What has happened in the course of the Trump hush money trial is absolutely mind-bending, norms-crushing stuff. On Thursday, a jury found former President Donald Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records. But while there was no way to anticipate this particular verdict, there is plenty about the aftermath of this trial that we all knew, long before a trial even started. And that has everything to do with Trump’s habit of twisting the truth and facts for his own political gain.
Even with the unprecedented nature of this trial, Trump’s potential next move is a relatively easy guess.
This is true even though this trial was marked by a number of “firsts,” including its being the first time a U.S. president has ever been tried on criminal charges and the first time a major-party candidate has sat for a criminal trial. The closest America has ever come to this before was with Richard Nixon — although Nixon resigned because other Republicans told him he’d lost the confidence of his fellow party members. In contrast, we’ve seen very few Republicans stand up to Trump during his two impeachments, during his Jan. 6 insurrection or during his third run at the White House.
Yet even with the unprecedented nature of this trial, Trump’s potential next move is a relatively easy guess.
On the night before the closing arguments, Trump “truthed”: “Can you imagine, a President of the United States, who got more votes than any sitting President in the history of our Country, and who is also the Republican Nominee for President in the upcoming 2024 Election, and leading in all polls against the Democrat Nominee, Joe Biden, is tomorrow going before a Corrupt and Conflicted Democrat Appointed, Acting New York Judge, on a FAKE & MADE UP CASE by a Soros backed failed D.A., and the Judge himself, to see whether or not he will become a common criminal?”
Moments after the jury began deliberating, Trump took to his social media platform again, firing off a series of misleading and outright false claims, including the assertion: “I don’t even know what the charges are in this rigged case — I am entitled to specificity just like anyone else. There is no crime!” Notably, Trump typed this even as, as MSNBC’s Hayes Brown pointed out, the jury sat for more than an hour while Judge Juan Merchan provided detailed instructions about what jury deliberations entail. That post was just one of many in which Trump refuted the validity of any pending guilty verdict.
Trump, a self-proclaimed wannabe autocrat, has made his own criminal case an attack on the rule of law from the start. It is incredibly dangerous to have someone who is supported by a significant percentage of the American people focus on degrading an important American norm. When Trump calls the justice system “corrupt” and “conflicted,” he undermines one of the central tenets of our rule of law: the right to a fair trial. This explains why Trump effectively attempted to undermine a verdict before it was even passed down. He has sought to damage the institution of our justice system from the start. And he has succeeded in chipping away at its perceived legitimacy, long before any verdict was handed down.
A lot of Trump watchers believe that Trump’s main goal in running for president was to afford himself some legal protection. According to Republican Will Hurd, Trump is running for president “because he’s trying to stay out of jail.” Trump announced he was running for president ridiculously early, a week after his party underperformed in the midterms. Since then, he has been laser-focused on trying to merge his status as a defendant with his status as a candidate — creating a scenario in which Trump is pitting himself against the Justice Department and the rule of law.
Perhaps even more significantly, running for president presented an opportunity to have GOP donors pay his legal bills. Which they did, to the tune of $100 million.
Since mid-April, Trump has been sitting in a criminal court listening to everyone from adult film star Stormy Daniels to National Enquirer owner David Pecker testify about their damning experiences with Trump. At times, it seemed as if candidate Trump and his team didn’t help defendant Trump much during the trial. At one point, Trump lawyer Susan Necheles attacked Daniels, saying, “You have a lot of experience making phony stories about sex.” This comment opened the door for Daniels to testify about the sexual relationship she says she had with the Republican front-runner, an unforced error that could have been avoided. A former federal prosecutor, Jim Walden, told The Washington Post, “Whatever else Donald Trump may be — a great businessman, a great reality TV show host, a great politician — he’s a dumb lawyer.”
So what happens now? Now that we have a verdict in the case, there’s a good chance Trump will play it as being what he expected, and even wanted. We should expect him to go scorched-earth, because he so often does. We know he will try to weaponize this verdict and craft it into an assault on the rule of law, on the judge and the jury and on New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
No matter what the outcome, Trump was always going to try to use candidate Trump to help defendant Trump. And any verdict was destined to be molded into his branded narrative of persecution, witch hunts and a fight against the political system. Of that we can be certain.
Molly Jong-Fast
Molly Jong-Fast is a political analyst for MSNBC, special correspondent for Vanity Fair and host of the podcast “Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast.”
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