“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.” — Donald Trump, Sioux City, Iowa, Jan. 23, 2016
Donald Trump has not shot anybody on Fifth Avenue … not yet. It’s one of the few felonies he’s managed to avoid in a yearslong crime spree that’s included defrauding banks, running a scam university and a scam charity, committing what a judge later ruled was a rape, pulling off a hush-money scheme to interfere with the 2016 election, abusing his office to seek dirt on Joe Biden from Ukraine, plotting an attempted coup and encouraging his supporters to storm the Capitol, making off with top-secret papers, and promising to destroy the planet for $1 billion in campaign contributions.
Among other things.
And when Trump didn’t lose any voters, just as he’d promised, the establishment — Congress, judges and prosecutors, the news media — froze.
It took the untainted eyes of 12 everyday people — a software engineer, a security engineer, a physical therapist, a salesman, an investment banker, a businessman, a product manager, a retired wealth manager, two lawyers and two educators — to reveal what “the system” has been refusing to see for decades. That the streaking Emperor of Fifth Avenue had been wearing no clothes the whole time. And that the felonies Trump committed on that famed street, at Trump Tower, should not go unpunished.
These were the dozen regular folks who comprised the jury that made American history at 5:10 p.m. on May 30, 2024, when they found Trump guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up his 2016 pre-election hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels to cover up their affair — the first-ever felony conviction of a U.S. ex-president.
The criminal conviction of Trump — who still faces 54 other felony counts in three separate cases — was an epic event, and yet it didn’t mark the end of anything. History will likely see it as the beginning of the end, but the end of what? The end of a con man’s nation-changing career? Or the end of the American Experiment? The next eight months or so will tell us.
Trump has displayed none of the remorse that he needs to convince Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan to spare him prison time. Instead, the 45th president proclaimed, “We are living in a fascist state,” and then tried to justify that claim with both absurd attacks on Merchan, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and President Joe Biden — whom he falsely alleged had orchestrated the state-level prosecution — and with ridiculous lies about Democrats planning to quadruple taxes and stop you from having cars.
» READ MORE: The troubling reason Trump’s trial is so boring | Will Bunch Newsletter
The unhinged Friday morning rant was almost laughable except for one thing: His critiques of the U.S. justice system and the American Way writ large were endorsed by virtually all of the Republican Party, making the November election a referendum on whether or not a “red Caesar” dictator will be given carte blanche to bulldoze what he claims is a broken country. GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson, who shirked his D.C. duties to spend a day at the Manhattan trial sucking up to Trump, set the tone when he called Thursday’s verdict “a shameful day in American history.”
It takes a staggering level of cynicism for the political party that gave you a bogus “war on drugs” that made the United States the world leader in locking up people, but especially Black and brown people, and that blocked any and all police reform after a cop named Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd on video, to now claim that American justice is rigged and unfair.
That said, I’m going to say something a little surprising here. When Trump charges that the American system is badly broken, he’s not wrong. The last nine years have exposed a deep strain of weakness and even impotency among so many of the institutions we once trusted — our prosecutors and our judges, and in the hallways of Congress, and the news media.
Not because they went after Trump. But because they let him get away with it. Well, most of them did.
How appropriate that a short-fingered vulgarian who launched his career in real estate discriminating against Black would-be tenants and who has wallowed in every stereotype about African Americans, including his claim that Black voters have embraced him because he’s an accused criminal, finally met his match in a soft-spoken, focused Black prosecutor from Harlem’s “Strivers’ Row.” Bragg patiently sifted through the potential cases against Trump until he found the right one. And what a contrast between Bragg and America’s feckless attorneys general like Bill Barr, who quashed slam-dunk federal charges against Trump for the same hush-money scheme, or Merrick Garland, who for two years acted like a deer in the headlights when confronted with an ex-president’s criminality.
And how fitting that Trump — who in his current campaign claims that migrants coming into the United States are “not people,” as a prelude to an Orwellian, door-knock-in-the-dead-of-night deportation scheme that involves mass-detention camps and dictatorial powers — will be sentenced by a judge who came to America from Bogota, Colombia, at age 6 and embarked on the American Dream as a first-generation college student. Compare Merchan’s even-handed, no-nonsense judicial temperament with the clown antics of two justices on the nation’s highest court, billionaire-friendly globetrotter Clarence Thomas and flag-flying Samuel Alito.
One of the things that the Trump trial revealed is how much America has changed in exactly 50 years since Watergate and the resignation of the last thoroughly criminal president, Richard Nixon. That year saw one huge mistake — successor Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which only boosted the fiction that a president is above the law — but 1974 also showed how back then, the system largely did work. Congress members from both parties probed White House crimes and voted for impeachment. The Supreme Court was unanimous in forcing Nixon to turn over his tapes. Some news outlets, like the Washington Post and CBS, were aggressive in chasing the truth.
In 2024, the system is largely not working. A corrupted, partisan federal judiciary slow-walks Trump’s other cases. Milquetoast newsroom leaders are too afraid of bias allegations to fight for democracy. The Republican Party has become a dangerous cult that uses threats of retribution or even violence to enforce discipline. It took 14 Americans outside of these warped elite circles — Judge Merchan, DA Bragg, and the 12 citizens who served on the jury — to finally put the brakes on a naked Trump’s seemingly unstoppable crime spree.
In a year dominated by cowards, the courage of the Trump jury is remarkable. With their anonymity preserved (so far, anyway), these seven men and five women were able to look at Trump’s behavior and judge him without fear of getting primaried or losing their six-figure salary or all the other craven reasons that prevent our elite watchdogs from doing their job. They were serious about their civic duty and deliberated for 10 hours before declaring what we all have seen with our own eyes.
Donald Trump is a felon.
We deserve a government as good as the American people — and we don’t have that. We have to save ourselves. Much as it took a physical therapist and a salesman and a teacher and all the rest to finally bring Trump to justice, it’s going to take about 80 million of us to save the United States from a completely unglued and retributive dictator in the Oval Office, before we start the long process of rebuilding this wreckage from the ground up. Our institutions may be broken but the regular folks of this country just gave me so much hope. It’s, like, incredible.
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