“The real verdict is going to be November 5th, by the people. And they know what happened here.”

So said a defiant Donald Trump late yesterday afternoon, immediately after a Manhattan jury found him guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records some eight years ago. Apparently, the statute of limitations applies to everyone except Donald Trump, who thus becomes the first American president to ever be convicted of a crime.

“This was a rigged, disgraceful trial”

WATCH: President Trump’s Statement Following the SHAM Verdict in New York⤵️ pic.twitter.com/g4kx6UwXZx

— CPAC (@CPAC) May 30, 2024

Shortly after the verdict, a surge of donations to Trump’s campaign website crashed its online fundraising page. From the time the verdict was announced late Thursday afternoon until mid-morning Friday, the Trump campaign reported raising $34.9 million in donations. No doubt anticipating this, the Biden-Harris campaign went money-grubbing: “Donald Trump’s supporters are fired up and likely setting fundraising records for his campaign … so while the MAGA Right comes to the aid of Trump, Joe Biden — and those who care about democracy — need you.”

That’s rich, isn’t it? The party that interferes in elections by prosecuting its political opponents and keeping them tied up in court is panhandling for people “who care about democracy.”

Team Dumb-and-Dumber also did some demogoguing: “The threat Trump poses to our democracy has never been greater,” they intoned. “He is running an increasingly unhinged campaign of revenge and retribution, pledging to be a dictator ‘on day one’ and calling for our Constitution to be ‘terminated’ so he can regain and keep power. A second Trump term means chaos, ripping away Americans’ freedoms, and fomenting political violence — and the American people will reject it this November.”

I’m not so sure. In fact, I think the Democrats have good reason to be freaking out about their electoral prospects. Take deep-blue New York itself, which Biden won by 23 points in 2020. That lead continues to evaporate, as a new Emerson poll has The Decrepit One leading Trump by just seven points, 48-41.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg gloated about his big day in court. “I did my job,” he said. “And while this defendant may be unlike any other in American history, we arrived at this trial, and ultimately today at this verdict in the same manner as every other case that comes through the courtroom doors: by following the facts and the law, and doing so without fear or favor.”

So this case was just like “every other case,” except that Bragg declined to prosecute it years ago, as did his predecessor in the Manhattan DA’s office. And there was no “fear or favor,” except in the way Demo-donor Judge Juan Merchan upheld practically every objection from the prosecution while denying practically every objection from the defense. Nope, no fear or favor there.

As for an appeal, Trump’s legal team has 30 days to file it. Some are calling for him to bypass the usual appeals process for an expedited Supreme Court ruling, but this doesn’t seem wise. In fact, it seems like exactly what the Democrats want. Think about it: If the Republican-controlled Supreme Court overturns this verdict, Biden’s campaign team will be able to attack not only Trump but also the “right-wing” High Court. On the other hand, if Trump went through the normal appeals process, the New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division would have 10-15 reversible errors from which to choose. And a reversal by that politically neutral court would have a legitimacy that a 5-4 Supreme Court decision would lack.

Here’s how NYU Law School’s Brennan Center sees the appeal process: “His case would be heard by the First Department of the New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, and it could potentially be appealed again to the New York State Court of Appeals, which is New York’s highest court. Notably, that court just overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 sex crimes conviction. The majority’s ruling in that case rested almost entirely on what the majority viewed as critical errors by the trial judge in allowing prejudicial testimony.”

Critical errors? Merchan made plenty of them. This case, though, is a self-inflicted wound. It revolves around a hush-money payment made to a porn star. But, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy notes, “This was a historic trial of a former president of the United States by his partisan adversaries. Whatever you think of the results, it’s inconceivable in New York that anyone other than Donald Trump would ever have been indicted in this way.”

True that.

Asked whether he thought his client got a fair trial, Trump lawyer Todd Blanche said, “No, I don’t think so. I mean, we’ve been saying for over a year that we couldn’t get a fair trial in Manhattan … and it played out in lots of ways, exactly as we expected.”

“The jury was unanimous in its lack of unanimity,” said former Republican congressman and federal prosecutor Trey Gowdy, referring to the prosecution’s failure to define the essential “predicate” crime upon which the whole case hinged. This flew in the face of the Supreme Court’s 2020 Ramos v. Louisiana decision in which Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said, “There can be no question either that the Sixth Amendment’s unanimity requirement applies to state and federal criminal trials equally.”

Trump will be sentenced on July 11, just four days before the start of the Republican National Convention. He faces up to four years for each of the 34 counts. But unlike the violent thugs who rule New York City’s crime-ridden streets, Trump has no priors, and state law says that the maximum sentence for this level of felony is 20 years, so he’s got that going for him.

