I t took little more than nine hours of deliberation for a New York jury to ensure Donald Trump a new place in history. He was already the first US president, sitting or former, to be tried for a serious crime. Now he is the first ever to be convicted.
Sure, the guilty verdict did not come in any of the three much graver cases still outstanding against him. Like Al Capone – to whom Trump has, self-incriminatingly, long liked to compare himself – he got done on Thursday for the relatively small stuff. But the law got him in the end.
It would be nice to think this really is the end. In a normal world, it wouldn’t even be a question: Donald Trump would be done, all hope of a return to the White House shattered. “Of course,” we’d say, “Americans would never elect a convicted felon as their president! They disqualified Joe Biden back in 1988 for nicking a rhetorical riff from Neil Kinnock , for heaven’s sake – they’re hardly going to send a criminal 34 times over to the White House.
” But we left the normal world a long time ago. In Trumpworld, a guilty verdict, like the first presidential police mugshot , is a fundraising opportunity . Acolytes of the former president can point to the pattern that established itself early, by which successive legal blows only made Trump stronger, propelling him to the front of the pack during the Republican primaries as he cast himself as the victim of a liberal deep state.
So you can see the logic behind Team Trump’s bulli.