This article was originally published via Vanity Fair.
After four weeks of testimony and two days of jury deliberations in the first criminal trial of a former U. S. president, Donald Trump on Thursday found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records. By convicting the presumptive Republican nominee for the November election, a Manhattan citizen jury has turned the infamous real estate developer into a convicted felon in the city where he first earned his enormous reputation.
Trump stood as the foreman said “guilty” to all charges against him in the case.
The indictment against Trump stems from the cases of his unlikely 2016 White House bid, and is based on a symbol he has built over decades. In the run-up to that year’s election, the rise of the Access Hollywood gang threatened his viability as a candidate, an already bizarre proposition. He had long been known as a so-called playboy, yet his comments during the recording fueled his crusade into damage control mode and etched the words “grab them through” in American election history. .
It is against this backdrop, prosecutors say, that Trump was quick to cover up a decade-long affair with porn star Stormy Daniels. Her former repairman Michael Cohen arranged for her to get $130,000 for her silence. Trump won the election. When the settlement cases became public in 2018, Daniels and Cohen became national figures in their own right, resulting in a sexual psychodrama scandal with few parallels. The charges against Trump, as a sort of summary of the case, were low-key — allegations that he manipulated money records to cover his payment to Cohen — but also reflected the claim that he illegally conspired to win the 2016 election.
When Daniels testified at trial, jurors heard her describe her encounter with Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in 2006, before he invited her to his hotel suite that night. She said having sex with him made her uncomfortable (she regretted not saying no), but nervous and fearful. He had discussed a possible role for her on The Celebrity Apprentice. Over the course of 4 days, Cohen’s testimony charted his disenchantment with his former boss, an ongoing feud that made him a minor celebrity and a social media phenomenon.
Those days of testimony, centered on dramatic personalities and explosive relationships, drew large doses of attention, and the lines to enter the Manhattan Criminal Court were the longest. However, most of the time, the surroundings outside the courthouse were silent. Simpson’s death, just days before the jury meeting began, prompted commonly simple assumptions about potential comparisons to the historic spectacle of the football player’s 1995 murder trial. Most of the issues discussed over the past month have already been very well digested by the national press.
Still, the trial has given a glimpse of Trump’s cultural entrenchment as he prepares to run for the White House again. The witnesses were an investigation of other people who had been attracted to him for one reason or another: Daniels, Cohen, former president of the Enquirer editor, David Pecker, and former White House communications director Hope Hicks. Stuck in his hometown for a few weeks, Trump took the opportunity to reach out to New York administrative staff, visiting a structure site, a fireplace station and a bodega, and, at a rally in the Bronx, was celebrated by two of the rappers who are out on bail on gang charges. A few days during the trial, he was escorted to court by former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik and the former leader of the Hells Angels. Chuck Zito, among others, through Republican politicians including J. D. Vance, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Vivek Ramaswamy and Mike Johnson.
The overall atmosphere of the debates, from beginning to end, can simply be described as completely Trump. During the jury meeting in April, a Puerto Rican IT representative living on the Lower East Side told the court that he had discovered the former president “fascinating and mysterious. “”In the end, he wasn’t selected as a panelist. Later that week, he told USA Today that he called Herson Cabreras and gave more details.
“The guy comes in and the others go crazy,” he said. “That’s what I meant. “
This is a story.
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