The first former president to be convicted of a felony is now also the first convicted felon to be elected as president.

Donald Trump won reelection on November 5, paving the way for his return to the White House—as well as the end or postponement of the criminal cases against him. The extent to which those cases also paved the way for his return to the White House will be a topic for years of debate. One plausible argument is that the sense that Trump was being persecuted strengthened his support; another is that the failure to bring cases sooner and finish them deprived voters of complete information. Both may be true.

In any event, the discussion is moving from the legal to the political because the legal side seems to have reached a dead end. Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Justice Department are expected to end the cases against him related to attempting to subvert the 2020 election and hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, neither of which has made it to trial. The documents case, long considered the most straightforward, was bottled up by a Trump-appointed judge on dubious procedural grounds. The election-subversion case took a detour to the Supreme Court, where a conservative majority ran down the clock before ruling that a president has very broad immunity for most acts done as president; the lower court hearing the case only recently got back on track, but on November 8, Smith asked the judge to pause the case, citing Trump’s victory.

But now, given that DOJ guidance says a sitting president can’t be tried, and that Trump has promised to fire Smith and immediately dismiss the cases anyway, the two federal cases are likely to wind down. An election-subversion case in Fulton County, Georgia, is effectively frozen already amid challenges to the prosecutor’s handling of the case. Trump has been convicted but not sentenced in New York State related to hush money paid to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels, and sentencing in that case may never happen, either.

If the failure to swiftly prosecute Trump enabled his election, then, his election seems to guarantee that he will never face accountability for the acts he committed, including those for which he has already been convicted of 34 felonies.

What follows is a summary of the major legal cases against Trump, assessments of the gravity of the charges, and the prognosis. This guide will be updated as necessary.

New York State: Fraud

In the fall of 2022, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil suit against Trump, his adult sons, and his former aide Allen Weisselberg, alleging a years-long scheme in which Trump fraudulently reported the value of properties in order to either lower his tax bill or improve the terms of his loans, all with an eye toward inflating his net worth.

When?
Justice Arthur Engoron ruled on February 16 that Trump must pay $355 million plus interest, the calculated size of his ill-gotten gains from fraud. The judge had previously ruled against Trump and his co-defendants in late September 2023, concluding that many of the defendants’ claims were “clearly” fraudulent—so clearly that he didn’t need a trial to hear them.

How grave was the allegation?
Fraud is fraud, and in this case, the sum of the fraud stretched into the hundreds of millions—but compared with some of the other legal matters in which Trump is embroiled, this is a little pedestrian. The case was also civil rather than criminal. But although the stakes are lower for the nation, they remain high for Trump: The size of the penalty appears to be larger than Trump can easily pay, and he also faces a three-year ban on operating his company.

What happens now?
On March 25, the day he was supposed to post bond, an appeals court reduced the amount he must post from more than $464 million to $175 million. Trump has appealed the case. In a September hearing, New York appeals-court judges seemed skeptical of the case against Trump and sympathetic to his arguments. They have not yet ruled.

Manhattan: Defamation and Sexual Assault

Although these other cases are all brought by government entities, Trump also faced a pair of defamation suits from the writer E. Jean Carroll, who said that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department-store dressing room in the 1990s. When he denied it, she sued him for defamation and later added a battery claim.

When?
In May 2023, a jury concluded that Trump had sexually assaulted and defamed Carroll, and awarded her $5 million. A second defamation case produced an $83.3 million judgment in January 2024.

How grave was the allegation?
Although these cases didn’t directly connect to the same fundamental issues of rule of law and democratic governance that some of the criminal cases do, they were a serious matter, and a federal judge’s blunt statement that Trump raped Carroll has gone underappreciated.

What happens now?
Trump has appealed both cases, and he posted bond for the $83.3 million in March.

Manhattan: Hush Money

In March 2023, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg became the first prosecutor to bring felony charges against Trump, alleging that the former president falsified business records as part of a scheme to pay hush money to women who said they’d had sexual relationships with Trump.

