— from Robert Reich's Substack
Friends,
Convicted felon Donald J. Trump has attacked the judge and prosecutors, but he will find it far more difficult to attack the 12 jurors who found him guilty today on all 34 counts, after less than twelve hours of deliberation.
Those jurors were not Democrats. They were not politicians. They were not people who had a bias against Trump. They were Americans.
Trump’s lawyers allowed them to become jurors because they showed no bias.
It’s this fact that will be the most damning to Trump’s narrative that he’s being hounded by the Biden administration and Democrats.
Biden should say nothing about the verdict. Democratic lawmakers should maintain a dignified silence.
by Amanda Marcotte | June 1, 2024 - 6:23am | permalink
I was asked a few times by people over Memorial Day weekend what I thought would happen in Donald Trump's criminal trial for fraud in Manhattan. I expressed cautious optimism that he would be convicted, pointing out that the prosecution presented an overwhelming amount of evidence while the defense acted like a bunch of clowns. Folks reacted with surprise to this prediction. They've been burned too many times, watching Trump wriggle away from consequences for a dizzying number of crimes, including his efforts to overthrow democracy. Thursday, however, a ray of hope opened up as Trump was found guilty on 34 state felony charges.
District Attorney Alvin Bragg and lead prosecutor Joshua Steinglass had two advantages over others who have tried to hold Trump accountable. First, there are no powerful Republicans swooping in to save Trump from consequences in New York. There are no corrupt Federalist judges, like Aileen Cannon or the Supreme Court Six, finding ways to delay Trump's federal trials indefinitely. No Senate Republicans to stop Trump from being rightfully convicted after his impeachment in the House of Representatives. No wealthy donors to step in and pay his civil judgments, whether for his extensive business fraud or his sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll. Second, Trump was facing a jury of his peers. I had some faith that ordinary people, when faced with inescapable evidence of Trump's criminality, would suck it up and do their civic duty. Unlike, say, all the people who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution but decided to protect the leader of the GOP instead.
by Sonali Kolhatkar | June 4, 2024 - 7:07am | permalink
Many Americans are celebrating the news of Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felony charges in a hush-money incident that took place ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Newspaper headlines screamed “TRUMP GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS” and media reports relied on superlatives such as “historic” and “unprecedented” to label the unanimous jury verdict. Given that Trump has been unusually adept at avoiding accountability for a staggering number of alleged crimes, the verdict felt like a long-overdue comeuppance.
It was even more shocking than the news of Derek Chauvin’s conviction in the murder of George Floyd four years ago—but not by much. The United States criminal justice system was not designed to be applied equally across race and class. It was designed to protect men like Trump and Chauvin—powerful elites who bend laws to suit their purpose and the henchmen who serve them.
by Robert Reich | June 1, 2024 - 6:15am | permalink
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Today, the Republican lie machine has turned into a full-force gale.
Republican lawmakers have been repeating Trump’s lies that Biden was “behind” the Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Trump; that Juan Merchan, the judge who presided over the trial was “conflicted;” that Trump’s election expert wasn’t allowed to testify;that Merchan instructed the jury that they could find Trump guilty even without unanimity; and the jury was biased against Trump.
I’ve heard these lies all day today.
Help me here, because I honestly don’t understand how people who have taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States can so blatantly lie about what just occurred. How do they justify their lies, to themselves? How do they look themselves in the mirror? Why did they get into politics in the first place?
by Thom Hartmann | June 1, 2024 - 5:50am | permalink
Donald Trump is now a felon, busted for and convicted of stealing the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton and the American people. Our criminal justice system has worked, and there will almost certainly be some political fallout to both Trump and the GOP.
Nonetheless, odds are he won’t see a day in jail or even a particularly punishing fine and will probably be long dead before his lawyers finish with his inevitable years, perhaps decades, of appeals.
But what will this mean for America? How will it affect our political system and the Republican Party, which he has so thoroughly corrupted?
As much as a deep concern about Trump taking back the White House is legitimate — particularly given the number of billionaires who’ve thrown in with him recently — a fear that America will never recover from Trump and Trumpism probably isn’t.
The reason has to do with the difference between a movement and a cult.
Movements are organized around ideas and have lasting power long after those who initiated them are dead or gone.
Barry Goldwater, for example, once led a movement to enshrine white supremacy in US law and turn control of our politics and economy over to the morbidly rich. It was the 1960s incarnation of a movement that stretched back to the Revolutionary era, when some of the richest plantation owners and bankers argued that only the wealthy should be able to vote or hold public office. It was revisited in 1920 by Warren Harding with his massive tax cuts for the rich, ultimately leading to the Republican Great Depression.
The movement survived Goldwater’s defeat in the 1964 election, and even his 1998 death because it was based on an idea: that society should be run with “classes and orders,” and the privileged few should have the greatest say in running government. In 1980, Ronald Reagan picked up that mantle and it’s been the Mitt Romney GOP’s core animating principle ever since.
Even the Confederacy was a movement rather than a cult; that’s why its ideas of white racial superiority and using violence to achieve political power live on in today’s Republican Party. You can argue that there were “heroes of the movement” like Robert E. Lee (recently praised by Bob Kennedy), but the movement lived on long past their short lifetimes.
