June 07, 2024
Photo The Boston Globe
Guilty!
After a six-week trial, it took jurors less than 10 hours of deliberation to come back with guilty verdicts on all 34 felony counts of fraudulent business records against former President Donald Trump. This was a thunderclap of a decision, which may tilt the electorate enough to ensure that Trump does not regain the White House in November.
Trump engaged in a fraudulent scheme to pay money to an adult film actress, Stormy Daniels, to keep her quiet in the few weeks left before the 2016 election. According to her, she had intimate relations with Donald Trump in 2006 while his wife was at home with their newborn son. If this charge became public, it would almost certainly sink Trump’s campaign against Hilary Clinton, especially given the blowback from the release of the Access Hollywood tape in early October 2016, where Trump was recorded bragging about sexually assaulting women.
The critical witness for the prosecution in this trial was not Trump’s lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, but rather the owner of the tabloid National Enquirer David Pecker. Pecker explained how he and Trump had concocted a scheme to promote Trump, to publish false stories attacking his rivals (for example, that Ted Cruz’s father was somehow involved in the Kennedy assassination in 1963), and to “catch and kill” possible negative stories about Trump that Pecker caught wind of. This was all highly illegal.
In this context, it came to be known that Stormy Daniels was prepared to take her story to the press unless she was paid a large sum of money. Quick negotiations concluded in a non-disclosure agreement that ensured her silence in exchange for 130,000 dollars. This is where things became tricky. Pecker explained that his lawyers told him the National Enquirer could not pay this money and would get into legal trouble if it did. Trump could have paid Daniels directly with a personal check, which would have been tawdry but not illegal, but Trump did not want to do that. He wanted to keep his fingerprints off this transaction, so he had Michael Cohen set up a shell company that took a 130,000 dollar loan against Cohen’s home to fund the payoff. Cohen and Trump’s accountant Allen Weiselberg then came up with a way to pay Cohen back from the Trump Organization by claiming it was payments for legal services. The amount paid back had to be over double what Cohen had paid to account for the taxes Cohen would incur. In the end Trump paid Cohen 420,000 dollars over 12 payments, declaring these payments to be for legal services.
Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney who brought the case, charged Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records. These charges would be misdemeanors, and normally would not merit such aggressive legal action. But Bragg bumped the charges up to felonies because the falsification was done to further an additional serious crime, in this case to affect the outcome of the 2016 election. In the end, the jury was convinced of these charges, and Trump is now a convicted felon.
Trump will be sentenced in July. While Democrats would love to see him go to jail, it is unclear what penalty the judge might impose. Business record fraud alone would normally result in probation but not jail. However Trump did the fraud in order to steal a Presidential election, and he has shown contempt for the court and no remorse for his actions throughout this process. These factors might lead the judge to impose some prison time. Trump will however be able to appeal his conviction, and will likely get any prison time put on hold until the appeal is resolved, which will take over a year.
Instant political polls show that the majority of the American people agree with the verdict, for example one poll showed 50% agree and only 30% disagree. Other polls show 10% of Republicans and 60% of independent voters state they are less likely to vote for Trump given this conviction.
The election so far has been very close with Trump and Biden running neck and neck. Trump has repeatedly shown that he has a ceiling of support, only 46% of voters backed him in 2016, and 47% in 2020. He lost the popular vote both times but won in 2016 because of narrow victories in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. For Trump to win again in 2024 he will need to replicate his 2016 performance. But this means he has no margin for error. If he were to lose just 2-3% of his vote, and only win 43-44% of the popular vote, he will lose handily. The meaning of this conviction is that he is going to have a very hard time avoiding this loss of support. While 35-40% of the country are in his MAGA cult and would vote for him no matter what he does, there are still 10-15% of the country that are swing voters and could go either way. His criminal conviction is going to make it very hard to hold on to a large share of those voters. Even in the meaningless Republican primary contests that have been held after Nikki Haley dropped out, Trump has seen 20% of Republicans still voting for Haley, indicating they are not big supporters of Trump.
The voters that are up for grabs are the least politically engaged. Those voters who follow politics closely have mostly made up their minds. But the Biden campaign needs to aggressively reach these less engaged swing voters in the final 2-3 months of the campaign, and hammer home Trump’s unfitness for the job. They already have much to work with, including Trump’s earlier finding that he had raped a woman in the 1990’s, that his business has engaged in so much fraud that a judge fined him 400 million dollars, that he was responsible for taking away women’s right to abortion, and that he wants to dismantle NATO and hand Ukraine to Russia. Now that Trump has a criminal conviction, Biden’s team needs to hang that around his neck every day.
For Trump, the conviction has been devastating. He has three more criminal trials against him, and he has successful delayed them for now. It is unlikely that any of them will take place before the election. If he can win the White House he can put off those cases or even have the Department of Justice dismiss the two federal cases entirely. If he fails to win in November though, he could be facing far more serious felonies and the prospect of lengthy jail sentences. This impending humiliation is terrifying. Trump is staring into the abyss.
