President Joe Biden defends the justice system during his first comments on Trump's guilty verdict.

A White House run derailed or a crooked jury? From Buenos Aires to Beijing, this is how the verdict was reported.

The former president is to be sentenced shortly before the start of this summer's Republican National Convention, where he will be nominated as his party's candidate for the November election.

Shortly after becoming the first former American president to be convicted as a felon, Donald Trump told reporters outside a Manhattan courthouse that the verdict was a “disgrace,” a “rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt.”

There is a simple, foolproof way to predict when Trump will describe something or someone as rigged or corrupt: when he doesn’t get what he wants. Elections he loses are fraudulent, legal decisions that go against him are rigged, and anyone who opposes him is corrupt. In every single instance, Trump is decrying not a corrupt individual or rigged process, but a person or process that is not corrupt or rigged enough to give him the results he seeks.

Trump’s attorneys did not offer much in the way of a defense during the trial, relying instead on a “haphazard cacophony of denials and personal attacks,” as the former prosecutor Renato Mariotti put it in The New York Times. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Trump with falsifying business records in an attempt to cover up a sexual encounter with the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels, in order to prevent news of the incident from breaking during the final, crucial weeks of the 2016 election. As my colleague David A. Graham writes, the payments were made through Michael Cohen, a former Trump operative turned prosecution witness, who paid Daniels $130,000 for her silence. The defense failed to convince the jury that Cohen was not a credible witness to Trump’s crimes despite a past record of dishonesty.

[David A. Graham: Guilty on all counts]

Instead, Trump and his allies spent most of their efforts putting the trial on trial, attacking the presiding judge and the process itself in bombastic press conferences outside the courtroom. Trump was far from being unfairly treated—anyone else engaging in such behavior would have been jailed for contempt; rather, Justice Juan Merchan bent over backwards to overlook his antics. Trump violated gag orders by attacking witnesses and attempting to intimidate Daniels during testimony that “at times seemed to be describing nonconsensual sex,” and attacked the judge’s daughter as a “Rabid Trump Hater.” Yet Merchan told Trump, “The last thing I want to do is put you in jail.” In this trial and others, Trump has received special treatment precisely because he is an important political figure.  

Many political writers originally reacted with disdain to Bragg’s charges, treating them as a sideshow to the much more serious state and federal charges regarding Trump’s alleged theft of classified records and unlawful attempt to seize power after losing the 2020 election. It is true that compared with potentially exposing nuclear secrets to foreign spies and attempting to end American democracy, trying to cover up his encounter with Daniels seems like a much less serious crime. But that cover-up, prosecutors said, was also an attempt to influence an election, and the jury convicted Trump on all 34 counts relatively quickly, after two days of deliberation—a sign of the strength of Bragg’s case and a smoothly run trial. Not every jury gets it right, and not every trial is fair. But few of the Republican objections even contest that Trump did the things he was convicted of doing; they simply amount to demands that Trump be able to commit crimes with impunity, because anything less would be political persecution.

Republican lawmakers have settled on rhetoric attacking the trial itself, alleging that, as House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “Democrats cheered as they convicted the leader of the opposing party on ridiculous charges.” That is not what happened. The document-falsification charges Trump faced are relatively common in New York, even if the theory that they could be upped to felonies because of their connection to an attempt to influence a federal election was novel. Trump was convicted, as the Constitution demands, by a jury of his peers in the city where his crimes were committed, in a process Thomas Jefferson described as “the only anchor, ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” The American Founders considered trial by jury one of the core ideals of the American Revolution, in part because royal judges were considered too beholden to the King.

Republicans are attacking the New York trial because that court was seen as insufficiently beholden to their king. That prosecution proceeded relatively smoothly because right-wing judges lacked the ability to sabotage or delay the process. My colleague David Frum wrote that “it says something dark about the American legal system that it cannot deal promptly and effectively with a coup d’état.” But the culprit here is not “the American legal system.” Trials for the more serious federal charges against Trump have been delayed by a sustained attack on the rule of law carried out by right-wing legal activists embedded in the judiciary who are committed to postponing any trial long enough for Trump to potentially win an election and then dismiss the charges himself. Put simply, Trump is unlikely to be tried for these more serious charges not because of vague problems with the American legal system, but because a lot of federal judges are Republicans who want the leader of their party to get away with committing federal crimes.

The Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon has, as The New York Times reported, “effectively imperiled the future of a criminal prosecution that once seemed the most straightforward of the four Mr. Trump is facing.” She “has largely accomplished this by granting a serious hearing to almost every issue—no matter how far-fetched—that Mr. Trump’s lawyers have raised, playing directly into the former president’s strategy of delaying the case from reaching trial.”

The conservative-dominated Supreme Court, of which fully a third of the justices are Trump appointees, has also gone along with Trump’s legal strategy of delaying a trial as long as possible. “In recent years, the Roberts Court has shown greater and greater impatience with criminal defendants’ efforts to forestall punishment,” the law professor Aziz Huq wrote in February, noting that “a general hostility to foot-dragging in criminal cases is a through line in the court’s docket.” Not so with Trump.

“The reason Trump has nevertheless sought to slow down the immunity appeals process is obvious: to postpone the trial date, hopefully pushing it into a time when, as president, he would control the Department of Justice and thus could quash the prosecution altogether,” Andrew Weissmann and Ryan Goodman wrote in The Atlantic in March. “The Supreme Court has shamed itself by being a party to this, when the sole issue before the Court is presidential immunity.”

Trump’s legal theory that former presidents are immune to prosecution for crimes committed while in office unless impeached for those crimes is so laughably broad that it would allow a president to assassinate a political rival and then avoid impeachment by threatening to slaughter every lawmaker in Congress. Yet the right-wing justices, sworn to uphold a constitutional order in which no one is above the law, seemed strangely intrigued by this assertion of imperial power during oral arguments earlier this month. Justice Samuel Alito, who has not denied that a flag supporting Trump’s attempted coup was flying outside his house just days after it happened, wondered out loud if prosecuting former presidents who try to overthrow democracy might harm democracy.

The right-wing justices are acting like Republican politicians who believe they are obligated to delay the trial of their party leader as long as possible and potentially prevent it from happening. This is not simply my jaded assessment. Today, Speaker Johnson told Fox News, “I think that the Justices on the Court—I know many of them personally—I think they are deeply concerned about that, as we are. So I think they’ll set this straight.”

Even if the justices reject Trump’s absurd legal theories, their dawdling may still prevent a trial from taking place before November. This gamesmanship by the justices on behalf of the party that appointed them bears far more resemblance to a corrupt or rigged process than a trial by a jury of one’s peers does. And that’s precisely the issue: In a Manhattan courtroom, facing 12 ordinary American citizens, Trump could not count on right-wing legal elites to skew the proceeding in his favor. Trump is not angry because the Manhattan trial that convicted him was rigged; he is angry because it wasn’t.

One should take a moment to appreciate the absolute failure of the Republican elite, who have repeatedly refused to hold Trump accountable. Twice Trump was impeached by Congress for interfering in American elections—once by trying to blackmail a foreign government into falsely implicating his political rival in a crime, and once for trying to keep himself in power by fraudulent schemes and violence. Both times, Republican senators spared Trump the consequences by acquitting him.

Whether they did so out of fear of Trump and his followers or because they are on board with his authoritarian project, the result is the same: The head of the GOP is a convicted criminal who holds democracy in contempt and whose objective is seizing power in order to keep himself out of prison. Republicans have only themselves to blame for this outcome.

[Read: The twisted logic of Trump’s attacks on judges]

As the writer Osita Nwanevu noted in March, “The only people who've ever held Trump meaningfully accountable over the last nine years have been ordinary Americans and they've spent that entire time being lectured to and berated by elites who've failed to do anything.” This is overbroad—Democrats impeached him twice—but there is something to it nonetheless. Republican senators voted to acquit twice knowing that Trump was guilty. Most Republican politicians and conservative media figures kissed Trump’s filthy ring rather than ruin their career or even defend their family from his degrading insults. Right-wing jurists have adapted their supposedly ironclad judicial philosophies to fit Trumpist imperatives.

The 12 jurors who convicted Donald Trump will not have taxpayer-funded bodyguards for the rest of their life. They are not protected by reverence for their office or by their connections to power or money. They surely understood that by convicting Trump, they could be subject to harassment and violence, much as others who have refused to do Trump’s bidding have been.

Yet those 12 random New Yorkers showed more courage in convicting Donald Trump, knowing that they could be hounded for doing so, than nearly the entire conservative elite has in the past decade. Small wonder that this same elite is so terrified of the possibility of Trump facing another jury of his peers, an American institution that has so far proved itself resistant to Trump’s corrupting influence.

