NEW YORK – New York City was once Donald Trump’s playground, the place where he made his name and then plastered it everywhere he could. Now, the city that helped make him rich and famous has become his battleground. And Trump keeps losing.
His conviction this past week was the third and heaviest blow the former president has been dealt in his erstwhile hometown this year – a series of challenges to his ego, his bottom line, and now, perhaps, his freedom. His felony conviction on May 30, delivered by a jury of 12 Manhattan residents, brought with it the possibility that he could eventually be imprisoned in New York, a far cry from the image he spent decades cultivating as a real estate mogul and man about town. In February, Trump endured another humiliation: a judgment of more than US$450 million (S$608 million) in a civil fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James for overvaluing his net worth.
The ruling undermined a central element of his public identity as a brilliant business person. And in January, another jury in Manhattan ordered the former president to pay US$83.3 million for defaming writer E Jean Carroll, whom Trump had been found liable for sexually abusing in a changing room at Bergdorf Goodman in the 1990s.
Taken as a whole, the three cases have steadily chipped away at the persona Trump built across his decades in New York City, even as most polls show him continuing to lead this fall’s presidential race. Election results from 2016 an.