When?
The trial began on April 15 and ended with a May 30 conviction. A judge is scheduled to rule September 16 on whether the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity invalidates the case. On September 6, he announced that he was postponing sentencing to avoid interfering with the election.

How grave was the allegation?
Many people have analogized this case to Al Capone’s conviction on tax evasion: It’s not that he didn’t deserve it, but it wasn’t really why he was an infamous villain. Trump did deserve it, and he’s now a convicted felon. Moreover, although the charges were about falsifying records, those records were falsified to keep information from the public as it voted in the 2016 election. It was among the first of Trump’s many attacks on fair elections. (His two impeachments were also for efforts to undermine the electoral process.) If at times this case felt more minor compared with the election-subversion or classified-documents cases, it’s because those other cases have set a grossly high standard for what constitutes gravity.

What happens now?
Sentencing was scheduled for November 26, but with Trump now in the middle of a presidential transition, some observers expect that Justice Juan Merchan will either postpone sentencing or even forgo a sentence altogether.

Department of Justice: Mar-a-Lago Documents

Special Counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with 37 felonies in connection with his removal of documents from the White House when he left office, but Judge Aileen Cannon has dismissed the case, finding that Smith’s appointment was not constitutional. Smith has appealed. The charges included willful retention of national-security information, obstruction of justice, withholding of documents, and false statements. Trump took boxes of documents to properties, where they were stored haphazardly, but the indictment centered on his refusal to give them back to the government despite repeated requests.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

When?
Smith filed charges in June 2023. On July 15, 2024, Cannon dismissed the charges. Smith appealed that dismissal on August 26.

How grave is the allegation?
These are, I have written, the stupidest crimes imaginable, but they are nevertheless very serious. Protecting the nation’s secrets is one of the greatest responsibilities of any public official with classified clearance, and not only did Trump put these documents at risk, but he also (allegedly) refused to comply with a subpoena, tried to hide the documents, and lied to the government through his attorneys.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
Vanishingly unlikely. Smith and the Justice Department are reportedly working on winding down the case now, both because Trump would quash it on his first day in office and also because long-standing guidance says a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. This once looked to be the most open-and-shut case: The facts and legal theory here are pretty straightforward. But Smith drew a short straw when he was randomly assigned Cannon, a Trump appointee who repeatedly ruled favorably for Trump and bogged the case down in endless pretrial arguments. Even before her dismissal of the case, some legal commentators accused her of “sabotaging” it.

Fulton County: Election Subversion

In Fulton County, Georgia, which includes most of Atlanta, District Attorney Fani Willis brought a huge racketeering case against Trump and 18 others, alleging a conspiracy that spread across weeks and states with the aim of stealing the 2020 election.

When?
Willis obtained the indictment in August 2023. The number of people charged makes the case unwieldy and difficult to track. Several of them, including Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis, struck plea deals in the fall. Because a challenge to Willis’s presence on the case isn’t going to be heard until December, the case will not begin before the election.

How grave is the allegation?
More than any other case, this one attempts to reckon with the full breadth of the assault on democracy following the 2020 election.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
Trump’s election casts even more uncertainty over an already murky future. This is a huge case for a local prosecutor, even in a county as large as Fulton, to bring. The racketeering law allows Willis to sweep in a great deal of material, and she has some strong evidence—such as a call in which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” some 11,000 votes. Three major plea deals from co-defendants may also ease Willis’s path, but getting a jury to convict Trump will still be a challenge. A judge on September 12 tossed three counts as outside state jurisdiction, and dismissed several other but said the state can refile them with more detail. The case has also been hurt by the revelation of a romantic relationship between Willis and an attorney she hired as a special prosecutor. On March 15, Judge Scott McAfee declined to throw out the indictment, but he sharply castigated Willis. Trump’s victory may result in the case being frozen indefinitely.

Department of Justice: Election Subversion

Special Counsel Smith has also charged Trump with four federal felonies in connection with his attempt to remain in power after losing the 2020 election. This case is in court in Washington, D.C.

