a preview of the story he will tell again and again in the months ahead.“This was a disgrace,” he said. “This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt.” He misleadingly called the district attorney “A Soros-backed D.A.”, and claimed the trial was a politically motivated attack by the Biden administration. He claimed he had no hope of a fair trial in New York. “We didn’t do a thing wrong,” he added. “I’m a very innocent man.”Other Republicans quickly echoed those claims. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign sent out an email asking his supporters for money because he was a “political prisoner”; his fundraising site briefly crashed under the weight of visits.For its part, the Biden campaign put out a statement saying that the verdict showed that “no one is above the law”, but again redirecting supporters to the election ahead. It also sought to fundraise on the back of the verdict.Outside the court, Maya Yang and Victoria Bekiempis reported on a “heavy sense of shock and relief” among the protesters and counter-protesters gathered there. The mood on Fox News, unsurprisingly, was febrile; the forthcoming trial of Hunter Biden came up almost immediately. Pundit Jeanine Pirro appeared to raise the spectre of violence: “We are a country that was born of revolution … We are fighters, and I hope it is only at the ballot box. My insides are so angry.”The other casesThere are three remaining criminal cases against Trump, all arguably more serious than the hush-money trial: two relate to attempts to overturn the 2020 election result, and a third is about the secret documents found at Mar-a-Lago.But all three appear unlikely to reach trial before the election. Most observers say that Trump’s lawyers have deliberately thrown up procedural questions in order to delay the cases as long as possible. They could also be affected by a pending supreme court case over Trump’s claims of presidential immunity.If Trump wins, he could shut down the two cases which are being prosecuted on the federal level, and potentially seek to have state prosecutions put on hold.What happens nextTrump drove to Trump Tower immediately after leaving court. Sentencing has been scheduled for 11 July – four days before the Republican national convention – although it is possible that it will be delayed further.In this piece, Sam Levine sets out the possible punishments, ranging from up to four years’ imprisonment to fines or community service. He cites experts who consider a prison sentence unlikely, because he is a first-time offender convicted of a non-violent offence. But there has also been some speculation that the judge in the case, Juan Merchan, could put Trump behind bars because of his reputation for taking white-collar crime seriously.Even if Trump is jailed, his sentence will probably be delayed while he appeals against the verdict. That could take months or even years to play out. He has no option of pardoning himself if he returns to office, because the prosecution was brought on a state level.There is no legal impediment to Trump running for the presidency as a felon, or even if he is jailed. (That’s happened once before, a century ago.) He could even be president from his cell.Again: a prison sentence is unlikely. But even the prospect of a president doing community service is an astonishing departure from the norm.The political falloutYou will have heard the question countless times: could even being convicted of a crime put Donald Trump’s supporters off voting for him? Now that theoretical matter has become a reality. In this piece, David Smith looks at the recent polling, which finds that two-thirds of respondents say that a conviction would make no difference to their vote.That is unsurprising, given the state of political polarisation in the US – and the most likely consequence for the campaign is renewed energy among committed supporters on both sides. But while that majority who are unmoved by the guilty verdicts is sizeable, it only takes a small percentage shifting to change the outcome of what remains a very close election.Key to what the impact of the verdicts will be, David writes, is how Joe Biden will handle it. So far, he has avoided commenting on the trial, lest he be accused of political interference. But Biden, who has found success in the past by running as a defender of democracy, has little choice but to talk about Trump’s conviction on the campaign trail. The danger is that his opponent will then cast him as forgetting the pocketbook issues which matter to ordinary Americans.“The president’s opponent has just handed him the kind of campaign weapon that any candidate would dream of,” David writes. “Biden would be wise to use it with precision.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat else we’ve been readingView image in fullscreen
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Hudson-Smith, who won in 44.07 seconds, said the result would help him prepare for “the big one, which is the Olympics”.The front pagesView image in fullscreenAlmost all today’s front pages were all subject to a late change last night – and you can see a wrap of global media reaction to the verdict here.On the front page of the Guardian, the headline “Guilty on all counts” with a picture of Trump, eyes downcast. The Telegraph has two words: “Trump guilty”, while the Daily Mail has the same thing with an exclamation mark attacked. In the Times, it’s “Trump found guilty in hush money trial”. The Mirror headline also has “Trump guilty” under the line of “Historic trial verdict” and a big picture of Trump looking down – alongside an old image of the former president with Stormy Daniels. The Sun has a very similar front page with “Guilty” under the words “Historic U.S verdict”. The i wins the prize for brevity, with “Guilty”. 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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 by publicly disparaging the judge and his daughter, 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 More