Verdict takeaways: Jury convicts Trump on all 34 felony counts in hush money case

As you watch Republicans react, you’ll note that many of them are deploying their favorite word: “lawfare.”

Think: warfare, but instead of guns and bombs, the allegation is that liberals are using dubious legal tactics to target their enemies.

Here’s an example of those GOP cries:

But the claims of liberal lawfare are mere GOP gaslighting.

As I wrote last year, right-wingers often deploy allegations of lawfare as a clarion call for conservatives to seek retribution against liberals when one of their own is confronted with a legitimate legal proceeding. And it’s a ridiculous claim coming from a party that openly uses dubious legal tactics to undermine democracy and hamstring their political opponents.

To be clear, this trial was anything but lawfare. Trump’s team not only had a hand in selecting this jury — the former president also was repeatedly allowed to defy the judge’s gag order, which prohibited him from publicly attacking witnesses and members of the judge’s family. And Trump was still found guilty.

No, Republicans, this wasn’t lawfare. This was justice.

In his first interview after the verdict was handed down, the trial’s central witness — Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer — joined MSNBC’s panel to share his thoughts on the historic day.

“How are you?” Rachel Maddow began.

“I guess the word is relieved,” Cohen replied. “This has been six years in the making. ... This is a six-year process within which for accountability to finally be had.”

“Were you surprised by the verdict?” Maddow asked.

Cohen: “No. I was not.”

Watch the full interview below:

Republican politicians’ responses to the guilty verdict are rolling in, and many of them are freaking out. A few themes are emerging:

• The trial’s outcome is proof that the U.S. is actually not a modern state: House Majority Leader Steve Scalise declared the verdict proof that the U.S. has become a “banana republic.” Never mind that treating former political leaders accountable under the law is, in reality, one of the clearest indicators of robust rule of law in a democracy. 

• The verdict means that the trial was a purely political exercise: Rep. Pat Fallon of Texas decried “the pure weaponization of the judicial system by Democrats.” The narrative overlooks the fact that Trump was given due process, had tremendous resources at his disposal, and was convicted by a jury of his peers — all under a relatively novel application of the law that was never considered a slam dunk case by many legal experts. 

• Trump’s conviction is all the more reason to rally behind him: Sen. John Cornyn of Texas tried to rally the troops by saying: “Now more than ever, we need to rally around @realdonaldtrump, take back the White House and Senate, and get this country back on track. The real verdict will be Election Day.”

Trump’s allies know that this conviction could hurt him among independents — but they’re going to do everything they can to create a comeback narrative to mobilize the base.

After the verdict, talk quickly turned to a) whether Trump will be sentenced to prison on July 11; and b) how that would work. How does, for example, a person entitled to lifetime protection from the Secret Service serve a prison sentence?

But if Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., had his way, Trump would be stripped of Secret Service protection. The Trump nemesis is the lead author of the DISGRACED Former Protectees Act (or, more fully, the Denying Infinite Security and Government Resources Allocated toward Convicted and Extremely Dishonorable Former Protectees Act.)

According to that legislation, which Thompson introduced last month, such protection “shall terminate for any person upon sentencing following conviction for a Federal or State offense that is punishable for a term of imprisonment of at least one year.’’

Of course, this bill won’t pass the House, at least not this term, and probably not the next. But Thompson’s bill highlights the absurdity of the situation we now find ourselves in.

Alex Wagner, speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

Alvin Bragg is now a two-time winner in the court of holding Trump and his organizations to account. This is a person who also secured a criminal conviction for the Trump Organization on tax fraud. Now he has this one. That is a big deal. And I think we should recognize the skill, the talent and the drive that undergirds everything that happened here.

I am, however, also looking at the way Trump allies, wannabe Trump allies and the Republican Party at large are reacting to this — the specter of a Republican front-runner being crowned the nominee four days after the sentencing, becoming a felon, is something we never thought he would see in American history.