The Trump “movement,” however, is an altogether different thing. Its only core organizing principle is loyalty and fealty to one man: Donald Trump.
by Robert Freeman | June 1, 2024 - 5:38am | permalink
There will be supertankers of ink, and server farms of electrons expended to divine the meaning of Trump’s criminal conviction Thursday on 34 felony counts. Here are three thematic queries the nation needs to make in order to gain the clarity about the event that the matter demands.
First, it is clear that Trump won the presidency in 2016 by committing a massive fraud on the country. That was one of the prosecutor’s main closing arguments. And Trump obviously believes it, or he wouldn’t have paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 and Michael Cohen several multiples of that. He wouldn’t have elevated the misdemeanors of falsifying business records into the felonies of election interference if he didn’t know that that is what it would take to win.
But that means that Trump’s claims for unqualified immunity for all the other crimes he may have committed are bootstrapped from the criminal behavior by which he won the 2016 election. No sensible person can claim that a convicted criminal should be able to be immune from the very criminality that made possible his claims of immunity in the first place. It would be insanity.
by Heather Digby Parton | June 2, 2024 - 7:24am | permalink
by Carl Gibson | June 2, 2024 - 7:35am | permalink
Polling outlet Morning Consult didn't waste any time surveying voters after former President Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 felony counts in his Manhattan criminal trial. And their results spell bad news for Trump's attempts to appeal to voters outside of his base.
According to the poll, 54% of respondents supported the 12-person jury's unanimous verdict finding Trump guilty of covering up violations of election law by paying hush money to various women in advance of the 2016 presidential election. 34% of voters registered disapproval with the convictions, with the remainder undecided.
In addition to the approval of the verdict, a significant portion (49%) of independents polled think Trump should drop out of the 2024 race given his guilty verdict. Roughly 15% of Republican voters polled said the same, and even 8% of respondents who identified as Trump supporters thought he should suspend his campaign.
Overall, the poll found that 45% of voters told Morning Consult that they would vote for President Joe Biden in November, and 44% said they would cast their ballots for Trump, meaning the race is still within the margin of error for both candidates. Voters were also split on how the former president should be sentenced. 69% of those polled said a fine would be a sufficient punishment, while 49% said they would be in favor of probation. 44% of respondents said they would support incarcerating Trump.
After former President Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 felony counts in his New York criminal trial, all eyes are on Judge Juan Merchan as he prepares to sentence the 45th president of the United States on July 11. But even then, Trump's legal woes will be far from over.
NBC News recently summarized the presumptive Republican presidential nominee's remaining criminal cases, which could mean Trump is stuck in a courtroom once again in 2024 right during the crucial weeks of the general election campaign cycle. Trump still has one state-level indictment to contend with, along with two federal cases brought by Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith.
The likeliest remaining prosecution to result in trial proceedings before the election would be Trump's DC election interference case. However, that will depend largely on whether the Supreme Court rules in Trump's favor as it hands down a ruling in his criminal immunity case later this month. Should justices side with Trump, Smith's entire indictment would be thrown out. But if it rejects his claims of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan could then schedule a trial date by August or September, as she has indicated both sides would get two to three months to prepare for trial proceedings.
by Jaime O’Neill | June 2, 2024 - 7:38am | permalink
Has the fever broken? Has the abscess burst? Has the cancer been caught and removed in time?
Well, the fascists have done their work, and just because Trump is now a convicted felon doesn’t mean we’re all going to just pop out of bed, no longer sick, no longer traumatized, no longer cynical, and no longer mentally and spiritually toxified. From left to right, we’re pretty fucked up, having been made sick by the disease of fascism, disillusioned with most everything, no longer sure what, if anything, can be believed or trusted anymore.
But has the fever broken? Has the abscess burst? Has the cancer been caught and removed in time?
Trump made us very sick, with a great deal of help from an Australian fascist and his tinker toy fake news network that spread conspiracy theories and the lies of a fake president before, during, and after his term in office, a period in our history during which we never knew what the next day’s bullshit would be. If you watched the stuff issuing from the Free Fascist News sources, that news was seldom good, and even less seldom true.
by Carl Gibson | June 2, 2024 - 7:35am | permalink
Polling outlet Morning Consult didn't waste any time surveying voters after former President Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 felony counts in his Manhattan criminal trial. And their results spell bad news for Trump's attempts to appeal to voters outside of his base.
According to the poll, 54% of respondents supported the 12-person jury's unanimous verdict finding Trump guilty of covering up violations of election law by paying hush money to various women in advance of the 2016 presidential election. 34% of voters registered disapproval with the convictions, with the remainder undecided.
In addition to the approval of the verdict, a significant portion (49%) of independents polled think Trump should drop out of the 2024 race given his guilty verdict. Roughly 15% of Republican voters polled said the same, and even 8% of respondents who identified as Trump supporters thought he should suspend his campaign.
Overall, the poll found that 45% of voters told Morning Consult that they would vote for President Joe Biden in November, and 44% said they would cast their ballots for Trump, meaning the race is still within the margin of error for both candidates. Voters were also split on how the former president should be sentenced. 69% of those polled said a fine would be a sufficient punishment, while 49% said they would be in favor of probation. 44% of respondents said they would support incarcerating Trump.
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