When?
A grand jury indicted Trump on August 1, 2023. The trial was originally scheduled for March but was frozen while the Supreme Court mulled whether the former president should be immune to prosecution. On July 1, 2024, the justices ruled that a president is immune from prosecution for official but not unofficial acts, finding that some of Trump’s postelection actions were official and sending the case back to the trial court to determine others. Smith obtained a new indictment on August 27, which retains the same four felony charges but omits references to corrupting the Justice Department. On November 8, Smith asked the trial-court judge to pause the case because of the “unprecedented circumstance” of Trump’s reelection.

[David A. Graham: Trump attempted a brazen, dead-serious attack on American democracy]

How grave is the allegation?
This case rivals the Fulton County one in importance. It is narrower, focusing just on Trump and a few key elements of the paperwork coup, but the symbolic weight of the U.S. Justice Department prosecuting an attempt to subvert the American election system is heavy.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
It’s not happening, folks.

Additionally …

Once upon a time, cases were filed in more than 30 states over whether Trump could even appear on the 2024 ballot under a novel legal theory about the Fourteenth Amendment. Proponents, including J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe in The Atlantic, argued that the former president was ineligible to serve again under a clause that disqualifies anyone who took an oath defending the Constitution and then subsequently participated in a rebellion or an insurrection. They said that Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election and his incitement of the January 6 riot meet the criteria.

The Supreme Court conclusively disagreed. The justices ruled unanimously on March 4 that states could not remove Trump from the ballot, and appear on the ballot he did. Trump is set to be sworn in as the 47th president on January 20, 2025.

In the final weeks of the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump did the following things: falsely accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating their neighbors’ pets; invited a comedian onstage at a rally to call Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”; said he wouldn’t mind if someone shot the reporters who cover his rallies; fantasized about former Representative Liz Cheney having guns “trained on her face”; called America a “garbage can for the world”; and pretended to fellate a microphone in public. Then, on Tuesday night, he decisively won the presidential election, sweeping every battleground state in the country.

That Trump routinely gets away with saying things that would have ended any other politician’s career is hardly a novel observation. People have been making this point since he launched his first campaign nine years ago. Theories abound to explain the phenomenon, and we’ll get to those in a moment. But, first, do me a favor and reread that paragraph above. Clock your reflexive reaction. Do you find yourself indifferently skimming, or notice that your attention has begun to drift? Do you roll your eyes at what looks like yet another scoldy catalog of Trump’s alleged misdeeds, or mentally quibble with my characterizations? (He was obviously joking about Cheney.) Perhaps you’re thinking that you missed one of these moments—or maybe you’re not quite sure. Hasn’t he said something about shooting reporters before? Who can remember—all of this stuff blends together.

What you’re experiencing is the product of Trump’s clearest political accomplishment, and perhaps his most enduring legacy: In his near decade as America’s main character, he has thoroughly desensitized voters to behavior that, in another era, they would have deemed disqualifying in a president. The national bar for outrage keeps rising; the ability to be shocked has dwindled.

Trump is not the first modern president to contribute to this national numbing effect. Richard Nixon’s abuses of power shattered the idyllic image many Americans had of the presidency, seeding a skepticism that would eventually blossom into generational cynicism. And Bill Clinton’s affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky—complete with the airing of every graphic detail by opponents, and the rush to excuse his indiscretions by allies—helped normalize the idea that presidents don’t need to be moral exemplars.

But when it comes to lowering our collective expectations of presidential behavior, Trump is a singular figure. The lines he has enterprisingly crossed—legal, ethical, constitutional, moral—are too numerous to list. (Plus, chances are, you’d get bored and abandon this article if I tried.) But it seems worth noting here just a few of Trump’s firsts. He is the first president to try to stay in power after losing an election. He is the first president to be impeached twice (for attempting to trade military aid for political favors from the Ukrainian president, and for sending a violent mob to storm the Capitol). He is the first to be convicted of a felony (for crimes connected with hush-money payments to an adult-film star with whom he had an affair), and the first to be found liable for sexual abuse (for assaulting E. Jean Carroll in a department-store dressing room). He demonstrates no contrition for these acts. In fact, he’s always denied all wrongdoing—even as he’s boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing the support of his base.

