Donald Trump is now a convicted felon. What happens next?
Businessman. Reality-TV star. President. Convicted felon. The improbable life story of Donald Trump has an ignominious new chapter, courtesy of a New York court verdict.
Trump was found guilty on state charges of falsifying business records, in concealing payments to a porn star during the 2016 election to keep her from talking publicly about their past affair.
In the span of just a few minutes on Thursday, the foreman of a Manhattan jury read out the unanimous verdict to count, after count, after count that will thrust the country into unknown political territory.
“Guilty,” said the middle-aged man, wearing a casual blue sweater. “Guilty. … Guilty. … Guilty,” he said, repeating himself 34 times for each of the counts.
Some in the courtroom gasped as the judge had announced there was a verdict. He’d been planning to send the jury home at the end of the day, when the foreman sent a note heralding a decision.
At 5:03 p.m local time, the jurors re-entered the room. Not a single one of them appeared to stare at Trump as they walked right past him toward the jury box. By 5:07 p.m., they’d convicted him.
Minutes later, they filed right past him again, none making any visible eye contact as they exited.
A decision in former U.S. president Donald Trump’s hush-money case is expected, with a New York jury set to issue a verdict in the historic trial.
Trump sat impassive during the verdict, with the parties having just been warned by the judge not to react as the decision was announced.
Trump later gave his son Eric a prolonged, vigorous handshake as they left the courtroom minutes later, exiting this scene into that new, uncharted territory.
The first man ever to serve as U.S. president and be convicted of a crime has been ordered to come back to receive his sentence on July 11.
This is just days before the Republican convention that where Trump is scheduled to be officially crowned the party’s presidential nominee.
Trump to continue campaign
To be clear, Trump remains free to keep running for president; it’s a race he might very well win, if current public opinion polls are accurate.
“The real verdict is going to be November 5th by the people [on election day],” Trump said in a defiant statement. “I’m a very innocent man, and it’s OK, I’m fighting for our country.”
But the verdict will unleash an unpredictable succession of events that could wind on without resolution for months — potentially even for years.
First, Trump will be asked to meet with a probation officer in the coming days. That officer will be asked to write a sentencing report, including details such as whether Trump shows contrition.
A veteran New York city criminal lawyer has this unsolicited advice for Trump: admit your guilt in that meeting, or say nothing.
“Just don’t deny it,” said Mark Cohen, who has spent decades first as a prosecutor, then a defence lawyer. “Denying it would be a problem with the judge.”
That judge is Juan Merchan, a daily target of Trump’s wrath.
Trump will certainly appeal the verdict, alleging bias and judicial errors, arguing that Merchan sealed Trump’s fate by issuing unfair instructions to the jury that were impossible to defend against. Those appeals could take years to sort out.
In the meantime, Merchan will decide Trump’s short-term fate.
Merchan’s July 11 sentencing decision will hang like an un-detonated bomb over the coming weeks of the presidential election.
Penalties range from fines to prison time
That’s because the gamut of potential penalties for this crime is head-spinningly vast: Trump could receive anything from a verbal warning, to probation conditions, to serious prison time — potentially up to four years for each of the 34 counts.
The prevailing view is that Trump won’t go to prison. As a first-time offender, convicted for the lowest category of non-violent felony, most legal observers expect a lesser penalty.
“Almost no one familiar with the New York criminal legal system expects a sentence of incarceration,” said Tim Bakken, a former New York prosecutor who now teaches law at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in New York state.
There’s a caveat here. Trump’s behaviour throughout the trial — with his frequent trashing of the judge and witnesses, and his string of contempt-of-court findings — makes a harsher penalty possible.
“Before this [trial] started, I would have thought [he’d get] probation,” Cohen told CBC News.
“[But] Trump’s done his best to promote disrespect for the law. So I would think that would be something that Merchan’s gotta be thinking about.”
So there is the possibility that a presidential candidate might be campaigning from jail.
And there’s no telling how Trump supporters might react.
Outside the courthouse this week, Joe Palau, a construction worker from Brooklyn in a red MAGA cap, insisted a conviction would backfire politically. “If he’s found guilty, more people will go to him.”
Cynthia Frybarger, a Trump critic from California who was in town taking in the scene, described it as a well-deserved serving of justice to a man she described as a decades-long law-breaker.
Trump first made news headlines in the 1970s when the U.S. Justice Department sued his family business for refusing to rent apartments to Black and Latino people in violation of anti-housing-discrimination laws; the suit was settled out of court.
“I’m embarrassed by it, to be honest with you,” said Frybarger, 73, a retiree who worked in the lending industry. She was standing outside the courtroom this week holding a sign that said, “Lock Him Up.”
“Doesn’t make me a proud American.”
Ultimately, Trump’s fate may play out in a far larger court of public opinion, as more than 100 million Americans are expected to cast ballots in this year’s presidential election.
The impact of this verdict will be scrutinized ferociously. Polls will be pored over in the coming days to determine whether this monumental event tilts the race toward President Joe Biden.
Watching the next polls
Here’s all we know on that score.
In the lead-up to the trial in April, several surveys suggested a guilty verdict could damage Trump politically. They said he might lose several crucial percentage points, trigger a stampede of swing voters or lead a staggering 16 to 24 per cent of his voters to reconsider their support.
We’re no longer in the world of hypothetical statistics. We’re now entering a real-world scenario where there’s no proof this shift will happen.
It is an untested proposition, to put it mildly, that the criminal cover-up of a two-decade-old affair will succeed in reducing Trump’s support where so many other events have not.