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The best lens for national news stories is often when local outlets find a way to connect the broader picture to their readers. Enter: the Queens Daily Eagle.

The whole thing is honestly art.

Andrew Weissmann, speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

I think there are two things to keep your eye on. One is whether they seek a prison term. They can seek it; it doesn’t mean the judge will give it. Obviously, Donald Trump’s team will say no. He’s a first-time offender, if you consider whether he has been convicted.

The second is, if they do seek a prison term, when it would be served. You could imagine them trying to figure out a way to deal with the fact, if he is in fact the Republican nominee, whether it would be served after the election, depending on what happens. That is part of the calculus that they’re going to be thinking about, because one thing that will weigh on Judge Merchan is going to be: If I’m thinking about jailing him for any time, do I do it while the election is pending, or do I do it Nov. 15?

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Trump hasn’t been sentenced yet, and it’s highly possible that he’ll receive no time behind bars. But that hasn’t stopped the former president from declaring himself a “political prisoner” in fundraising appeals. The political prisoner iconography has reportedly appeared in posts on social media, and a lengthy version of the appeal also appears on the GOP fundraising site WinRed.

That site, which looks like it was perhaps last redesigned in 2006, was quickly flooded with Republican donors — and crashed about an hour after the verdict. It says something remarkable about this political moment that Trump instantly found a way to profit from a criminal justice caricature.

OK, sorry to be a downer, but this whole rigamarole tonight is probably not one we’re going to experience again before Election Day. As I noted earlier this week, Trump has managed to waylay and stonewall the three other criminal trials that he had been set to face this year. His federal election interference case is being held up by the Supreme Court’s pending ruling on his immunity claim. The Mar-a-Lago classified documents case is lumbering forward under a backlog of pending motions thanks to the judge’s inexperience. And in Georgia, the case is on hold while the state Supreme Court considers an appeal over whether Fulton County DA Fani Willis can still prosecute Trump.

There’s still a chance at least one of those makes it to trial in the next few months, but … I’m not putting money on it just yet.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once again parroted MAGA world’s false narrative that Trump was unfairly persecuted by a justice system weaponized by the Democrats.

“America deserves a President who can win at the ballot box without compromising our government’s separation of powers or weaponizing the courts. You can’t save democracy by destroying it first,” he wrote on X. “The Democrats are afraid they will lose in the voting booth, so instead they go after President Trump in the courtroom.”

This is a powerful statement from New York City Councilman Yusef Salaam, who, as a boy, was wrongly incarcerated with four other teens, then known as the “Central Park Five,” for crimes they didn’t commit. At the time, Trump suggested the boys should have been executed. And despite their exoneration, Trump has refused to apologize or admit that he was wrong.

Councilman Salaam emphasized that this is a sobering reality check, rather than a time to celebrate.

One might hope that, even though he’s a Republican, Mike Johnson’s role as House speaker and as the government official third-in-line to the presidency might lead him to exercise more restraint on the Trump verdict than his GOP colleagues. One would be … naive.

In a statement posted on X, Johnson rattled off what have rapidly emerged as standard GOP talking points on Trump’s Manhattan trial as a “purely political exercise, not a legal one” and called for the party to rally behind their leader.

Johnson’s steadfast loyalty to Trump is reminiscent of recently dethroned House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s fealty to Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection — McCarthy refused to impeach Trump and held a chummy photo op with him at Mar-a-Lago.

Given the choice between rule of law or cult leadership, Republican leaders consistently choose the latter.

Jen Psaki, speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

The wheels of justice work very slowly, as we know. Frustratingly slow at times. I think a lot of people didn’t believe we would be at this moment, but as Alvin Bragg said: This is a very different defendant, but we arrived at this in the same way we would any other.

