Donald J. Trump's lucky streak in his criminal case has come to an end.
Before his guilty verdict in Manhattan on Thursday, the former president had enjoyed a near-flawless victory that some of his aides saw as the lawyer's equivalent of an inside straight. Though Trump had lost a civil lawsuit involving costly damages, the four criminal cases that threatened his freedom had stalled so much that advisers found it hard to believe his good fortune.
In a Florida case where Trump is charged with obstruction of justice and illegally possessing classified documents, the trial will almost certainly be delayed until after the November presidential election as a judge appointed by President Trump spends too much time puzzling over minor issues.
In the Georgia case, a prosecutor who charged Trump with being part of a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election was arrested for a romantic relationship with a man she hired to help prosecute Trump.
The Supreme Court also took up Trump's legal team's argument of presidential immunity due to federal charges of attempting to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, significantly limiting the possibility of a trial being held before the election.
Trump's winning streak came to an end just after 5pm on Thursday when a 12-member jury returned a guilty verdict against Trump on all 34 charges of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal that may have jeopardised his 2016 presidential campaign.
As the jury foreman announced the verdict, Trump's friends, family and aides, lined up in two rows, barely reacted. Trump sat slumped and somber at the defense table. In the seat behind him, his son Eric shook his head from side to side. The courtroom was silent as the jury foreman repeatedly pronounced “Guilty. Guilty.”
When Trump rose to leave the courtroom, his face looked as if he had been punched in the stomach. As he walked into the courtroom aisle, he shook Eric Trump's hand, and the two shook hands before the former president left the courtroom.
He drove off in a motorcade, smiling as always at fans outside the window, but predictions by his allies for days that the trial would end in a mismatched verdict or even an acquittal did not come true.
Such an outcome would have been almost unthinkable for the Trump campaign as recently as last summer.
At the time, the conventional wisdom among Trump's lawyers was that the Manhattan lawsuit would never see the light of day, and Trump's lawyers didn't spend much time thinking about it.
Instead, they focused on cases they considered far more serious and dangerous, specifically two federal cases brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith.
The Trump campaign thought it had a good chance of winning the Florida document case, because the judge and jury were seen as friendly. But they were pessimistic about the Washington trial, where Trump is accused of lying and intimidating his way to stay in power. There they met with Judge Tanya Chutkan, who seemed to them as hostile as Washington's overwhelmingly Democratic-voting residents and who had witnessed up close the violence perpetrated on behalf of the former president at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump's legal team believed the trial in Washington would definitely be held before the election, and thought the odds were slim.
Their delaying tactics and moves by Smith's team then stalled the two federal cases, and the Manhattan case suddenly found itself being heard first.
A person close to Trump noted the irony. Within the Manhattan district attorney's office, the hush-money case was known as a “zombie case.” The case had been buried and resurrected multiple times, said Mark Pomerantz, who worked in the office but left in early 2022 after new district attorney Alvin Bragg refused to immediately move forward with prosecuting Trump. Bragg had been skeptical of relying on the testimony of Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to lying to Congress, and a person close to Trump speculated that Bragg was being forced to pursue a prosecution he never really believed in.
But the case is back on schedule, with a trial set for April, just three months before the Republican National Convention. The former president and New York native will be forced to face a jury in a city that widely dislikes him. He is scheduled to be sentenced on July 11, just days before the start of the national convention where he is expected to be nominated for a third time.
In private conversations with advisers in recent days and weeks, Trump, who was convicted by two Manhattan civil juries over the past year and a half, has often expressed resignation to the idea that he would be convicted in the case. Trump has privately argued that a verdict would benefit him politically in the same way that the indictment energized and bolstered his support in the Republican primary.
For nearly a year, he has been publicly laying out his strategy for dealing with the aftermath.
Trump and his allies in Congress and the conservative media were diligently preparing an outraged audience, whatever the outcome. There was no need to scatter talking points. Everyone knew what to think and what to say. Minutes after the verdict, Trump's allies posted simultaneously on social media, saying nearly the same thing: this is a threat to the American justice system.
Trump allies were urged by his team to post support for him on social media, and one of Trump's top advisers warned on the X platform that a Republican Senate candidate was “quitting” his campaign after calling on people to respect the ruling.
Trump has insisted, and without evidence, that the Manhattan charges are part of a vast conspiracy against him orchestrated by President Biden and unnamed minions in his inner circle. His allies, notably former strategist Steve Bannon, have already called on Republican lawmakers to issue subpoenas for anyone involved in Trump's prosecution.
For more than a year, Trump's political activism and legal troubles have been thoroughly intertwined.
But while the indictment gave Trump an empirical advantage in the Republican primary, boosting his support in the polls and fueling his online fundraising, it is unclear what impact a conviction would have on the broader electorate that Trump must appeal to to win November's election.
Public views of Trump have remained remarkably stable over time. Trump is currently leading Biden in five of the six swing states, according to a new New York Times/Siena College poll of states that could decide the presidential election. While most voters in those states say they aren't paying much attention to the trial, Trump has a shot at success among undecided voters who are roughly evenly split on whether they will receive a fair and impartial trial.
Working in Trump's favor is that voters across the country view the hush-money charge as the least serious of the four criminal cases he faces. In a national poll conducted a month after the trial began, Quinnipiac University asked voters whether Trump's conviction in the Manhattan hush-money case would affect their vote. Only 6% of Trump supporters said a conviction would make them less likely to vote for him. While that percentage is small nationally, such voters could play a decisive role in close states.
“Voters have short memories and even shorter attention spans,” said Republican pollster Neil Newhouse. Just as the former president's two impeachments have faded from memory, he said, “the hush money conviction may be overshadowed by the first presidential debate.”
“Nothing that has emerged from this trial is so shocking or surprising as to throw it once again in the court of public opinion,” Newhouse added.
A guilty verdict would almost certainly inflame already-simmering Republican anger across the country. A Fox News poll conducted during the trial found that a majority of Trump's supporters said he had not been treated fairly by the justice system, and half said he had done nothing wrong with the payments.
“Many Republicans, even those who have been cold toward Trump, are angrier than we've ever seen our base before — angrier than they were after the 2020 election, angrier than they were after any impeachment trial,” said Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio.
“There is a personal grudge,” added the senator, who is a finalist for Trump's running mate. “The courts, a symbol of law and order in America, are being used as a weapon against the only candidate who cares about the courts.”
No one is trying harder to stoke MAGA rage than Trump.
On Wednesday, the day after actor Robert De Niro attended a news conference with Biden campaign staff outside the courthouse in Lower Manhattan, Trump told reporters at length that Trump supporters had yelled at De Niro to silence him.
“He's had MAGA attacks. He had MAGA attacks yesterday,” Trump said in a hallway outside the courtroom. “He's had a ton of MAGA attacks.”
Ruth Igielnik Contributed report.