Trump’s apologists might argue that his success is a symptom, not the cause, of the country’s coarsened character. Alternatively, something about his public persona, forged in the New York tabloids and on reality TV, may make people uniquely tolerant of his sins. After all, the same voters in North Carolina who delivered him the state’s 16 Electoral College votes this week also rejected a Trump-aligned candidate for governor who’d been discovered making vile anti-Semitic and racist comments on a porn site. Trump has also no doubt been aided by Republican politicians who cravenly defend everything he does, blundering Democrats who have struggled to provide a compelling alternative, and a press corps still constrained by its “bias toward coherence.”

In any case, the fact remains that Trump’s brazenness damages the political culture. Every time he crosses a new line, he makes it that much easier for the next guy to do so. Nearly a decade into the Trump era, too many Americans have internalized the idea that expecting our political leaders to be good people is quaint and foolish. But this savvier-than-thou attitude only empowers Trump and his mimics to act with impunity.

Is it possible to resensitize an electorate to scandal and cruelty? I don’t know. Maybe we start by trying to remember how we felt when all of this was still new.

In recent weeks, Gen Z voters have been sharing videos of themselves on TikTok listening—for what they say is the first time—to Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood tape. I found watching these videos, and reading some of the young people’s interviews in The Washington Post, at once heartbreaking and hopeful. Brigid Quinn, a 15-year-old in Georgia who had never actually heard the once and future president say “grab them by the pussy,” told the paper she “didn’t understand how people thought this was normal.” Kate Sullivan, a 21-year-old student in Ohio, was similarly shocked when she heard it for the first time. “I just recently got into politics,” she said. “The fact that people knew about this, and he still won, is pretty wild to me.”

A less cynical age may dawn again.

A little over a week ago, campaigning in Kalamazoo, Michigan, former First Lady Michelle Obama had a moment of reflection. “I gotta ask myself, why on earth is this race even close?” she asked. The crowd roared, but Obama wasn’t laughing. It’s a serious question, and it deserves serious consideration.

The most remarkable thing about the 2024 presidential election, which hasn’t lacked for surprises, is that roughly half the electorate still supports Donald Trump. The Republican’s tenure in the White House was a series of rolling disasters, and culminated with him attempting to steal an election after voters rejected him. And yet, polling suggests that Trump is virtually tied with Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.

In fact, that undersells how surprising the depth of his support is. Although he has dominated American politics for most of the past decade, he has never been especially popular. As the Democratic strategist Michael Podhorzer has written, the United States has thus far been home to a consistent anti-MAGA majority. Trump won the 2016 Republican nomination by splitting the field, then won the Electoral College that November despite losing the popular vote. He lost decisively in 2020. In 2018, the GOP was trounced in the midterm elections. In the 2022 midterms, Trump was out of office but sought to make the elections about him, resulting in a notable GOP underperformance. Yet Trump stands a good chance of winning his largest share of the popular vote this year, in his third try—now, after Americans have had nearly a decade to familiarize themselves with his complete inadequacy—and could even capture a majority.

[Read: Trump: ‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had’]

Trump’s term was chaos wrapped in catastrophe, served over incompetence. He avoided any major wars and slashed taxes, but otherwise failed in many of his goals. He did not build a wall, nor did Mexico pay for it. He did not beat China in a trade war or revive American manufacturing. He did not disarm North Korea. His administration was hobbled by a series of scandals of his own creation, including one that got him impeached by the House. He oversaw a string of moral outrages: his callous handling of Hurricane María, the cruelty of family separation, his disinformation about COVID, and the distribution of aid to punish Democratic areas. At the end came his attempt to thwart the will of American voters, an assault on the tradition of peaceful transfer of power that dated back to the nation’s founding.

