Felonious Trump

Trump is a felon now. He’s been a felon for about a week, and I’ve been trying to figure out how I feel for most of it.

If you follow me on social media you know that I have not exactly been all aboard the Stormy Daniels Election Interference Train. I’ve argued that the triviality of this case diminishes the other, far worse crimes Trump has committed — crimes that I believe should land Trump in jail for the rest of his miserable life. Unlike Trump’s treasonous actions between November 3rd 2020 and January 6th 2021, and unlike Trump’s egregious mishandling of classified documents, business fraud is the kind of chickenshit criminality we usually overlook in former Presidents. The political motivations behind the Stormy Daniels trial are obvious, and I didn’t like the precedent such a trial establishes. 

This is the least popular take I’ve ever had. I have won no friends with this take, and I will win no friends with it today.

Over the past week, I have tried to write both a defense of that position and a long and joyous mea culpa, but neither worked because I don’t fully believe either position. This guilty verdict places us in a weird and unprecedented situation. It will take decades for the consequences to play out.

Here is my analysis, for whatever it’s worth:

Trump is guilty

Nobody — not even the conservatives — is seriously arguing that Trump didn’t do the crime.

Quick recap, skip if you’re tired of reading about it: In 2006, Trump had sex with Stormy Daniels. Ten years later, during Trump’s first presidential run, Daniels attempted to go public with her story, at which point Trump had his lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen use his own money to pay Daniels $130K to keep her thoughts to herself, then classified his reimbursement as a legal expense, which it wasn’t. That obfuscation by itself is misdemeanor fraud, but becomes felony fraud if undertaken to obscure a different crime. NYC district attorney Alvin Bragg successfully argued that Cohen’s initial $130K payment to Daniels constituted an illegal campaign donation that far exceeded the $3,300 legal limit for individual donations, which in turn violated a NYC statute that makes it illegal “to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.”

This is a novel application of the law, but the payment and obfuscation clearly happened. The jury did the right thing. Justice is served.

…of an incredibly minor crime

You can’t even buy a house for $130K. 

$130K is $126,700 over the individual campaign contribution limit, sure, but thanks to Citizens United, that limit has no meaning. In the first three months of 2024, dark money groups, which have no limits on the individual donations they can accept, poured $84 million into the Democratic coffers and $78 million into the Republican war chest. Cohen’s payment to Stormy Daniels is .08% of the money received just from dark money groups in just 90 days.

When it comes to businessmen and politicians, six-figure business fraud is crime for babies. A 2023 study found that 10 percent of all companies commit securities fraud in any given year, and 40 percent — nearly half — commit accounting fraud. Congresspeople regularly engage in insider trading that nets them millions. Corruption is rampant within our government. Senator Menendez is on trial right now for having sacks of cash and gold bullion stashed inside his house in a near-literal Scrooge McDuck situation: hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks straight into his own pocket in exchange for serving foreign interests. That’s worse, right?

But hey, both things are illegal. Trump may have just set some kind of record for the 34 lamest felony counts ever handed down to a politician, but he did the crime, so he should do the time. Right?

The Trial was Politically Motivated

Obviously.

Look, I would love to live in a world where all those crimes I listed in the previous section are prosecuted. But no new era of accountability has dawned with this Trump conviction. The number one reason Trump found himself in court over $130K to a porn star is an extremely justified fear that if Trump gets reelected in 2024 he will end democracy in the United States. “They got Al Capone for tax fraud!” I hear repeatedly, which illustrates the point: the feds did not go after Al Capone as part of some massive tax fraud crackdown on the general public. They went after Capone because he was guilty of other, larger crimes that were harder to prosecute, and because he was dangerous.

There were good reasons to go after Capone for tax fraud and there are many ways to justify going after Trump for business fraud. But let’s not pretend this trial had nothing to do with who Trump is and what he would like to become. It’s embarrassing.

…And The Verdict Might Swing The Election For Biden

It’s hard to argue with results.

Ettingermentum, my go-to source for all things electoral at this point, has a great article on how this verdict shakes up the 2024 election. Hard to choose just one thing to excerpt, but here’s the crux of the argument:

We don’t have a ton of polling data post-conviction yet, and the polls we have aren’t the most reliable in the world, but overall, they show a small shift towards Biden. In a race as tight as this one, a small shift might be all it takes. 

The Republicans Want Revenge

Popular conservative podcaster and beanie enthusiast Tim Pool posted a single word in response to the Trump verdict: “war.” A few hours later, on Timcast IRL, he offered a glimpse into what that war might look like. After winning the presidency, Trump should sic his attorney general on all the Democrats and prosecute them for every possible crime. Pool’s guest, Laura Loomer, immediately went farther. “Not just jail, they should get the death penalty. You know, we actually used to have, the punishment for treason in this country —" 

The podcast cut off. It seems there are still things you cannot say out loud.