Two presidential impeachments, the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, a sexual-abuse finding, recorded remarks about forcing himself upon women, a corporate-fraud verdict and promises to use state tools to punish his adversaries — none of these have made Trump electorally toxic.
In the meantime, the native New Yorker produced a memorable New York moment. Scores of people filled the street near the courthouse after the verdict, snapping photos outside a police barrier.
Some were Trump fans, some were detractors, some just curious onlookers. Noah Bergin, a musician in town from Indiana to play a concert, said he never believed Trump would be convicted on all 34 counts.
He described feeling relieved that nobody is above the law. As for predicting the effect on the 2024 presidential race, he reacted with a touch of humility that even a seasoned pundit might emulate here.
“It’s a long way ’til the election,” Bergin said.
“We’ll see how it plays out.”
Published at Mon, 15 Apr 2024 09:35:06 +0000
South Africa’s ANC party poised to lose majority, partial election results suggest
If partial results from this week’s election in South Africa stay the course, the free hand the African National Congress (ANC) has enjoyed on the national political stage for 30 years could well be coming to an end.
The country’s electoral commission has seven days to declare the full results following Wednesday’s vote, but early returns suggest the party of Nelson Mandela that swept to power in 1994 after the end of apartheid may be about to lose its parliamentary majority for the first time.
With just 20 per cent of the vote declared, news agencies were reporting ANC support running between 42 and 45 per cent. Their closest challenger, the pro-business Democratic Alliance, was reported at about 25 per cent support.
If the predictions hold, the ANC will still emerge with the most seats, but would likely, for the first time, have to seek coalition partners to govern, signaling a major shift in South African politics.
ANC’s coalition options
Given the myriad opposition parties, it’s hard to predict what that coalition might look like. Some 50 opposition parties stood in the national ballot.
“The ANC may want to cobble together a coalition with smaller parties that are unlikely to contest its core policy offering than to go into a coalition with either the Economic Freedom Fighters [EFF] or [uMkhonto we Sizwe] MK party on the left or even the Democratic Alliance [DA] on the right,” said Ongama Mtimka, a political analyst and lecturer associated with the Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province.
“Only as a third and fourth option would they consider going into coalition with either the Economic Freedom Fighters or the Democratic Alliance,” he said.
The Marxist EFF is one of the parties that analysts agree will have siphoned support from the ANC, although in keeping with levels from previous elections where support has sat at around 10 per cent.
The EFF’s leader, Julius Malema, a former ANC youth deputy expelled from the party and criticized by many for his ostentatious lifestyle, advocates nationalizing South African mines and forcibly redistributing land and wealth to the country’s black majority.
Mtimka says the EFF’s growth remains marginal, but that he is attracting what author and journalist Fiona Forde has called “an inconvenient youth.”
“A youth that doesn’t buy into the promise of a democratic South Africa because many of them feel they have been labeled ‘born free’ when in fact their lived realities are to the contrary,” said Mtimka.
Economic struggles
Three decades after the end of apartheid, South Africa is still struggling to lift people out of poverty. In 2022, the World Bank declared it to be the most unequal country in the world in terms of the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
About one-third of South Africans are out of work, many of them under the age of 30.
“I think that where young people might put their mark on are all these new parties that have emerged in the last two years or so that do present a much more hip, urban base,” said Zwelethu Jolobe, an associate professor at Cape Town University.
“They don’t really have rallies in the way that the ANC and the DA do,” he said. “They use a lot of social media and they sort of talk to the kind of things that people like to talk about, right?”
The party that has ruled South Africa since the end of apartheid is in danger of losing its parliamentary majority in national elections. Results won’t be known for days, but a growing list of problems has left many voters angry.
Another party siphoning votes from the ANC is uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), backed by former President Jacob Zuma, whose scandal-soaked administration came to an end when he was forced to resign in 2018.
Zuma himself was barred from standing in the current election by South Africa’s top court, but he’s thrown his weight and an enduring populist appeal behind the party that takes its name from the ANC’s old paramilitary wing.
Both Zuma and Malema have managed to play a two-sided game in the election, criticizing the ANC’s current leadership under South African President Cyril Ramaphosa while claiming to be the true representatives of the ANC’s core values.
After Wednesday’s vote, Ramaphosa tweeted that “the people of South Africa will give the African National Congress a firm majority.”
If they don’t, Mtimka says Ramaphosa should prepare the way for his departure.
“I would say that he should be a caretaker president who simply helps us to transition from the murky waters of a contentious transition period and then leverage that political capital that he has to position a younger and more vibrant successor,” Mtimka said.
ANC’s future
Jolobe says he believes that despite the potential political shift in South Africa, people’s trust still lies with the ANC.
“Because at least you know who they are and you know what they can or cannot do,” he said. “There is a lack of trust, however, when it comes to the other parties, including the DA, the EFF and the rest of them.”
The Current18:59Why loyalty for Mandela’s party is waning in South Africa
He contends that the ANC deserves to win the election despite having “performed badly” over the last 20 years — although for backhanded reasons.
“Other parties have not been able to make capital out of the shortcomings of the ANC. [So] they do deserve to win, but they do not because of what they do, but because of what other people don’t do.”
Regardless of the final results, it is increasingly clear that time has formed an inevitable wedge between the so-called “born free generation” and those who fought to be free, making it harder for the ANC to rely on its anti-apartheid credentials from the past to paper over failings in the present.
Published at Thu, 30 May 2024 20:27:44 +0000