That’s our justice system working. That is how this is supposed to work. I don’t mean the outcome. What I mean is, you have evidence. You indict. There is a case where the defendant is allowed to testify on his behalf if he chooses. You argue the case; you have a jury of your peers that are selected. The jury of your peers consider it, take it with seriousness as everybody who has been in the courtroom has said, and they made a decision. That’s what happened.

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OK, calm down, sir. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that convicting a former president of white-collar crime is not the same as a sitting president being assassinated.

Trump posted on Truth Social that he will be holding a news conference at 11 a.m. ET on Friday at Trump Tower, where he has retreated for the night.

Joy Reid, speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

Trump has attacked Alvin Bragg. He has attacked his family. He has caused him to face death threats, to face threats in the city of New York. He has been on the attack against all of the pillars of our judicial system.

There’s so much irony in what happened today ... Alvin Bragg took a lot of heat for bringing this case. He was doubted by many. People picked apart whether the case made sense, whether it was the right time. This was called the least important case.

Guess what, it’s the only case that will likely go to trial before the election. It was a success, and it was done methodically, it was done carefully, and it turned out that he did have an underlying crime. So I think that Alvin Bragg deserves his flowers today.

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I know that Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host and white nationalist luminary, profits off of paranoid fearmongering via his independent media network, but this is getting ridiculous:

In one brief missive, Carlson appears to suggest that a) the verdict can be blamed on immigrants from the Global South; b) the verdict foreshadows a potential Trump assassination; c) the verdict single-handedly blemishes an otherwise nearly perfect criminal justice system (never mind it’s systemic bias against Black Americans); and d) any defender of the verdict is a threat.

A natural question is whether Trump will be incarcerated after this guilty verdict. It’s possible, but multiple factors work against that possibility.

Judge Merchan has many options in front of him, including a prison sentence of up to four years on each count, but even a maximum term would likely result in much less time served. Imprisonment isn’t mandatory for these lowest-level felonies, and this is Trump’s first conviction. And despite convictions on all 34 counts, we shouldn’t expect consecutive time for each count. The parties will argue their positions to the judge in connection with the July 11 sentencing.

Manhattan prosecutors will almost have to seek some amount of incarceration, given that Trump was convicted on all counts and disrespected the process throughout, serially violating his gag order. The weighty decision then falls to Merchan, who has ably handled the case to this point.

But beyond the question of whether the judge mandates imprisonment, there’s the trickier questions of whether and how it actually happens. Trump would likely remain at liberty pending his appeal, which won’t likely be resolved before November. The election, therefore, remains a crucial turning point for all of the former president’s criminal cases.

Trump and the GOP are hoping that this conviction will be a boon for him in November if they stoke enough anger over the verdict to fuel voter turnout.

Speaking to reporters outside the courtroom, Trump said that the “real verdict” will be up to voters, essentially telling his supporters that they can effectively undo this verdict at the ballot box — a sentiment echoed by his allies on social media. According to NBC News, the Republican National Committee gave GOP chairs similar talking points.

While most Republicans have reacted to the verdict with a mixture of outrage and falsehoods, former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan urged “all Americans to respect the verdict and the legal process.”

Hogan’s deviation from the GOP talking points no doubt stems from his campaign to flip a Senate seat in deep-blue Maryland. Preserving his distance from Trump is essential to Hogan’s chances. Yet that electoral reality did not stop Chris LaCivita, one of the Trump campaign’s top officials, from savaging Hogan’s reaction. “You just ended your campaign,” LaCivita responded.

At a time when Black civil servants are facing right-wing attacks, I don’t think the power of this moment can be overstated. Manhattan’s first Black prosecutor has administered justice to a powerful, white former president who has spent the past weeks and months whipping his mob of followers into a volatile frenzy.

It’s a point that wasn’t lost on members of the National Black Prosecutors Association, which sent me a statement as Trump was unleashing a series of public attacks on Bragg last year. Give that post a read here.

