After a New York jury found Donald Trump guilty on 34 felony counts, Republicans relied on familiar rhetoric to condemn the outcome. The verdict was an “outrage.” The prosecution itself reflected an unforgivable “abuse.” The United States is now a “third-world country” and a “banana republic.” And so on.
The talking points were badly flawed last year when they were peddled in response to Trump’s indictments, and they have not improved with age.
The core problem with this argument is that it’s predicated on a deeply strange assumption: To take the line from Trump’s partisan defenders seriously, one must accept as a given that the former president has earned the benefit of the doubt. Discard the evidence, they say, and recognize this virtuous and honorable man, not as a criminal, but as an undeserving victim of a system run amok.
But is anyone genuinely surprised by the fact that jurors would hear both sides of a case, consider the evidence and find Trump guilty of criminal wrongdoing?
Let’s take a stroll down memory lane.
Before launching a political career, Trump was investigated “in every decade of his adult life by federal and state agencies, by bankers and casino regulators, by legions of prosecutors and competitors.” Indeed, as regular readers might recall, long before he rose to political prominence, the Republican first made headlines when he and his father faced a Justice Department investigation for discriminatory housing practices.
At the time, he managed to amass some riches, but The New York Times uncovered evidence that Trump’s wealth was partly the result of “dubious tax schemes” and “outright fraud.”
More recently, Trump was found to have run a fraudulent charity, a fraudulent “university” and a business that routinely committed fraud. While in the White House, Trump faced a criminal investigation, was impeached twice and routinely found himself at the center of corruption allegations and scandals.
Trump has also surrounded himself with convicted criminals, and several members of his inner circle went to — or are currently in — prison. Indeed, his own "fixer" was imprisoned on the identical set of facts that led to his own conviction.
And did I mention that Trump is the first former president to have been liable by a jury for sexual abuse? Because he is.
There can be no doubt that the former president’s conviction is every bit as dramatic, historic and important as it seems. There’s no precedent for anything like this in the American tradition. It deserves every ounce of attention it’s receiving — and then some. It's not uncommon to hear the presumptive GOP nominee's critics complain that he too often avoids accountability and escapes unpunished, and yesterday's outcome helps prove otherwise.
But a related question hangs overhead: Are the guilty verdicts surprising, or were they the inevitable outcome for a man who’s lived much of his life acting as if rules and limits are irrelevant?
Or as New York magazine’s Jon Chait summarized last year, “Maybe, just maybe, the reason Trump keeps getting indicted for crimes is not that the criminal justice system is in the grips of a vast liberal conspiracy but that he is, in fact, a criminal?”
The question isn’t why Trump has been convicted, the question is how he managed to go this long without having been convicted before.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.