As for that sentencing, former federal prosecutor Brett Tolman was less than optimistic: “The rules are out the window. Who knows what this judge will do? I predict that he will give him some jail time. I think he will fine him. He’ll give him a stern lecture, and then he’ll promptly plan his retirement in a book deal.”

Imagine Donald Trump being locked up in New York instead of on stage in Wisconsin to accept the presidential nomination of his party.

Tollman also had some friendly advice for milquetoast Republicans who simply shrug their shoulders at the Democrats’ use of lawfare: “I support the gloves coming off,” he said. “I support conservatives that are in office punching back and punching hard.” Tollman rightly noted that a bully doesn’t stop until you punch him in the nose, “until you prosecute some of these political people from the other side of the aisle and they think twice about using this kind of tactic in the future.”

They were no doubt popping champagne corks over at the cartoon network called MSNBC, where we got a glimpse of the different world in which they dwell. Take, for example, this bit of legal “analysis” from disgraced Mueller-prober and inveterate Trump-hater Andrew Weissman, who couldn’t stop slobbering about the guy in the black robe: “With respect to Judge Merchan, I mean, I am, I am like now, you know, I have like a man crush on him. He is such a great judge that it’s hard to see that the jurors wouldn’t have the same impression. I mean, it’s just, you just keep on thinking, if you looked in the dictionary for ‘judicial temperament,’ that’s what you’d get.”

Gross.

“What we saw today was an absolute travesty of justice,” said Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz. “This was not law. This was not criminal justice. This was politics. This was a political smear job. This was an attack job. This is what you see in banana republics. I am both furious and heartbroken at the same time. I’m furious at what we saw, but I’m heartbroken for the rule of law. I’m heartbroken for our justice system.” Cruz continued:

Now, you look at the rulings from this judge, this partisan judge. They were so biased, I’m going to tell you right now, the chances that this decision is overturned on appeal are one-hundred-point-zero. … This is all about politics and influencing the election, and it is a disgrace. … We have 51 Democrats in the Senate, and not one of them has the guts to stand up and say, “This is wrong.”

To Cruz’s point about rule of law, the term comes naturally to a man who has spent much of his adult life in service to the law, even arguing cases before the Supreme Court. Those on the Left, however, were trotting the term out gratuitously, as if they actually knew what it meant or respected its precepts. Which, of course, they don’t.

Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio’s parents fled Cuba when they saw the ill winds of Castro’s communism on the horizon. He’s thus familiar with this sort of thuggery, and he says that the only chance Biden and his fellow Democrats have in the upcoming election is to keep Trump tied up in court. He adds:

We cannot become one of those countries where people, when they leave office, are targeted through the court system by their political opponents. That’s what happens in Brazil, that’s what happens in Peru, but we can’t let it happen here. And that is the direction we are headed right now with what’s happened here today. … Trump’s going to win this election, but we’ve got to make sure this never happens to anyone else ever again.

Seven years ago, Trump ostensibly mislabeled a check. Now he’s “guilty” of 34 felonies.

“Great damage was done today,” said constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, referring to the judicial system that he once revered. “When I was in the courtroom, and the verdict was being read, and the word ‘guilty’ was stated 34 times, I was really shocked by how gleeful some people were. … Regardless of how you feel about this case, that’s a sad moment for our country.”

Sad, that is, unless your Trump derangement blinds you to the awful precedent that this case sets. “You know what this verdict won’t change?” asked former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway. “It won’t make Joe Biden any less 81 years old, and it won’t make Kamala Harris any more appealing.”

Former Assistant Attorney General and Fox News host Mark Levin kept it pithy: “No crime, no jurisdiction, no due process. Conflicted judge, Soros prosecutor, Manhattan jury.”

Upon hearing the verdict yesterday, I was inclined to say that it won’t change a single vote. But I’d have been wrong. “I’m a Libertarian,” posted an obscure Montanan named Liam McCollum. “I opposed Operation Warp Speed, I opposed Trump’s war in Yemen, and I criticized him a lot. But when his enemies falsely frame him as a Russian asset and convict him as a felon in a sham trial, I can’t help but like him.”

Similarly, an independent state senator from Maine, Eric Bakey, said of Trump: “I was undecided, but today’s events have convinced me. I am voting for Trump.”

Fox News cites numerous other examples of the blowback that Democrats are likely to face as a result of this injustice.

“Our country is at a crossroads,” said Reverend Franklin Graham. “What we saw today has never happened before, and I think for the majority of Americans, it raises questions about whether our legal system can be trusted. Pray for our nation, for God’s guiding hand that this republic will be one nation under God with liberty and justice for all.”

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Updated to include the Trump campaign’s fundraising numbers in the immediate aftermath of the verdict.