In a news conference after the verdict, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg began by highlighting that “this type of white-collar prosecution is core to what we do at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.” He also noted that “a major part of our practice” in the nearly 90 years since Thomas Dewey ushered in the modern independent DA system “has been public integrity, including cases involving jurists, local and state electeds, public servants and others.”

In other words, even though Trump is a former president, the crimes he was charged with were treated the same way any other white-collar crime would be treated.

For the rest of us, it was a day of historic significance. For Bragg, it was a Thursday.

Trump just became the first former president in American history to be convicted of felony crimes. But he wouldn’t be the first presidential candidate with a conviction to run for the White House.

About a century ago, Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs ran for president while imprisoned — and received about 3% of the national vote. But while the cause of Debs’ imprisonment was noble — he expressed anti-war sentiment, spoke out against the American working class being used as cannon fodder and was imprisoned for violating the Espionage Act — Trump’s conviction is a badge of corruption.

Chris Hayes, speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

One of the sort of great asymmetries of the Trump era is this way in which the compulsive antisocial behavior never comes back to hurt him — whereas the people that come back and square off against him, there’s a temptation to be dragged to his level and you have to keep yourself from doing that.

We’ve seen this play out in a whole bunch of ways. We saw that first in the primary in 2016. People tried to get into nasty exchanges with Trump, and it didn’t work. We’ve seen it time and time again. I think, again, the challenge here was that everyone in this entire thing had to keep it 100 for every moment. The DA’s office, the judges, the jury, everyone could not step out of bounds, and everyone did it successfully. Again, it’s a real testament to all of those individuals who were involved in this.

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Shot:

Chaser:

Hochul, for the record, is a Democrat and will most certainly not be doing that. Also, again, there is nothing “banana republic” about holding a former president to the same legal standard as every other private citizen.

Katy Tur, speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

I was inside the overflow room when the verdict was read. I wanted to be able to see this moment with my own eyes. In about three weeks from today, I will have been covering Donald Trump for nine years. And so today when I was watching Donald Trump’s face as the verdict was read and I was watching as the jury filed out in front of him, I was struck by how not a single one of them, from my vantage point, looked at his face. They either looked straight ahead or they looked down as they passed by him.

We live in such a tense time and such an angry time that I think about what the jurors were feeling when they passed by Trump’s table. When it comes to Trump himself, I wanted to see his face as this was read because this is a moment in history, and this is a man who has not faced consequences for his actions for most of his life.

He was stone cold. Didn’t react whatsoever. There was no raise of the eyebrows. There was no shrug. There was no reaction. He sat there looking at the jury, looking at each one of them as they passed by but never made a move. Never muttered anything. Never changed his expression.

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For years, there has been a popular school of thought that Trump possesses a peculiar invincibility to legal and political consequences. You could find evidence of this narrative from Washington reporters pontificating about “Teflon Don” to “Saturday Night Live” writing sketches. Today’s guilty verdict should consign that view to the dustbin.

This is not to say that Trump has gotten everything he deserved. But the former president has lost the popular vote twice, been impeached twice, been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars after losing three civil suits and, now, been convicted of 34 felony counts.

Once the sentencing goes forward in July, he almost certainly will go to his grave carrying the title of “convicted felon.” The lesson is that the only way to handle this bully is not to wilt — as many counseled Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to do — but to confront him head-on.

It feels very important to point out that the structure of the charges in this case means that the jury didn’t just have to find Trump guilty of the top-level crime at hand, namely falsifying business documents. They had to agree that each of those 34 documents in question were falsified to conceal another crime. It’s basically a two-for-one crime special down at the Manhattan courthouse.

Chris Hayes, speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

To me the process was itself a monumental achievement. Everyone in that room, again, as equals, in this municipal building with these career prosecutors and this judge and this jury of average citizens testing the principle of equal justice under the law — whatever happened today in that outcome of the jury, that process worked. It would have worked in a hung jury. I would have believed that. The process was its own achievement.

