The Verdict and Trump’s War Against America

Former President Donald Trump is at war with America. When, in New York this week, a jury of twelve citizens found the former President guilty of all 34 charges against him, he threw down the gauntlet with a temper tantrum. “Our whole country is being rigged right now,” he declared after stating that he was “fighting for our country. I’m fighting for our Constitution.”

What Nonsense. Donald Trump is fighting for Donald Trump. He is fighting the verdict of twelve ordinary citizens of New York who listened carefully to the case against him and who listened carefully to the defense he mounted. They deliberated and determined that he was guilty of each of the charges brought against him.

Eleven of the charges involved phony hush-money invoices to his company disguised as invoices for legal services, eleven charges involved the actual hush-money payments disguised as payments for legal services, and twelve charges were for cooking the books twelve times to create the illusion that the payments were legitimate business expenses instead of hush money payments to a porn star with whom he had sex.

Donald Trump, with an air of righteous indignation, maligned our jury system and declared that he was fighting for America and our Constitution. Imagine that. Donald Trump was fighting for America and our Constitution with every check he wrote.

The jurors, twelve ordinary citizens, were not fighting against America, nor were they fighting against our Constitution as Trump charged. The jury acknowledged that it is a crime to hide elicit payments with phony ledger entries to hide an affair to influence a presidential election. It wasn’t a very complicated verdict.

Frankly, I believe it was an unimpressive case to bring. Had he made those payments himself to avoid impairing his relationship with his wife and family, there would have been no case. Hush money paid to conceal an affair to avoid impairing a marriage isn’t illegal, but hush money paid to hide an affair to avoid impairing a Presidential election is.

Whether Donald Trump made those payments to avoid impairing his marriage or his presidential campaign is, one might suppose, anybody’s guess. However, he was indicted and convicted for paying the money to influence the election, and hush money paid to influence a presidential election is a crime.

“I’m fighting for our country. I’m fighting for our Constitution,” he has declared. “Our whole country is being rigged right now,” he insisted at his press conference the day after the verdict was handed down.

Nonsense.

It would all be laughable if it weren’t so tawdry and lame and if nearly every Republican running for elected office in America weren’t obligated to mouth Trump’s defensive absurdities. As presidential historian Timothy Naftali observed following Trump’s post-guilty-verdict press conference, “Every Republican will be forced to put it at the center of their 2024 campaigns. That (verdict) will create a torrent of poison that will likely be worse than we saw in the ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign that preceded January 6. And that will further unsettle an already sensitive country,” Naftali said. “I worry about it because (Trump’s) ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign created widespread doubt about the honesty of our electoral system and led many people to believe that fraud had been committed in 2020.”

Trump’s war against the guilty verdict is a war against law and order, against the notion of crime and punishment, and against the principle that in America, no one is above the law. When Trump declared in a recent interview that the President must have absolute immunity, he was saying that in Trump’s America, the President is a dictator answerable to no one for any abuse for as long as he or she is President. Trump declared with a straight face that no President can ever have to answer to the law. No Presidential aspirant in this century has ever taken the Nixonian position that when a President does something or anything, it is automatically legal by virtue of the office. Nowhere and at no time in history has any President, except for Richard Nixon, made such an outrageous statement. But now Donald Trump has, and whether or not he believes it, he would rule as though it were true.

Listen to him: “This was a rigged, disgraceful trial. The real verdict will be November 5th by the people, and they know what happened here, and everybody knows what happened here.” This is Trump talk but take it seriously. He is telling the country that when and if he again sits in the Oval Office, he can do as he pleases with impunity because, as he has stated, he will have absolute immunity.

Anti-Trump Americans should eschew any notion of schadenfreude. The verdict is a low point for all of us. It represents the historical nadir of presidential history and a national embarrassment of immense proportions. Whether one is a Republican or a Democrat, former President Trump has tarnished the American presidency. It is an unhappy time for all of us.

The implications are enormous.

There are the potential consequences for an election in a few months. Will Americans believe that a president being found guilty of a crime ruins the aura of the Oval Office for all time? What does it say about us if a majority within one of our political parties continues to embrace a convicted felon? Worse yet, what would it say about us if we elected such a felon, as the Constitution allows us to do? Donald Trump was not convicted by a star chamber or a democratic majority in a Senate trial following a congressional impeachment. He was convicted by a jury of fellow citizens.   

No one knows how voters will react to Trump’s latest moment of disgrace. His conviction will certainly energize his loyal base, and his campaign will try to create a backlash against the guilty verdict among the American electorate.

Or, the guilty verdict could play into Biden’s campaign theme that his predecessor is too corrupt and extreme to serve as President again. Moderate and suburban voters whom Trump has always struggled to attract could be further alienated.

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Recent podcasts have featured my commentary on Liz Cheney’s book, “Oath and Honor,” as well as my commentaries regarding:

U.S. Representative Jim Jordan,

Brian Kemp and Those Republicans of Georgia,

The Trump Indictments,

The Fox Corp Settlement,

The CNN Trump Town Hall,

The Hunter Biden plea deal,

The New American Cult of Personality,

and my interviews with William Bratton, Retired Chief of Police in New York City, Los Angeles, and Boston.

Rikki Klieman, Attorney, Network News Analyst, and best-selling author;

John Thoresen, Executive Director, Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center;

Katherine Gehl, co-author of The Politics Industry and founder of the Institute for Political Innovation,

Jazz artist Ann Hampton Callaway,

Outlander author Diana Gabaldon,

AI Data Scientist Lawrence Kite,

Ryan Clancy, Chief Strategist of No Labels,

Senator Barbara Boxer,

Senator Joe Lieberman,

and Maryland Governor Larry Hogan.

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Novels by Hal Gershowitz