In meandering address resembling campaign speech, Trump repeats unfounded claim President Biden behind hush-money trial.

Less than an hour after former president Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in New York, his presidential campaign’s fundraising website crashed due to heavy traffic.

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The day the jury reached a verdict, Mr Trump’s second-eldest son was the only relation in the courtroom, absorbing the 34 declarations of “guilty”

For 30 intense, liminal minutes yesterday, the world felt on edge between two possible futures. The jurors in the New York trial of Donald Trump hadn’t taken all that long to deliberate, at it for only two days, and now they were preparing to deliver their verdict.

Any seasoned trial attorney or courtroom reporter will tell you that a quick verdict is usually bad news for the defendant—and yet, Trump had escaped seemingly intractable situations so many times, and with such ease.

As the foreperson of the jury pronounced him guilty on each count, Trump transformed. He was no longer a man to whom gravity no longer applied, but a defendant in a courtroom like any other, one who now faces the indignities of sentencing—potentially including prison time. He has said that he plans to appeal, and an appeals court could eventually toss out the conviction—but that would be a long way away, almost certainly after voters have finished casting their ballots in November. And even if an appeal succeeds, there is no undoing the moment when the country first saw a former president convicted of crimes in a court of law.

In the fall of 2016, the writer Jesse Farrar made a joke on Twitter that would soon prove prophetic. “Well, I'd like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam!” he wrote, assuming the voice of an overconfident pundit. The tweet then proceeds to describe Trump easily dodging catastrophe. “Ah! Well,” the imaginary pundit continues. “Nevertheless.”

In the years since, Trump has survived a series of events that for any other politician could well have been career-ending: a special-counsel investigation, two impeachments, an attempted coup, and multiple indictments. Somehow, he was always able to escape consequence. But now, with a verdict against him in New York convicting him of 34 felony counts, Donald Trump is finally facing real consequences.

[David A. Graham: Guilty on all counts]

The conviction is a major win for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who faced criticism from commentators across the political spectrum when he first announced the charges against Trump in March 2023. The case didn’t seem serious enough, the arguments went. Instead of addressing the most pressing, important misconduct by Trump—his effort to illegitimately hold on to power following the 2020 election—it focused on a grubby scheme by Trump and those around him to quash negative stories during his 2016 campaign. But over the past six weeks, as prosecutors set out their case in a dingy Manhattan courtroom, the structure of their legal arguments and the strength of the evidence against Trump came into focus. While Trump sat scowling alongside his defense lawyers, Bragg’s team laid out the trail of documents and testimony implicating him in what prosecutors argued was a conspiracy to improperly influence the 2016 election.

The story involves a series of lies and cover-ups, each nested within the other like matryoshka dolls. Trump and his associates, prosecutors argued, coordinated hush-money payments to women who threatened to go public about their past sexual interactions with the candidate. Then Trump agreed to orchestrate a series of payments to his fixer Michael Cohen to conceal the initial payments. The structure of the charges themselves was matryoshka-like: 34 counts of falsification of business records, elevated to felonies on the basis that Trump intended to violate New York election law, which itself became criminal only because he allegedly relied on an array of different “unlawful means.” Throughout the trial, Trump complained on Truth Social that the charges were baseless and legally confused, as if he could once again talk himself out of trouble. In the courtroom, though, he remained silent. And the jury had the last word.

[Read: Wrong case, right verdict]

Elsewhere in the justice system, Trump’s legal strategy of running down the clock until the election seems to be serving him well. Arguably the most serious case against him, the federal charges regarding January 6, remains stalled while the Supreme Court dithers on the question of presidential immunity. A guilty verdict in that case might carry more historical weight, but there’s nevertheless something appropriate about how the New York trial, in all its grimy mundanity, went first. The facts of the matter are so essentially Trumpian, all stemming from his foundational belief that the rules—of U.S. and New York election law, of state requirements concerning recordkeeping, of basic decency toward other people—do not apply to him. They also speak to his willingness to push past the line of acceptable behavior—sometimes by a great deal—in order to win and hold on to power. And sometimes, it turns out, that conduct will constitute criminal behavior in the eyes of a jury.