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For a guy who claims to love “law and order,” Trump sure does wind up with a lot of people who have been convicted (or pardoned) for crimes in his inner circle. That includes (but is not limited to) his 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort, 2016 deputy campaign manager Rick Gates, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former White House political adviser Steve Bannon and former Trump Organization CFO Alan Weisselberg. (I’d include his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen in this list, but he’s out of the club after testifying against Trump.)

It’s a statement so common it’s almost trite. Politicians and other civic leaders will often say that ours is “a government of laws, not of men.” Indeed, it’s even carved into courthouse walls. But the idea that everybody has equal standing before a court of law — that the little man gets the same treatment as the big man — is an ideal that has often not been met.

But today, a wealthy man who once occupied the most powerful position on the planet was pronounced guilty by ordinary New Yorkers. Trump being found guilty of 34 counts doesn’t make that “government of laws” phrase consistently true, but it does mean that it can be true sometimes.

Andrew Weissmann, speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

It is hard not to see today as a rebuke to the Supreme Court and to Judge Cannon. The New York criminal justice system worked, and it worked because a lot of fearless people put their heads down and did their job — and were attacked from beginning to end and will certainly continue to be attacked.

Judge Cannon continues to delay a case that clearly could have gone to trial, and the public’s right to a speedy trial has been violated. There’s some thought that the Supreme Court may have been waiting for this verdict, and we will see if that is an explanation for the delay or whether there really are five justices who are intent on undermining the public’s right to a speedy trial in the Jan. 6 case.

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While most Republicans were tripping over themselves to condemn anybody but Trump for his conviction of 34 felonies Thursday, Republican Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama took a surprising alternative. He showed respect for the jurors and said Republicans need to pick a different nominee with “good character” and “BEAT THE STEW OUT OF BIDEN!”

That’s not going to win him any fans in the MAGA crowd.

Although “All the President’s Men” helped lionize journalists in the wake of Watergate, some historians argue that U.S. District Judge John Sirica was the linchpin in President Richard Nixon’s downfall, as the presiding judge in the trial of the Watergate burglars. Sirica was named Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” in 1974, and his photograph graces a display on the first floor of the Barrett Prettyman Courthouse in D.C.

Merchan will no doubt get some credit (and already has) for his handling of this trial, especially as the country has seen how another jurist, Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon, has stymied the former president’s classified documents case in Florida.

Rachel Maddow, speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

Donald Trump doesn’t get to, by acclimation, decide he’s the nominee in this country. The Republican Party decided that he alone, among all other citizens in this country, is the person they would most like to put forward as the best leader in this country. The person who is best positioned to represent their values and to be their nominee to lead this country.

The Republican Party could change its mind and decide that somebody who’s been convicted of 34 felonies shouldn’t be, can’t be, a member of office. If you’re a member of Congress and you’re indicted, you are removed in your committees. If you’re convicted of a felony, you’re removed from Congress. That is a decision that the parties make.

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Weird that Trump is complaining that he wasn’t given a venue change, and that the jury was rigged against him because they come from a place where he’s unliked. Dude was just in New York City a week ago saying there’s a “very good chance” he’ll be the first president to win the state in decades because New Yorkers have come to love him.

Oh, what a difference a week makes.

In between railing against his father’s guilty verdict on X, Donald Trump Jr. also complained about the sentencing hearing taking place just days before the Republican National Convention.

“Sentencing is 4 days before the GOP Convention...They’re not even trying to hide the ELECTION INTERFERENCE!!!!” he wrote.

Just a reminder that the prosecutors and the defense both agreed before Judge Merchan that they preferred a mid-July date for Trump’s sentencing.

MSNBC columnist Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a fascism scholar, had an important response to Trump being found guilty in the hush money trial. She pointed out that the leaders Trump admires most don’t live in countries where a jury of ordinary citizens could find them guilty. As she writes, “No one can hold Xi, Putin, Orban, Erdogan, Lukashenko, or any other of these vile strongmen accountable.”

