In the case of the People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, a jury in Manhattan of five women and seven men found the defendant guilty on Thursday on thirty-four counts of falsifying business records in the first degree.
The conviction on these felony charges is only the most recent stain on the legal history of the former President. Last year, in a civil trial, another New York jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and awarded the victim of that assault, the advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, five million dollars. A subsequent suit against Trump for defaming Carroll resulted in an additional award of more than eighty-three million dollars in damages. Trump awaits three more trials—in Washington, D.C., Florida, and Georgia—in which he faces myriad indictments for helping to foment the violent uprising at the U.S. Capitol; criminally mishandling classified documents; and taking part in a conspiracy to “unlawfully change the outcome” of the 2020 election. He has further distinguished himself in the annals of American law by being the only President to be impeached twice—the first time for trying to extort the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, the second for “incitement of insurrection.”
Following the devastating judgment against Trump in Manhattan Criminal Court, voters will now decide to what extent they care. The question is whether any who remain undecided—particularly in the most critical precincts of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona—will be convinced that a felony conviction disqualifies Trump from a second term as Commander-in-Chief, or whether this most recent badge of dishonor is, in the end, of no greater concern than his well-documented history as a bigot, a fabulist, and an authoritarian intent on pursuing a second term inflamed by a spirit of vengeance.
The vast majority of the electorate is, to one degree or another, quite aware of his many characteristics. He has been around a long time. He is aggressively transparent, supremely frank about his furies and his prejudices. He appears to be devoid of shame. Rather than betray regret about a hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actress with whom he allegedly enjoyed a brief interlude, or even issue denials under oath, Trump, in his many press conferences outside the courtroom at 100 Centre Street, exploited the trial as a means of illustrating the ongoing narrative of his persecution at the hands of the Biden Administration and the Deep State. His victimhood, he has told his supporters, is your victimhood. I am you. My retribution will be your retribution. As the trial wore on, he managed to monetize this tall tale. His fund-raising increased, particularly among smaller donors. Such is his talent for self-pity and demagoguery. His continuing legal jeopardy, according to Politico, “may be the most effective tool he has going.”
Trump’s personal adventures and interesting accounting practices appear to have given little pause to even the most self-righteous of G.O.P. leaders. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, has called the Bible the bedrock of his “personal world view,” and yet, in the wake of the allegations provided by Daniels, Trump’s former consigliere Michael Cohen, and other witnesses, he still visited the Centre Street courthouse to show his treacly obeisance to Trump and to denounce the proceedings as a “sham.”
The picture is no different among Trump’s former Republican rivals. Early critics, such as Senators Marco Rubio, of Florida, and J. D. Vance, of Ohio, are now puppy-eager supporters vying for the Vice-Presidency or a Cabinet position; more persistent naysayers, such as Governor Chris Sununu, of New Hampshire, have also fallen into line. Trump’s last real opponent in the Republican primary, his former envoy to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, spent months attacking his character (“Every single thing Donald Trump has said or put on TV has been a lie”) and his mental stability (“He is unhinged. He is more diminished than he was”). She blamed him for the Party’s losses in 2018, 2020, and 2022, and declared that she, at least, was brave enough to say so: “Of course, many of the same politicians who now publicly embrace Trump privately dread him. They know what a disaster he’s been and will continue to be for our party. They’re just too afraid to say it out loud. Well, I’m not afraid to say the hard truths out loud.” And yet, as the trial entered its last days, Haley, predictably, crumbled, saying out loud that she would cast her vote for Trump and, implicitly, her integrity to the four winds. In return, Trump tossed Haley a crumb, suggesting vaguely that she might yet gain a place on his team “in some form.”
Some of the titans of Wall Street are showing similar degrees of moral flexibility. Stephen Schwarzman, a billionaire financier who abandoned Trump not because of the insurrection, in 2021, but after the G.O.P.’s poor showing in the 2022 midterm elections, has now returned meekly to the fold. His reasons, he said obscurely, include a variety of policy concerns and “the dramatic rise of antisemitism.” (Trump, who has a long history of antisemitic statements, said earlier this year that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.”) The hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin has similarly overcome his doubts. He once called Trump a “three-time loser”; now he is back on board.
Like so many authoritarians of the past—and, more recently, like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Jair Bolsonaro—Trump deploys a blood-and-soil rhetoric in which his supporters and the existing order are under dire threat. The United States is a “failing nation” hurtling toward catastrophe. The government and the media may say (accurately) that inflation has trended downward and that the unemployment rate is below four per cent, but Trump darkly forecasts a nightmare world of Chinese dominance and a “1929-type Depression.” Moreover, if Joe Biden is reëlected, the country will continue to become “a Third World hellhole ruled by censors, perverts, criminals, and thugs.” The 2024 election is “the final battle,” and only he can redeem us from a “Mad Max” dystopia—or, as he put it at a conference in Maryland last March, a “lawless, open-borders, crime-ridden, filthy, communist nightmare.”
If we have learned anything about Trump, it is that, beneath all the insult-comic improvisations, he means what he says. His authoritarian entertainments are authoritarian intentions. Where he has had the power and the discipline to enact his intentions, he has done so. He set out to appoint Justices to the Supreme Court to eliminate abortion rights, and he did so. He set out to erase the line between fact and lies, and did so. He set out to call into question the efficacy of elections and, for millions of people, he succeeded. He set out to deepen the divides in an already fractured nation and, by every measure, he has succeeded—to his benefit.
In his first term, he threatened the stability of international alliances, such as NATO, and in a second term he could easily destroy them. Putin would be pleased. In his first term, Trump routinely appointed mediocrities who, at least in some instances, ultimately put allegiance to the country before allegiance to the President and stood in the way of outright disaster; in a second term, Trump has promised that he will appoint pure loyalists hellbent on implementing his agenda of revenge. In his first term, Trump derided journalists as “the enemy of the people”; in a second term, he could deploy the powers of the I.R.S. and the Justice Department to punish them. His apparent fascination with violence could easily turn into the employment of violence. In his first term, Trump wondered aloud to Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and other officials why protesters couldn’t be shot “in the legs or something.” And has anyone forgotten the tweet, circa 2020, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”? He suggested the same remedy for migrants crossing the border.
Trump’s breezy contempt for African Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, women, the disabled, and the inhabitants of “shit-hole” countries is a matter of record. In the wake of Memorial Day, it is also worth recalling his contempt for those in the armed forces. “He’s not a war hero,” he said of John McCain, who served as a Navy officer and was a P.O.W. for more than five years in North Vietnam. “He’s a war hero ’cause he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” After learning that General Mark Milley, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had tried to ease anxieties in Beijing about U.S. military intentions, Trump tweeted, “This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”
In short, an understanding of what a second Trump term would mean for all Americans hardly depends on the verdict in the matter of the People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump. American democracy, any democracy, is by nature fragile, and even the most summary assessment of Trump’s rhetoric, actions, and intentions makes clear that the election in November is a matter of emergency. To return an unstable and malevolent authoritarian to the White House risks wounding American democracy in ways that would likely take decades to repair. That is not the only issue on the ballot, but those are the stakes. ♦
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