You can say a lot of things out loud, though, and the Republicans are shrieking all of them at the top of their furious lungs. Steve Bannon wants New York DA Alvin Bragg jailed. Stephen Miller urged every DA and House committee to start filing charges as fast as possible. Marco Rubio and Donald Trump Jr have called for the Republicans to “fight fire with fire.” And everyone is talking about the Rubicon. Again.

It’s more than just an influencer freakout. John Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor whose resume includes finding legal justification for torture and warrantless wiretapping during the Bush years, explicitly argues for revenge prosecutions in the name of diluting the impact of Trump’s felony conviction. Jim Jordan wants Bragg in front of the House Judiciary Committee. Mike Johnson wants the Supreme Court to nullify the ruling. And Trump himself has doubled down several times on his commitment to seeking revenge should he win back the White House in November, including on appearances with friendly interviewers who gave him on-air encouragement to tone down the rhetoric. “Sometimes revenge can be justified,” Trump told Dr Phil on Thursday. “I would have every right to go after him,” he told Hannity the night before that.

If the Republicans are to be believed, we will all rue the day we held Trump accountable for his actions in a court of law. There’s just one problem:

They Were Already Out For Blood

As I type this, Hunter Biden is on trial for possessing a gun while addicted to drugs: something almost never prosecuted in court. The whole thing is a consolation prize for the conservative base after the “laptop from hell” turned out to contain evidence of garden-variety nepotism and a bunch of embarrassing photos of and by an addict actively hitting rock bottom. These assholes have been attempting to impeach Biden and arrest members of “the Biden Crime Family” for years now. The Republican House impeached Mayorkas for following orders they didn’t like. The legal system is plenty weaponized already.

“Are you the hunter or the prey?” Pizzagate enthusiast Jack Posobiec asked his audience in the immediate aftermath of the verdict. “If you don't stand up and fight right now, there won't be another chance.” But Posobiec’s forthcoming book, written long before Trump’s conviction, is already about as extreme as it gets. In “Unhumans,” he apparently argues that the communist liberals are “unleash[ing] terror on everyday people and revoke[ing] their human rights to life, liberty, and property.” His book supposedly “steals their playbook, breaks apart their strategies piece by piece, and lays out the tactics of what it takes to fight back—and win, using real-world examples.” He’s not alone. They’ve been craving blood for years.

So like, yeah. They’re mad. And I do worry that this verdict may help generate buy-in for their life-and-death narrative. But everything the conservatives are threatening to do in the aftermath of this verdict looks an awful lot like what they were threatening to do — and actively doing — before the verdict came down.

This Verdict Shatters Norms

The thing about not charging presidents with crimes after they leave office is that it facilitates the peaceful transfer of power. It is better for the country to allow a handful of rich assholes to get away with petty crime than it is to have presidents clinging to power in order to avoid spending the rest of their lives in a courtroom or in jail.

Trump’s real crimes are not petty at all. He subverted our democracy. He refused to leave office. He endangered national security by leaving boxes of classified documents in a bathroom and reading them out loud to reporters and friends. Convicting and jailing Trump for these crimes would not subvert the norm of not charging presidents for minor crimes, it would just establish a new, auxiliary norm: if a president does serious crimes, they’ll find themselves doing serious time.

But Trump got convicted of a minor crime, which means the door for charging former presidents with minor crime is now wide open in a country where the judiciary system increasingly skews conservative.

Trump may lose in 2024. Keeping him out of office might well be worth the sacrifice. As we travel forward, though, we will do so without a norm that incentivized the peaceful transfer of power. This makes me very uncomfortable.

…But Maybe Those Norms Were Already Gone

Eight years ago, the chanted phrase “Lock Her Up!” horrified us, not because we thought Hillary was a saint, but because the idea of imprisoning a political opponent in America was genuinely unimaginable. Our imaginations have stretched considerably since then. The things we take for granted today would have caused honest-to-God panic attacks in 2016. 

Trump wants to round up millions of immigrants and expel them from our country without due process and he wants to gut the civil service and replace our nonpartisan bureaucracy with Trump loyalists who will rubber stamp whatever he wants to do and his thirst for revenge is not new: he has been out for blood since 2020. Members of his entourage openly discuss jailing journalists. Trump would like to declare martial law and unleash the military on protesters. The list goes on and on.

We have books like Posobiec’s Unhumans and an apocalyptic death cult who believes Trump to be chosen by God to lead the righteous in stamping out evil. We have people who believe the Left is actively performing Maoist Cultural Revolution within America’s borders. We are in a cold civil war that could easily go hot, and my worries about what Trump’s conviction means for America’s future betray my Pollyannaish hope that the country as I know it has a future at all.

I’ve written a lot about post-meteor dinosaurs who do not know they’re dead: politicians who operate as though we live in the world of 20 years ago when “bipartisan” was a compliment and our government halfway functioned on occasion. This time, the dinosaur is probably me.

Regardless, the die is cast. Trump is a felon now. And yes — that does feel good to type.