But in the United States, a jury just showed, we can.

Trump, whose father’s real estate empire was based in New York City’s outer boroughs, always wanted to get the respect of the glittering elite in Manhattan. It was the driving force behind his construction of Trump Tower, a thumb in the eye of the people who rejected him. But in the last six months, the island has been where a civil lawsuit from the state has threatened his hold on his businesses and a jury convicted him of 34 felony counts.

The jury’s verdict came after the New York stock market closed, but Trump Media and Technology Group took a hit in after-hours trading. The stock, appropriately abbreviated DJT, began to drop at 4:35 p.m. ET, just as it was announced that the jury had reached a verdict. It briefly rallied back near its closing price of $51 per share, then dropped to $44 per share at 5:10 p.m. ET as the guilty verdicts rolled in. As of 5:50 p.m. ET, the stock price was hovering around $47.50.

The stock price is still well far above its low of $23 on April 16, when the company announced that it would expand into streaming. But the reaction is an illustration of how risky it can be to tie a publicly traded company so closely to a single person.

Ari Melber, speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

Trump has a free speech right to share his views on this verdict. But then he said something false: He said the real verdict will come with the election. That’s actually not how the system works. That’s not what the Constitution case. Political votes in elections do not veto or override the justice system.

The real verdict just came today. And the public, the society, we have to take that in. And if you agree or disagree is not the test. It’s the rule of law and we’ll follow this until July. It may be that people disagree with sentencing and other things that come down but the real verdict has come and the real process will continue and he is, as a citizen, a party to that.

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I couldn’t help but laugh at this kvetching from far-right activist Charlie Kirk. 

“Now, we must be ready to maintain our resolve. There will be an unprecedented push to say that Trump CANNOT be allowed to win, that we CANNOT elect a convicted felon,” Kirk wrote on X.

“Don’t give in. They did this because they are desperate. They will lose, and they will pay.”

Hilarious. Dare to dream like Charlie Kirk, and one day you too will be able to ignore your chosen candidate’s criminal conviction over a lurid sex scandal.

In a statement responding to Trump’s conviction, the Biden campaign took the chance to caution voters that Trump is still running for president.

“Donald Trump has always mistakenly believed he would never face consequences for breaking the law for his own personal gain,” campaign communications director Michael Tyler said. “But today’s verdict does not change the fact that the American people face a simple reality. There is still only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: at the ballot box. Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.”

Andrew Weissmann, speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

You can’t just say these are judges who did this — these are people from the community who made this choice. I also think, well, Donald Trump wasn’t required to have testified in the courtroom. But when he comes out and says things are rigged, and that is now in a political arena, the answer to him in the political arena is: You know what, you could have taken the stand. You wanted them to hear your voice? Take the freaking stand.

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I wrote a few days ago about how America isn’t ready for the reality of a verdict in Trump’s trial. One of the main points I made was that the polls up until now were based on hypotheticals, asking how voters might react if Trump were convicted. From this point on, that has gone from being a possibility to a reality. And it may be a few days, or weeks, before the polls catch up to this new reality.

Many people are wondering whether Trump will be able to vote this fall after his conviction. After all, Republicans in his current home state of Florida have effectively blocked the enactment of a constitutional amendment that would have restored voting rights to former felons. But as NBC News explains, he’s set to benefit from New York’s much more progressive laws on that front:

Will this experience make Trump come out in favor of voting rights for incarcerated Americans? That seems unlikely.

It’s clear that a criminal conviction will not silence Trump. Speaking to reporters outside the courtroom after his verdict was delivered, Trump railed against Merchan and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and called the trial “rigged and disgraceful.”

“The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5, by the people,” Trump said.

