That the Encyclopedia Britannica, that traditional canon of knowledge, updated Donald Trump’s biography on Thursday in a matter of minutes to include his status as a convicted felon, indicates, beyond the fleeting and bombastic journalistic headlines, that what happened that day in the Manhattan criminal court (New York) made history. History, in fact, yet to be written; the first page of a story that begins with an abyss of unpredictable consequences in the political, legal and even the pure existence of the country.
Another mental scheme will be necessary to address the eventuality that a candidate convicted by justice, but who will probably not go to jail, can not only attend the elections without disrespecting his representativeness – another thing is exemplarity, even if Trump has never been precisely edifying—but even winning them. Wounded in his self-esteem by the verdict of the popular jury, which found him guilty of the 34 charges against him for falsifying the record of a bribe to the porn actress Stormy Daniels for electoral purposes, Trump feels free of constraints to undertake his flight forward, until he becomes strong, if the polls smile at him, in the White House.
It does not seem that he will have a difficult time, not only because of his advantage over Democrat Joe Biden in different polls, especially in some pivotal or swing states, which can decide the electoral result in November. Also due to the closing of ranks around him of billionaires willing to finance his campaign – like everything in the United States, the result of an election depends largely on money – or due to the thousands of small, anonymous donors, who in a few hours They contributed almost $35 million to Trump’s electoral machine after the verdict was announced. Almost 30% contributed for the first time to the main Republican fundraising platform, Trump WinRed. That Wall Street opened higher on Friday, apparently immune to the political earthquake, was another very clear sign that the Republican will have the upper hand from now until November.
If during the six weeks of the trial, by virtue of the gag order imposed by the judge to prevent him from criticizing witnesses, a tamed version of Trump could be seen – even with reservations, since he was twice convicted of contempt – nothing It no longer prevents him from giving free rein to his rage and his thirst for revenge: they are not exactly arguments typical of an electoral program, but they are factors of mobilization in a political scenario definitively dominated, today more than ever, by emotions.
Furthermore, by presenting himself as a political convict, he has more freedom to complain. The fact that, in his words, the trial was rigged also allows him to recover the term he used to denounce the alleged 2020 electoral fraud.
No one dares to predict how the verdict will affect the outcome of the November election, but one thing is clear: if there was any doubt that Trump was the leader of all Republicans, it is no longer there. The first consequence has been the undisguised judicial interference on the part of the legislature, a new political upheaval to further inflame a dog-faced campaign.
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Republican Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives, urged the Supreme Court to “intervene” to overturn the verdict, saying he knows some of the judges “personally” and believes they are “deeply concerned.” If it sounds like blackmail, it is blackmail. Also on Friday, the chairman of a House Judiciary subcommittee, fellow Republican Jim Jordan, demanded that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who prosecuted the case, and prosecutor Matthew Colangelo, who led the prosecution in the trial, , appear on June 13 for Trump’s “unprecedented political persecution.”
In parallel, eight Republican senators, including Marco Rubio and JD Vance, announced that they will boycott legislative activity, opposing any non-defense spending bill and stopping any Democratic initiative, also considering, without evidence, that Trump has been a victim of a political process. “Round statements are not enough. Those who turned our judicial system into a political cudgel must be held accountable. “We will no longer cooperate on any legislative priorities, and we invite all interested senators to join us,” they announced on Friday. The current composition of the upper house is 49 Republicans and 51 Democrats.
If institutions, such as the aforementioned Congressional committee or the group of Senate members, put themselves at the service of the interests of an individual, the risk of patrimonialization or appropriation of pillars of the system as the judicial power skyrockets. This trend was even clearer in Trump’s appearance on Friday in New York, in which one could see not so much the image of a citizen condemned by justice, but that of an aggrieved presidential candidate, who took refuge behind the logo of his campaign. The values that suit the interests are appropriated; those that do not, such as adverse justice, are delegitimized in this supermarket of values that American politics seems to have become since Trump’s mandate (2017-2021). Politics, in short, dragged through the mud.
“Destroy the judicial system”
The political fabric has been practically in tatters, some observers warn. The United States has entered a new political and legal territory as a nation, summarized in X (formerly Twitter) the historian Tim Naftali, professor of Foreign Affairs at Columbia University. “Donald Trump will now force all Republican Party candidates to destroy our judicial system. There will be a chorus of venom probably worse than what we heard before January 6 [de 2021, fecha del asalto al Capitolio por una horda trumpista]. If he wins, he will have a more toxic mandate than in 2017″, when he became president, Naftali wrote on Thursday.
