The verdict has been passed. Former President Trump was found guilty Thursday of all 34 charges against him in the New York hush money case related to falsifying records surrounding a payment made to silence porn star Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election.
Now the real test begins.
Will Americans who disagree with the outcome respect the rule of law, and more importantly, the safety of the jurors who decided the case? Or have we as a country been conditioned to such a partisan bias that we vehemently reject any outcomes that do not serve our political interests?
Trump wasted no time in delegitimizing the verdict, the trial and the rule of law as he addressed the media outside the courtroom. He said the trial was “rigged,” that the judge was “corrupt,” that “the country has gone to hell” and that “the verdict was “shameful.” He also took the opportunity to campaign, falsely claiming that “this was done by the Biden administration to injure or hurt an opponent – a political opponent.”
Read more: Guilty: Trump becomes the first former US president to be convicted of a crime
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s reaction to his loss was predictable. We had seen him use the same language to discredit the outcome of the 2020 election. The tirade outside the courtroom was clearly from the same playbook. But just like the election figures and the election results, the jury’s verdict was not so easy to predict.
The news that he was found guilty of all the crimes was stunning, even at a time when nothing should surprise us. After all, we are living in one of the most tawdry chapters in American history, in which the cover-up of an alleged meeting between an ex-porn star and a former reality TV host could have influenced the outcome of a historic election. If only our decade had a brave story for the history books to offset all the sloppiness, like when the Continental Army took over airports during the Revolutionary War.
The statements in all 34 indictments hadn’t even been read before the partisan spin began — including a fundraising appeal from the Trump campaign that called the ex-president a “political prisoner.”
But it’s important to recognize the gravity of the moment. The justice system worked, despite all the outside scrutiny, pressure, and organized efforts to invalidate the proceedings by those who preferred to see their husbands in the Oval Office rather than in a prison cell. We should be pleased that the prosecutors, the judge and a jury of twelve citizens refused to be intimidated by the defendant, his GOP surrogates and radical followers.
But we now face a bigger stress test: Will people believe in the justice system or its discrediting by Trump and his cronies?
Fox News was immediately on the defensive, which of course means offense. “The Biden-Harris campaign is now free to call him a convicted felon,” one reporter said.
Anchor Jeanine Pirro, of course, went one step further: “Americans believe in justice, and deep down they realize that something is very wrong here,” she said. ‘We have gone over a cliff in America. This verdict is the verdict of someone who was forced to fight a 1,000 pound gorilla with both hands tied behind his back. This is a suspect for whom crimes were created.”
Read more: What verdict will voters make after the jury finds Trump guilty in a hush money case?
Republican Party surrogates like Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) were also quick to denounce the verdict as unjust — or worse .
“Today is a shameful day in American history,” Johnson said in a statement released minutes after the guilty verdict was announced. “The American people rightly see that this is legal services, and they know that it is … dangerous.”
Turning the people against the justice system is not only a disingenuous move, it is also dangerous.
Violent threats and doxxing appear in all four of the ex-president’s criminal cases. Also prevalent are Trump and the right-wing media’s portrayals of prosecutors, judges and anyone who could jeopardize his chances of winning as dishonest or as a tool of the Democrats. Last summer, Trump supporters posted the names and addresses of the Fulton County grand jurors who indicted him and 18 of his co-defendants. Just this week, false reports about jury instructions spread in the right-wing media, leading to more threats against Judge Juan Merchan.
“Several conservative news personalities, including some affiliated with Fox News, falsely claimed that Judge Juan Merchan, as a Fox News host put it in a viral post on ‘ That is not true,” NBC reported.
Read more: Column: Trump is officially a convicted felon, but that shouldn’t stand in his way
Thursday’s guilty verdict followed weeks of salacious testimony surrounding an alleged sexual encounter between Trump and Daniels and the falsification of records surrounding a $130,000 payout to ensure her silence. Sentencing is set for July 11, four days before the start of the Republican National Convention in the swing state of Wisconsin.
Trump tried to move past the jury’s decision on Thursday when he proclaimed outside the courtroom: “The real verdict will be pronounced by the people on November 5.”
When it comes to selecting our next president, that’s true.
But we are a nation of laws. And that means that, in the opinion of this jury, the presumptive Republican candidate has earned a new title.
Convicted criminal.
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