Rachel Maddow, speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

The test here for us, as a country, is not about what happens on appeal. And it’s not about what happens on sentencing. The test for us now as a country is whether or not this former president and his allies will have succeeded in trying to undermine the rule of law so that people reject this as a legitimate function of the rule of law in our country.

They have tried to delegitimize this judge. They have tried to delegitimize the court and delegitimize the laws that he’s charged under. The people involved in bringing this case have been threatened and intimidated and have had everything brought to bear against them in a way that was designed to delegitimize the process of the American people. It’s now in the hands of the American people to decide if we’ll accept those efforts.

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NBC News reports that “a senior White House official says there are ‘no plans’ for the president to respond to the Trump verdict at this time.” It’s unclear how long “at this time” will last, but this restraint strikes me as prudent. Letting some time pass after the verdict will reduce the odds that the trial is received as a “deep state” conspiracy or a purely partisan exercise by skeptics.

There’s a lot of time until Election Day; the president will have plenty of opportunities to bring up the conviction. But exercising a bit of caution by creating some distance between the criminal justice system and the political system offers more upsides than downsides. After all, Trump’s unprecedented conviction already speaks for itself quite loudly.

Trump’s sentencing hearing will take place at 10 a.m. on Thursday, July 11, exactly two weeks after his first presidential debate with Joe Biden — and four days before the start of the Republican National Convention.

Some may find it fitting that Trump has now been convicted, and learned of this conviction, in the same courthouse where the now-exonerated “Central Park Five” sat and learned of their fate after admitting to a crime they didn’t commit. A crime that Trump, of all people, suggested and continues to suggest warranted the boys — now men — being executed.

Trump’s legal troubles may affect how some voters view him, but he is still the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. He began the year facing four criminal cases, but several snags could lead to the hush money case being the only one in which he potentially faces criminal consequences, as my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin has explained. Biden’s re-election campaign has been preparing to signal to voters that Trump will appear on the ballot no matter the outcome of his legal cases, NBC News reported.

The Manhattan jury has convicted Trump of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. It’s the first criminal conviction for a former U.S. president in our nation’s history.

After Judge Juan Merchan read out the jury instructions yesterday, Trump and his allies went into overtime to distort just what those orders said:

But despite what Rubio and others claimed, the jury does have to be unanimous on each of the counts, even if the road they take to get there might vary. As I wrote in a piece for MSNBC that was published earlier today:

Read the full essay to get the complete breakdown of how the jury was instructed to deliberate.

This was Trump’s final social media post, sent over his struggling social media platform mere minutes before the jury announced that it had reached a verdict.

The man is ending the trial like he started it: in denial and utterly apoplectic.

As the jurors prepared to start their deliberations, Republicans who potentially could be Trump’s running mate began to launch their attacks — on the trial, Judge Juan Merchan, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and President Joe Biden.

• Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida gave a false interpretation of Merchan’s instructions to the jury in a post on X.

• South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem also misrepresented the jury instructions on X, echoing Trump’s false claim of a “rigged” trial.

• Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina called the trial a “sham” and said Bragg is “guilty of perverting the justice system.”

• Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote on X that “what’s happening with Trump” is “worse” than persecutions under Joseph Stalin, claimed that neither Bragg nor Merchan had “explained what underlying crime President Trump allegedly committed” (Merchan had read the charges in detail on Wednesday) and said the Biden campaign was behind the prosecution.

• Senate hopeful Kari Lake of Arizona accused Democrats of election interference, calling the case “bogus.”

• Sen. JD Vance of Ohio requested that Attorney General Merrick Garland open an investigation into Merchan over the judge’s gag order on Trump and “consider prosecution for any criminal wrongdoing.”

• And, on Tuesday, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York filed a misconduct complaint with the New York court system over Merchan being assigned to the case.

Trump’s repeated attacks on Judge Merchan during the trial led to Merchan expanding a gag order to protect his family. After closing arguments, lies about Merchan’s jury instructions from Trump and his allies that were subsequently amplified by right-wing news outlets led to an increase in violent threats against the judge, as NBC News reported on Thursday.