Friday’s speech from Trump Tower in Manhattan, in theory his official reaction to the verdict, but in practice a hodgepodge of electoral topics—from the Chinese challenge to the arrival of migrants—did not provide any proposals, not even ideas. , just the usual scarecrows of fear: the “invasion” of foreign criminals, the United States as a “corrupt country, with corrupt elections”; the external debt; “unprecedented numbers of terrorists” entering or, in short, “open borders” because of the Democratic Administration. Nothing that he has not said before, even on a daily basis, as he entered and left the court during the trial. Served, however, on the tray of the reply it seemed much more than his inflated argument, rehearsed for months, even before the trial began: the alphabet of populism.
Considering the New York trial “very unfair”—and therefore, justice illegitimate—is yet another notch in his discourse, well-rooted in the right-wing media ecosystem. “Everyone knows what she is talking about, because she has been sowing these lines of attack for weeks and weeks, since before this trial even began,” maintains Abby Philip’s analysis on CNN. “We have yet to see Trump pivot to a message for a broader electorate, just from a political perspective, but I suspect we won’t see him do it, because, from his point of view, what he’s doing works, he doesn’t need to change.”
In fact, an NPR public radio poll confirmed on Thursday, a few hours before the jury’s decision was announced, that 17% of registered voters would support Trump even more strongly if he were found guilty. The outcome of the trial will not influence the vote of the majority of registered voters: two-thirds of those surveyed said that a guilty verdict would not change their choice on the ballot in any way. Three-quarters said the same for a not guilty verdict. Only a small percentage of votes, especially among independents, could change direction after learning that Trump is guilty.
The day after the verdict was hour zero of Trump’s revenge, staged a few meters from the golden escalator that, like the television star he was then, descended in 2016 to officially announce his candidacy for the presidency. His 33-minute tirade on Friday was broadcast live on the news, although some channels chose to interrupt the connection when he made falsehoods and attacks against the judge, prosecutors and President Joe Biden. Vowing to appeal the verdict, calling his fight existential for the Constitution and the country, he stated: “This is bigger than Trump. It’s bigger than me”: an unequivocal rallying point for the deep patriotism of Americans. “There is now only one question in this election: whether the American people will tolerate the country becoming a banana republic,” tweeted tech entrepreneur David Sacks.
Republicans are trying to channel the judicial frenzy into fundraising and their sworn commitment to oust Biden from the White House in November. The existential dimension of the verdict is on the table, in the foreground: “This will not stop Trump,” tweeted Tucker Carlson, propagandist of the most extreme republicanism. “He will win the elections if they don’t kill him first. But it does mark the end of the fairest justice system in the world. “Anyone who defends this verdict is a danger to you and your family,” he threatened, using the argument of fear as his flag.
Among the immediate moves by Republicans is the possible opening of criminal investigations against Democrats in Georgia and Florida for conspiring to interfere in the elections by impeaching Trump. Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan prosecutor who led the investigation, is a well-known Democrat, hence Trump’s refrain that the judicial offensive against him is politically motivated and that the one in New York was a “rigged trial.”
Trump will be confirmed as the Republican candidate for the White House at his party’s national convention, which will be held in mid-July in Milwaukee. Technically, he could still elect someone else, but no one bets a cent on such an eventuality because Trump’s electoral machine is unbeatable, as demonstrated by his cash register, which has not stopped accumulating money after the four indictments and, this Thursday, the verdict. of guilt. The dominance of the media landscape due to his trials, which have capitalized on all the spotlights, multiplies his public exposure to the Biden campaign, which is much more discreet and which has not entered into the matter until the very last minute of the legal issues of his rival. .
What in other circumstances, undoubtedly in times past, would be nothing more than epiphenomena—the feeling of grievance, anger, fear, the promise of revenge in the face of a real or unfoundedly unjust situation—occupy center stage as protagonists in the 2024 elections: the emotions inoculated in the 2016 campaign have already borne fruit. Judging by the reactions to Trump’s condemnation, there seems to be no turning back to bridle them, or at least bind them to an electoral program with standard promises. The miracle worker Trump has known how to stir up the sound and the fury: that of Hillbilly, the misplaced inhabitant of deep America; that of the metal workers turned into pariahs by the relocation of the Rust Belt factories, who voted for him en masse in 2016.
The lack of expectations of millions of beings given over to the desperation of alcohol or opiates—the so-called “deaths of despair” conceptualized a decade ago by economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case—the paradoxical class struggle of Hispanics who, in their day they were immigrants, like those from the Bronx, and now they ask Trump to close the borders to new arrivals and clean the streets of foreigners. Anger always permeates from top to bottom, and Trump knows it.
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