After four weeks of witness testimony and two days of jury deliberation in the first criminal trial of a former US president, Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records on Thursday. In convicting the presumptive Republican nominee for the November election, a Manhattan jury made the celebrity real estate developer a felon in the city where he first garnered his outsize reputation.
Trump remained motionless as the jury foreman read out “guilty” to all the charges he faced in the case. Afterwards, with the cameras rolling in the hallway, he returned to the themes he had been discussing throughout the trial.
“This was a rigged, disgraceful trial,” he said. “The real verdict is going to be November 5 by the people.”
The case against Trump stemmed from the circumstances of his improbable run to the White House in 2016, hinging as it did on an image he had constructed over decades. With the election approaching that year, the emergence of the Access Hollywood tape threatened his viability as a candidate, already a bizarre proposition. He had long been known as a self-styled playboy, but his comments during the recording hurtled his campaign into damage control mode and etched the words “grab ’em by the pussy” into American electoral history.
It was against this backdrop, prosecutors argued, that Trump scrambled to obscure a decade-old liaison with the porn star Stormy Daniels. His former fixer Michael Cohen arranged for her to receive $130,000 for her silence. Trump won the election. When the circumstances of the deal became public in 2018, Daniels and Cohen became national figures in their own right, resulting in a psychodrama-sex scandal with few parallels. The charges brought against Trump as a kind of capsule of the matter were comparatively low-key—allegations that he manipulated financial records to camouflage his reimbursement to Cohen—but they also reflected the contention that he had illegally conspired to win the 2016 election.
When Daniels testified during the trial, jurors heard her describe meeting Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in 2006 before he invited her to his hotel suite that night. She said having sex with him made her uncomfortable—she regretted not saying no—but that she was nervous and fearful. He had been discussing a potential role for her on The Celebrity Apprentice. Over the course of four days, Cohen’s testimony traced through his disenchantment with his old boss, an ongoing feud that has made him into a minor celebrity and social media phenomenon.
Those days of testimony, revolving around dramatic personalities and combustible relationships, attracted heavy doses of attention, and the lines to get into Manhattan Criminal Court stretched to their longest. For the most part, though, the environment outside the courthouse was muted. O.J. Simpson’s death, just days before jury selection was set to begin, prompted some mostly facile hypothesizing about potential comparisons to the era-defining spectacle of the football player’s 1995 murder trial. Most of what was being litigated over the past month had already been thoroughly digested by the national press.
Still, the trial often offered a measure of Trump’s cultural hold as he prepares to seek the White House again. The witnesses were a survey of people who had been drawn to him for one reason or another: Daniels, Cohen, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, former White House communications director Hope Hicks. Stuck in his hometown for a few weeks, Trump took the opportunity to commune with blue-collar New York—visiting a construction site, a firehouse, and a bodega—and, onstage at a rally in the Bronx, was celebrated by a pair of drill rappers who are out on bail for gang charges. Some days during the proceedings, he was accompanied at the courthouse by former NYPD commissioner Bernie Kerik and former Hells Angels leader Chuck Zito; on others, by Republican politicians including J.D. Vance, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Mike Johnson.
The general atmosphere of the proceedings, from beginning to end, could best be described as fully Trump. During jury selection in April, a Puerto Rican IT consultant who lives on the Lower East Side told the court that he found the former president “fascinating and mysterious.” He was not ultimately selected as a panelist. Later that week, he told USA Today that his name was Herson Cabreras and elaborated.
“The guy walks in, and people go crazy,” he said. “That’s what I meant.”