Judges overseeing Trump-related cases have routinely received a flood of harassment from the former president’s supporters, often after Trump attacks them on social media. Whether the jury finds Trump guilty or not, he will likely continue to invoke Merchan’s name in rants about his “victimization” by the criminal justice system — and the threats against Merchan will follow.

The duration of the jury’s deliberations: 9½ hours over two days.

Even if Trump is convicted, he likely would still be able to vote for himself in Florida.

Floridians convicted of a felony in another state only lose their right to vote if the state in which they’re convicted would disenfranchise them. That means New York law is the decisive factor. As NBC News reported:

Even if Florida were to disenfranchise Trump, he’d still have an ace in the hole. Under Florida law, Trump could ask for clemency through a process overseen by the governor.

And the odds are pretty good that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would approve that.

Trump’s presidential campaign has repeatedly used developments in his hush money case as an opportunity to ask his supporters for money. Since the first week of the trial, his campaign has persistently blasted out pleas for donations while painting the former president as a persecuted figure in the courtroom. The campaign also has raised money off of fines imposed by Merchan over Trump’s repeated violations of a gag order.

I hope one of the downstream impacts of this trial is that public knowledge of Trump’s nondisclosure agreement with Daniels raises awareness about the use of NDAs by powerful men hoping to silence women.

Trump is known for using such agreements. And the alleged catch-and-kill schemes that Trump used to secure NDAs, laid out by Manhattan prosecutors and their witnesses, certainly portray Trump as a desperate man with skeletons in his closet who is threatened by the idea of women speaking out.

It’s a point I thought Moira Donegan made well for The Guardian:

And Trump’s not the only powerful man facing legal troubles who has used NDAs. Music mogul Sean Combs is another, as is Trump buddy and former WWE leader Vince McMahon.

This trial is a great opportunity for our nation to reckon with the ways that powerful men have wielded their wealth and influence to insulate themselves from accountability or embarrassment.

One of the big questions of the hush money trial has been whether a conviction would hurt Trump’s chances in November. One piece of evidence might be to look at how voters responded the last time a presidential candidate had a conviction, even if it’s not exactly parallel.

Just days before the 2000 election, a TV reporter in Maine broke the news that Republican nominee George W. Bush had been arrested in 1976, when he was 30, on suspicion of driving under the influence. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor DUI charge.

A Gallup poll at the time found that the vast majority of all likely voters said it would not affect their decision, though 9% said it would make them less likely to back Bush.

In his book “What Happened,” former White House press secretary Scott McClellan wrote that Bush’s chief campaign strategist, Karl Rove, “believed the revelation was responsible for the Republican loss of Maine, where the news had originated, as well as the loss of enough support nationally to cost Bush the popular vote and send the election into overtime.”

His thinking was that the revelation undermined Bush’s “campaign refrain about restoring ‘honor and dignity’ to the White House” and likely led some social conservatives to sit out the race.

• Trump is convicted on all 34 counts. A sweeping conviction could see the former president sentenced to prison for up to four years per count, though incarceration would not be mandatory and he would likely serve his term on each count concurrently. Trump’s lawyers are very likely to appeal any conviction, and he would remain free during the appeal.

• Trump is acquitted on all counts. The presumptive GOP nominee for president would almost certainly consider this a massive victory.

• The jury delivers a split verdict — convicted on one or more counts, and acquitted or a hung decision on the rest. Even with the absence of a conviction on all counts, a jury finding Trump guilty of any criminal charge would still be an extraordinary moment in American history. A conviction on a single count could still result in a prison sentence.

• The jury can’t reach a unanimous decision on any charge, in which case Judge Juan Merchan would likely declare a mistrial. Prosecutors could retry the former president, but the timing would be unclear. You could expect Trump to hail a hung jury as total exoneration.