This is an extremely strange moment for American democracy. Polls suggest that independent voters – the people who decide American elections – will not vote for a man who is a convicted felon.
But now Donald Trump, currently the favourite to win re-election in November, has been found guilty, on 34 counts, of falsifying business records – and nobody knows if that verdict will make him more popular or less.
On the one hand, a court has decided that, yes, he deliberately altered his financial accounts, possibly for election campaign reasons back in 2016.
He is now a convict. Trump has a murky past, and his dodgy history now appears to have caught up with him.
On the other hand, this Manhattan case has always felt like a political hit job – proof of what Trump has long claimed, that the system is rigged against him, that the Democrats will stop at nothing to keep him out of power. It’s not just Trumpists who feel the trial is a sham. Alvin Bragg, the District Attorney, cobbled together various tax misdemeanours and turned them into an indictment. Now a Manhattan jury has found that Trump did deliberately and knowingly take part in fraud in order to cover up his alleged adultery. The judge, Juan Merchan, did behave in a suspiciously aggressive way towards the defendant.
We are yet to find out what Trump’s sentence will be – 11 July is the day we might discover whether he goes to jail or not, just in time, it so happens, for the Republican convention. It all stinks. But for now the prosecution has won. He is guilty, whether the justice system is fair or not.
‘A rigged trial, a disgrace,’ said Trump outside the court room yesterday. ‘The real verdict is going to be November 5 by the people … our country’s has gone to hell.’
What really frightens Democrats is that he might be proved right. The ‘lawfare’ against Trump so far has been a boon for him politically. Ever since his mugshot was taken in the Fulton County jailhouse in August last year, his poll scores have improved. The question now is whether Americans have enough faith in their justice system to believe that Trump is a criminal – or will they think that Joe Biden, and his party, are the real villains? The polling in the coming days should give us some idea of the answer, but as Trump says the real verdict will be November 5.
Watch Freddy Gray and Lionel Shriver discuss more on Spectator TV:
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