Donald Trump is guilty: A moment of vindication in what may be a horribly consequential year

Donald Trump has been found guilty on all 34 counts. It was a headline I feared would never be written. And for good reason. I was in America a few months ago. Hanging around airports or sitting on a plane you tend to have time on your hands. Waiting for a flight from Las Vegas to Atlanta, I started to chat to a dude in the boarding area. He wasn’t very warm as it happens, but I persisted gamely and succeeded in getting some kind of a half-smile out of him. When we got up to board, he turned his back to me.

He had a baseball cap on that bore the hallmark: “Trump For President.” At that moment it hit home: more or less 50% of the adults boarding this flight are going to vote for this self-centred, bullying, narcissistic, lying fraud in the US Presidential election in November.

I took a deep breath. Hard to compute.

I looked around, searching for clues but there were none. I might hazard a guess at which way someone would lean, but there were no tell-tale bolts through people’s heads with big nuts at either end.

It was a very strange realisation, looking at apparently ordinary, living, breathing human beings at close quarters and thinking: half of these guys are fucked up enough to think that this mendacious, avaricious, scheming, hate-filled, thieving thug is actually their man!

The one they would choose to lead the so-called free world! Stop the bus, I wanna get off…

AGONISING WAIT

Would the prosecutor, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, have a hope of securing a guilty verdict, even in New York? When the Stormy Daniels hush-money case started, I read about the jury selection process. Over 200 potential jurors were rejected. I had also seen some possibly too-honest New Yorkers rule themselves out, explaining that they loathed Donald Trump so much that they didn’t feel they could give him a fair trial – or words to that effect.

To swing a guilty verdict, the decision would have to be unanimous. You might see it as pretty damn obvious that Trump was guilty – and I’d agree – but in a jury of twelve, there would have to be a few Trump-adoring lunatics, who’d go rogue and scupper the possibility of a unanimous verdict.

At the end of the trial I still felt that a guilty verdict was a long-shot. I have no doubt that Donald Trump, and his legal team, were operating on the same assumption. I can hear them speculating: “All we need here is 8%, for Christ’s sake! There has to be one fucking dingbat among the dozen men and women doing their duty as citizens. One of our dingbats, that is. We can’t lose!”

When the jury told Judge Juan Merchan that they had arrived at a verdict, I warned anyone near me not to get their hopes up. There was an agonising wait, while the jury filled in the necessary forms. Had someone hinted that it was a unanimous verdict? Or am I misremembering? Then the news came through. It was for real: Donald Trump has been found guilty of all counts.

It didn’t feel as euphoric as when Ireland voted to allow abortion by a 2 to 1 majority. Or even as when it became clear that Biden had beaten Trump in 2020.

Honestly, I’ve never been big on schadenfreude. Taking pleasure in other people’s misery is a mean-spirited game. But there was something else going on here. My fears had proven unfounded. A jury of his peers had all come to the conclusion that the “stable genius” was guilty. It was an unexpected vindication of the independence of at least one branch of the judicial system, in a country where the Supreme Court has become a laughing stock for its appalling level of corruption, cronyism and right-wing politicisation.

New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

CONVICTED FELON

Donald Trump, of course, is a serial misogynist. In 2016, his neanderthal attitude to women was already causing his presidential campaign difficulties. It began with the publication of the Access Hollywood tape, dating from 2005, in which Trump was recorded talking to the TV host Billy Bush about trying – and failing – to seduce a married woman. He then suggested to Bush that he might just start kissing the woman they were both going to meet. “I don’t even wait,” the future Presidential candidate said on camera. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

That tape was made public eleven years later, just two days before the first Presidential debate with the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. The last thing the Trump gang needed on top of that was a porn star coming out of the woodwork to let the world know that she’d had a fling with the liar king.

Panicked into action, Trump personally approved the transfer by Michael Cohen – described as his consiglieri – of $130,000 to the National Enquirer to pay Stormy Daniels for her story. It was what they call a “catch and kill” operation. The publisher of the National Enquirer David Pecker hadn’t the slightest intention of running the story. He was doing his old pal Donald Trump a favour. The National Enquirer paid Stormy Daniels so that they could bury her evidence – with the porn star locked into a non-disclosure agreement.

That was revealing enough. But the clincher was that the expense was then mischaracterised as “legal fees” in the books and records of Trump’s companies. On the one hand, that amounted to fraud. On the other the payment was clearly corrupt, made in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. And it worked. Despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, Trump eventually took the number of electoral college delegates necessary to claim victory.

These sexual ‘indiscretions’, it emerged, were not isolated incidents.

Stormy Daniels.

In 1990, during divorce proceedings, his first wife, Ivana, accused him of rape. She later withdrew the charge, but that was in the context of reaching a divorce settlement. He went on to win the Republican nomination in 2016 in spite of it. Maybe he’d have been able to brush off the Stormy Daniels revelations as well – but the pay-off was an insurance policy.

Later, in 2019, with the 2020 election looming, the writer E. Jean Carroll recounted in an article in the New Yorker that Trump had raped her in the dressing room of a New York department store in 1995 or 1996. In a civil case that arrived in court in 2023, the jury did not find him guilty of rape. They decided instead that he was liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Later, the presiding magistrate, Judge Kaplan, explained that the jury had in fact agreed that Trump had raped E. Jean Carroll in the ordinary common-sense meaning, by forcibly and non-consensually penetrating Carroll’s vagina with his fingers. But rape was defined at the time in New York as penetration with the penis and so the verdict couldn’t stand. Trump claimed that he didn’t know E. Jean Carroll.