The New York case, like all the Trump prosecutions, has always been shadowed by the presidential race. Following the jury’s announcement of its verdict, Justice Juan Merchan scheduled Trump’s sentencing for July 11—just days before he is set to formally accept the GOP’s nomination for president at the Republican National Convention. Trump’s political appeal has always been tied to perceptions of his invincibility. He was a force of nature, the godlike manifestation of the people’s will unbound by law. Now, though, the Trump balloon has been punctured. The Übermensch is not so über. When Trump stepped out of the courtroom after the verdict to deliver remarks to the press, he walked with hunched shoulders, declaring his innocence in a flat, exhausted tone, as if he was struggling to summon his typical reserves of fury. He had a new look about him, unseen even after the 2020 election, when he lost but claimed victory; he looked defeated.

In 2018, Omarosa Manigault Newman turned a long-standing rumor into a piece of news: Donald Trump, she alleged, had used racist epithets on the set of The Apprentice. And the slurs, she claimed, had been caught on tape. Her claim led to a frenzy of speculation: Would the Apprentice recordings do what the Access Hollywood tapes had not? Would the show that had bolstered Trump’s rise in politics be, in the end, his undoing? What becomes of a public figure who has been caught, in such a literal way, saying the quiet part out loud?

The promised recordings never materialized, though, and so neither did the promised consequences. Without the evidence to back them up, Manigault Newman’s accusations languished in the space that divides the things that are known from the things that merely might be. Her claims took on the ironic distance of the genre that had bound her to Trump in the first place: Their dramas now came with asterisks. “Reality,” in their rendering, required scare quotes.

But lordy, many still hoped there’d be tapes. And this week—on the same day, as it happened, that a Manhattan jury turned Donald Trump, the alleged felon, into Donald Trump, the convicted one—the specter of recordings was raised again, this time as part of a Slate essay written by the former Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt. “The Donald Trump I Saw on The Apprentice” is long, thoughtful, and detailed. It offers new stories to support the old idea that Trump’s most powerful enablers, as he launched his bid for the presidency, were not politicians but entertainers: the behind-the-scenes workers who took a failing businessman and edited him, frame by soft-lit frame, into competence. Pruitt is sharing those stories now, he writes, because he can: The nondisclosure agreement he signed to join the show—-a document whose restrictions lasted for 20 years—recently expired. The essay reflects his catharsis. But it is sober too—akin, in that way, to the many other essays written by former Trump aides who indulged his truthful hyperbole before realizing the depth of the lie. Pruitt’s essay is openly confessional. It is implicitly apologetic. Its revelations read, in moments, as pleas for forgiveness: journalism as an act of atonement.

[Adam Serwer: Did the media learn nothing from 2016?]

The tapes—or more specifically, the spectral versions of them—come several paragraphs into Pruitt’s story, as he relates a discussion Trump had with Apprentice producers about whether a high-performing Black contestant, Kwame Jackson, should be named the season’s victor: “‘Yeah,’ [Trump] says to no one in particular, ‘but, I mean, would America buy a n— winning?’”

Pruitt’s allegation echoes the one that Manigault Newman made in 2018. And it is similarly difficult to verify. (“Those tapes, I’ve come to believe, will never be found,” Pruitt writes.) Pruitt has effectively given readers Schrödinger’s slur: a word at once uttered and not, a piece of proof and a defiance of it—news that is, at this point, no news at all. Trump might have said it. Or Pruitt’s allegation might be, as a Trump-campaign spokesperson put it yesterday, “fabricated and bullshit.”

But all of the things that the claim is not, at the moment, also highlight what it could be: an opportunity. The tapes, failing to give helpful answers, might instead offer helpful questions. Among them: What would such tapes, if they’re ever found, actually reveal? What could they, really? (Why would Trump be exempt from the truism that actions speak louder than words?) Trump has treated racism as a campaign message and a marketing ploy. He keeps finding new ways to insist that some Americans are more American than others. Epithets, for him, are a way of life. What could words convey that his actions haven’t? What, precisely, remains to be proved?

[David A. Graham: Trump goes all in on racism]

In 2018, in response to Manigault Newman’s claim, the Atlantic writer Matt Thompson considered what would happen—and what wouldn’t—if the rumored tapes materialized. The answer, he suggested, would have very little to do with Trump, and very much to do with everyone else. Six years later, that insight looks ever more prescient—and ever more urgent. Trump himself is a smoking gun. He has been there all along, strutting on stages and slumping in courtrooms and making his plans to restore the country to his particular version of greatness. He has shown us who he is. Why is it so hard to believe him?

Former President Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts on Thursday night. Stock of the media company bearing his name has fallen, and surged, and fallen again since then.

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