15 Thoughts On The Conviction Of Donald Trump
He's a felon 34 times over. Finally.
A New York jury has found Donald Trump guilty of 34 felonies for forging business documents to cheat in the 2016 election. I have covered this case closely for over a year now, but instead of collecting my thoughts in an orderly way, I’ll instead dump them here haphazardly.
Anyone who showed enough curiosity to learn how the somewhat obscure law Trump violated works, and how broadly it’s applied, has known for a long time now that this prosecution was well-predicated. The fact that Trump’s purpose in forging business documents was to gain an illegal leg-up in the election made the prosecution civically righteous.
Alvin Bragg’s liberal critics should acknowledge their mistakes, even if they believe their initial instinct to be skeptical of his case was well-intended.
Other people who should acknowledge their mistakes: The many, many prosecutors, judges, congressmen, and senators who have shown far less courage than Bragg, Judge Juan Merchan, and the 12 jurors who rendered this verdict, knowing it has put them at somewhat greater risk of retribution.
Donald Trump isn’t just a felon, he’s also a disgrace. Like basically all politicians who get convicted of felonies he should withdraw from politics. If it were a Democratic presidential nominee, his career would be over. It won’t happen, but that’s what would be proper. Democrats should say so freely.
Because he won’t withdraw from the race, Democrats and the rest of us should follow the logic of his conviction wherever it leads. Trump should be denied classified candidate briefings, just as felons are disqualified from classified clearance. Trump should be denied the right to vote in his home state of Florida, and if Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans try to create a special exception for him, Democrats should challenge it. They should feel free to demand he be punished to the full extent of the law.
Speaking of which, Juan Merchan should give Trump a stiff sentence. Trump behaved lawlessly, the impact of his crimes was vast, and he was extraordinarily contemptuous during trial. However, Merchan went on record to acknowledge that he was reluctant to jail Trump. He should set that aside and treat Trump like any other defendant. If 12 random New Yorkers had the courage to do what they did, he should show similar mettle.
Democrats also owe us some courage. The Biden campaign’s statement is decent, as are statements from the handful of Dems who’ve associated themselves with Trump-accountability politics (Jerry Nadler, Adam Schiff, et al). But as I sit here writing, Dick Durbin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee has said nothing, as his Republican colleagues mount an all-out assault on…the judiciary.
If it were me, I would set aside any concerns I might have about couth to drive the gravity of the matter as deep into the electorate as possible.
I would call it shameful for a major American party to nominate a felon for the presidency, and call on the party of Lincoln to go back to the drawing board.
I would note that felons are frequently ineligible for employment and housing, and it’s the height of arrogance for Trump to insist that he, as a felon, be eligible for America’s most important job, which comes with America’s most famous house.
I would note that an element of Trump’s crime was to cover up extramarital sex he had with porn star Stormy Daniels while his wife was home nursing their infant son; that he consummated this affair without protection; that if he’d impregnated her, he’d have paid for her abortion in exchange for her signature on a non-disclosure agreement; and that he now seeks to tell every woman in America if and when she can have an abortion.
I’d note he wanted to cover up the Daniels affair because it nearly became public immediately after Americans first saw the Access Hollywood tape, and heard Trump brag that he sexually assaults women with impunity; I’d note that another New York jury recently found Trump liable for “sexual abuse,” or, in lay terms, rape.
So far, that’s not what we’re getting. This contrast is shameful.
People lucky enough to have voting representatives should consider calling them and expressing their concern that in ducking this issue—sorry, “floating above the fray”—they’ll allow Republicans to dominate the information environment over the verdict, such that the public debate plays out as a contest between people who insist it’s a grievous miscarriage of justice, and people whose cats got their tongues. If Democrats don’t want this to fall out of the news cycle quickly, or for misgivings about the case to spread further than the MAGA base, they need to make themselves heard now.
If you alter a recipe, it will change the way your food tastes. If you want to change what people know, or think they know, about American political affairs, you have to add ingredients to the informational stew. If ever there was an occasion for Democrats to do that, this is it.
One thing that stuck out to me is that the verdict was quick and clean. No overlong deliberations, no partial verdict, but no rush to judgement either. And I think the fact that he's a convicted felon in this case will be easy to stick to him if we make it stick, because it's part of who Trump is. He's always been a scummy, crappy NYC scammer, and maybe it looked good for him when he got away with it, but now he got busted for one of his scummy little scams.
Really annoyed with knee-jerk takes like the Frank Bruni piece in NYT arguing that "it won't matter". It seems like people are already talking themselves into thinking a non-incarceration sentence will be a loss, and the fact of an upcoming appeal means the trial isn't really over, and his support is rock solid. Like they've internalized the idea of Teflon Don so much that they can't even take a guilty verdict at face value.
I'm also kind of annoyed with the "nobody is above the law but we're going to stay above the fray" messaging. Screw that. He's a con and a convict, and the only reason he isn't a convicted felon in other cases already is that he's got his own little "deep state" of GOP federal judges gumming up the works on his behalf. Rich irony. I think justice has been served regardless of his sentence. His status as a convicted felon is now a matter of public record and I think Democrats from Biden on down should be talking about it frankly and openly.
I really do hope that “felon” becomes the new “emails”. Just need everyone to keep repeating that word every day until November. Drip, drip, drip…