After a jury in New York found Donald Trump guilty on 34 criminal charges, Republicans relied on familiar rhetoric to condemn the outcome. The verdict was an “outrage”. The accusation 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 terribly flawed last year, when they have been trafficked in response to Trump’s accusations, and have not improved with age.
The central problem with this argument is that it is based on a deeply strange assumption: to take the line of 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 unworthy victim of an out-of-control system.
But will anyone genuinely Surprised that jurors would hear both sides of a case, consider the evidence, and find Trump guilty of criminal wrongdoing?
Let’s take a walk 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.” In fact, as regular readers can you rememberLong before he rose to political prominence, the Republican first made headlines when he and his father faced a Justice Department investigation for discriminatory housing policies.
At the time, he managed to accumulate some riches, but The New York Times discovered evidence that Trump’s wealth was in part the result of “dubious tax schemes” and “outright fraud.”
More recently, Trump was found to be running a fraudulent charity, a fraudulent “university,” a company 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 too surrounded himself with convicted criminals, and several members of his inner circle have been – or are currently – in prison. In fact, his own “fixer” was arrested for the same set of facts that led to his own conviction.
And did I mention that Trump is the first former president to have been held responsible by a jury for sexual abuse? Because he is.
There is no doubt that the former president’s conviction is as dramatic, historic and important as it seems. There’s no precedent for something like this in the American tradition, and it deserves all the attention it’s getting — and then some. It’s not uncommon to hear critics of the presumptive Republican nominee complain that he often avoids accountability and gets away with it, and yesterday’s result helps prove otherwise.
But a related question hangs over us: Are the guilty verdicts surprising, or were they the inevitable result for a man who lived much of his life acting as if rules and boundaries were irrelevant?
Or like Jon Chait of New York magazine summed up last year, “Maybe, just maybe, the reason Trump continues to be indicted for crimes is not because the criminal justice system is in the grip of a vast liberal conspiracy, but because he is, in fact, a criminal?”
The question is not why Trump was convicted, the question is how he managed to last so long without being convicted first.
This post updates our related previous coverage.
This article was originally published in MSNBC.com