One common explanation for Trump’s popularity is that voters have amnesia about his time in office. This may be true, and it might be more understandable if Trump had spent his time since leaving office remaking his identity into something less divisive, as many Republicans urged him to do.

He hasn’t, though. Instead, he has amplified many of his most outrageous attributes. The past few years have seen the FBI turn up some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets on a ballroom stage and in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, where they had been stashed haphazardly (this, after his 2016 campaign criticized his opponent, Hillary Clinton, relentlessly for her handling of her email security). The former president has also been indicted on dozens of felony charges and convicted on 34 of them. In civil proceedings, he’s been found liable for raping the writer E. Jean Carroll (he denies this) and to have committed millions of dollars of business fraud.

His 2024 presidential campaign has been built around two main promises: a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and retribution against his political enemies. He’s said he wants to deploy the military against domestic enemies, a category that he has made clear begins with elected Democrats. As I wrote after his October 27 rally at Madison Square Garden, hate and fear are his message. The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, recently reported that Trump had complained that he wanted generals like Hitler’s, and an aide allegedly assaulted an employee at Arlington National Cemetery who tried to prevent Trump from using it for crass politicking. Every administration has a few disgruntled staffers; no other administration has ever seen so many former top staffers say that a president is a fascist, a liar, or unfit for the presidency.

Harris is running a very different campaign. In contrast to Trump’s bleak vision, she has spent most of her short campaign offering a cheerful, patriotic vision of the sort that has traditionally appealed to American voters. Harris has been criticized for offering insufficient detail about her plans and granting too few interviews, and more detail and more transparency are always better. But Trump is just as vague, if not more so, about his plans—his explanation for his plans on tariffs and child care, for example, are downright naive—and he has avoided or canceled several interviews with interlocutors not considered friendly.

Some of the important reasons the election is so close are structural and have little to do with Trump or Harris. Underlying characteristics of the election benefit the Republican nominee: Voters in the United States are unhappy about the direction of the country, and voters around the world have been punishing incumbents. Although Harris is not the president, she has struggled to figure out how much to distance herself from Joe Biden and the administration in which she serves as vice president. Americans are also sour on the economy, and although the U.S. has weathered the post-COVID world and global inflation better than any of its peers, saying that is no use if voters don’t feel and believe it.

[Read: The case for Kamala Harris]

Trump has also benefited from the media environment. A robust right-wing press has opted to become effectively a wing of the MAGA movement. Harris faces scrutiny from both the mainstream and conservative press, but he receives it only from the mainstream. Some parts of the mainstream press still seem perplexed by how to cover Trump. Moreover, Trump has benefited from a huge range of attention outside the traditional news media. Podcasts have become an important driver of support for him. So has X. Elon Musk bought the platform out of a supposed concern for political interference, and has spent the past few months turning it into a gusher of pro-Trump disinformation.

Harris has run the shortest presidential campaign in history, a product of Biden’s late exit from the race. Whether a longer run would have helped or hurt her is impossible to answer clearly, though some Democrats fret that she has not sufficiently introduced herself to the nation in that time. Puzzlingly, her campaign has spent much of the past couple of weeks attacking Trump rather than emphasizing the affirmative case for her—setting aside the message that had won her a small lead in the polls and taking up the one that had been a loser for Biden.

In most respects, Harris is a totally conventional Democratic nominee—to both her advantage and her disadvantage. One might imagine that, against a candidate as aberrant as Trump, this would be sufficient for a small lead. Indeed, that’s exactly the approach that Biden used to beat Trump four years ago. But if the polling is right (which it may not be, in either direction), then many voters have stuck with Trump or shifted toward him. For many others, the closeness of the race is just as baffling. “I don’t think it's going to be near as close as they’re saying,” Tony Capillary told me at an October 21 rally in Greenville, North Carolina. “This should be about 93 percent to 7 percent, is what it should be.” He’s sure that when the votes are in, Trump will win—by a lot.