It is not a claim that he will be able to make again. Between sexual assault, defamation and costs, Trump had to raise a bond for $91.6 million, to cover his liabilities from the case. In fact he might just dream of murdering her.

Trump had also been accused by a significant number of women contestants in the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA contests of having walked into dressing rooms when the contestants were in various states of undress. And there were more than a dozen other accusations of sexual impropriety racked up against him. No wonder Stormy Daniels decided that she was not going to let him get away with this forever.

She turned out to be a more formidable and credible opponent than the Trump gang might have anticipated. In the end, the jury believed her, and as a result, Donald Trump is now a convicted felon. A man with a criminal record.

Not so long ago, that would have been the end of Trump’s bid to secure a second Presidential term. But in the crazily upside world of American politics, it may not have any negative impact on his campaign. In fact, among his more aggressive, hardline supporters, it might even be something he can wear as a badge of honour. The Republican Party certainly has no qualms about campaigning for him to become President in January 2025.

TARGETED AND KILLED

The sentencing of Donald Trump, perp, will take place on July 11, four days before the Republican National Convention, at which Trump is due to be confirmed as the Republican candidate. We are in uncharted waters here. It is open to Judge Merchan to impose a jail sentence of up to four years, though most observers feel it is unlikely.

As ever, Trump was determined to get his retaliation in first. “I’ll be ok with that,” Trump said (which is, of course, a lie). “But I’m not sure the public would stand for it. I think it’d be tough for the public to take. You know, at a certain point, there’s a breaking point” (which is, unmistakably, a threat). Put me in jail and it’ll be January 6 all over again only far, far worse. This time the mobs will be better prepared, and fully armed.

In a post on his own ‘Truth’ (a lie) Social network, Trump launched an attack on the prosecutor Alvin Bragg and on Judge Merchan, insisting that it was unfair that these individuals will “make a decision which will determine the future of our Nation.” Trump does a lot of shouting on social media. “The United States Supreme Court MUST DECIDE!” he added. That, of course, is the Supreme Court he has rigged with a series of appointments made when he was President.

In his post-trial comments, the former President has also been busy telling anyone who’ll listen that he will fight to the end for ‘this country’. “We will make America great again,” he claimed.

The truth is that this is just a slogan, a soundbite. He doesn’t give a damn about America or Americans. At its simplest, in seeking a second term in the White House, what he wants is the opportunity to make as much money as possible; to feather the nests of his co-conspirators; to issue pardons to his mates who remain behind bars; and generally to abuse his position in any and every way he can to maximise hereditary control.

He revels in division and chaos. His mission involves stirring up the paranoia, anger and hostility necessary to get him across the line and into the White House again. And after that? With only one term available to him if he plays it by the book, the likelihood is that he will go for broke. Start with a revenge mission against his opponents. Pay back the billionaires pouring money into his campaign by enacting policies that allow them to accrue even bigger fortunes. Continue the campaign already being prosecuted by the Republican Party to eliminate all independent voices from the apparatus of government. Redraw electoral boundaries and gerrymander on a grand scale with the objective of guaranteeing control of electoral outcomes for the Republican Party.

Donald Trump will think, talk and act like a dictator. And if possible, he will engineer ways to delay the next Presidential election, so that he becomes one – enter Emperor Donald the first.

The most sickening thing is that the alternative is so horribly tainted now. On the run-in to the last election you could make a case for Honest Joe. He might not be glamorous or charismatic, the thinking ran, but the promise of a quieter time in which decisions would be taken in a measured and thoughtful way was seductive. That illusion is over. Honest Joe has become Hypocritical Joe. Every idealistic-sounding thing he said when Russia invaded Ukraine has been exposed as so much disingenuous waffle in the context of his support for the outrageous butchery that has been perpetrated by Israel in Gaza. Respect for him is at an all-time low.

There are things that he has done relatively well during his presidency, most notably managing the US economy. And he has pushed the Republicans in the Senate and in Congress till he finally got a deal on cash for Ukraine. But it seems obscene to be weighing and measuring those things against Biden’s support for Israel’s utterly immoral and vindictive campaign of genocide in Gaza, with over 36,000 dead; over 80,000 injured, many of them completely disfigured; a famine deliberately and maliciously caused by the Israeli government; aid workers murdered in their hundreds; journalists targeted and killed faster than in any other war in decades; 74.3% of all buildings either damaged or destroyed; a campaign by Israel to intimidate the head of the International Criminal Court exposed; their complete failure to heed a series of motions passed in the United Nations; the refusal to listen to the order issued by the International Court of Justice for Israel to halt its military offensive in Gaza – and so on and on.

LAUGHING LIKE DRAINS

Sadly, given the absurd binary nature of US politics, it is either one or the other. And you know that Trump would have been even worse on Israel. And that if he can grab power again, he will drag America down to the very bottom of the pit, free the pitch for Putin and generally make the world a far darker and more combustible place. That the guilty verdict in New York may be as good as it gets.

Right now, it looks like hold-your-nose time is looming. It is the only context in which you can encourage your friends to Vote Biden. But we will see. There’s approximately six months till polling day. A lot can happen. And if Trump loses, he may go for broke anyway. A civil war in America may well be on the cards. In case you hadn’t noticed, a ruthlessly divisive disinformation campaign – driven by Vladimir Putin and his minions via social media – is underway and pushing us inexorably in that direction. It is making the world an infinitely more dangerous place. And Meta, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Google, X and the rest are soaking up the money being spent promoting it and laughing like drains all the way to the bank. Just thought I’d mention it.

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