Donald Trump trial: Despite result, jury is still out on who wins

Donald Trump had a premonition that the Democrat stronghold of New York, the city where he had built his dreams, was about to swallow him up.

Former US president Donald Trump outside his New York residence after being convicted in his criminal trial on Friday (AEDT). Picture: AFP

Donald Trump had a premonition that the Democrat stronghold of New York, the city where he had built his dreams, was about to swallow him up.

“Mother Teresa could not beat these charges,” he said just a day ago as a jury of 12 angry New Yorkers, five women and seven men, pondered his fate.

But as soon as Trump, who was smiling and joking with his lawyers in the courtroom, heard that the jury had reached a verdict in his so-called hush money trial, his demeanour changed instantly.

The 77-year-old became silent, sullen and glum as he awaited to see if he would be the first former US president to become a convicted felon.

Across America, people rushed to their screens to await the verdict. Outside the Manhattan Courthouse crowds of pro-Trump and anti-Trump demonstrators chanted. In the West Wing of the White House, presidential aides gathered “transfixed” in front of four televisions, each showing a different channel – CNN, CNBC, FOX News and MSNBC.

The President heard about it in Delaware where he was visiting the grave of his son Beau on the ninth anniversary of his death from brain cancer.

Thirty minutes later, when the foreman of the jury, an Irish immigrant, read out the word “guilty”, Trump closed his eyes and slowly nodded his head from side to side. It took a full two minutes for the foreman to say “guilty” 34 times to all charges. Trump’s face looked flushed and he grabbed the hand of his son Eric.

In that single moment, the US presidential election had been ­upended and American politics would never be the same again. The competing narratives that will be played on loop for the next five months were set in stone. The first was that Trump is now a 34-time convicted felon who falsified business records to cover up a hush money payment to former porn star Stormy Daniels and who is manifestly unfit to hold the ­office of president again. The second is that he is the victim of a trivial and politically motivated case brought against him by a Democrat District Attorney backed by a jury which lives in a city where three out of four New Yorkers voted against Trump in 2020.

The guilty verdict ended one of the most bizarre criminal trials in the country’s history – an unprecedented six-week spectacle where a former president sat glumly in court all day listening to lurid testimony about his alleged sex romps, hush money and false transactions, only to return at night to his gilded penthouse in Trump Tower where he received dignitaries from around the world, including former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison.

On weekends, Trump would hold political rallies, one of which attracted around 100,000 people, the size of an AFL grand final crowd, where he cast himself as the victim of a political witch hunt. Throughout the trial, his polls rose further, extending the lead of the presumptive ­Republican nominee over his Democrat opponent Biden.

Privately, Trump told people that being trapped in the courtroom all day was “miserable”. His demeanour became increasingly sullen as the case progressed.

He and his defence team began the trial exuding an air of confidence that he would be acquitted, notwithstanding the fact that the trial was being held in New York, his former hometown which had long ago turned on him. Their confidence stemmed from the fact that the case was a complicated one for the prosecution to prove.

Trump was charged with falsifying business records to cover up a $US130,000 hush money payment made to Daniels by Trump’s lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen in 2016 after Daniels claimed she had sex with the married Trump in 2006. But to make it a felony-level charge, the prosecution had to prove that the hush money was ­effectively an illegally large donation to Trump’s election campaign. That was a big leap.

As the prosecution tried to prove its case, the former president sat through weeks of often excruciating testimony against him. This included a lurid and detailed account of his alleged affair with Daniels, who spoke of how she met Trump at a 2006 Lake Tahoe ­celebrity golf function.

Daniels said Trump described her as “the smart one” and asked if she wanted to go to dinner. She said they met at his penthouse where “he was wearing silk or satin pyjamas that I immediately made fun of”, Ms Daniels said, by asking: “Does Hugh Hefner know you stole his pyjamas?”

She said she went to the bathroom and returned to find Trump sitting on the bed dressed only in his underwear. She said Trump dared her to spank him with a magazine, which she did and then they had sex. During her testimony Trump, who denies having sex with Daniels, stared at the floor, sometimes shaking his head.

But the most damaging testimony against Trump was delivered by his former fixer Cohen. Although Cohen had formerly been convicted of tax and bank fraud and was described by Trump’s lawyers as a serial liar who could not be believed, Cohen’s testimony was delivered clearly and with obvious effect. He gave jurors an insider’s view of the hush money scheme and what Trump knew about it.

He quoted Trump as saying to him “just take care of it” and said that Trump was fully aware of his actions in relation to the payment and recording of the hush money.

By the time the jury retired to consider its verdict, Trump’s lawyers knew that he was unlikely to be acquitted. But they admitted, after the verdict, that they had clung to hope that it might be a hung jury. Trump’s team had been buoyed by the body language of one of the jurors who appeared to repeatedly nod his head in favour of the arguments posed by Trump’s lawyers.

The guilty verdict, when it came, appeared to take the wind out of Trump. He stood in the hallway of the courthouse and delivered fighting words, but he looked flat rather than energised.

He called the case a “disgrace” and a “rigged trial”. “We didn’t do a thing wrong. I’m a very innocent man,” he said. “We’ll keep fighting, we’ll fight til the end and we’ll win because our country’s gone to hell. We don’t have the same country anymore, we have a divided mess.”

He said the “real verdict is going to be November 5 by the people,” referring to the presidential election.

As he spoke, the jurors quietly piled into black vans with tinted windows and drove north from the courthouse, choosing to remain anonymous despite having secured a unique place in history by delivering the first conviction of an American president.

They drove away past pro-Trump protesters holding up signs reading “Never Surrender” and anti-Trump protesters holding signs reading “Guilty”.

Trump’s son Eric quickly jumped to his father’s defence, tweeting: “May 30th, 2024, might be remembered as the day ­Donald J. Trump won the 2024 Presidential Election.”

Trump’s campaign also immediately swung into action by releasing a call to raise funds with the words “I’M A POLITICAL PRISONER! I was just convicted in a RIGGED political Witch Hunt trial: I DID NOTHING WRONG!”

Biden, who had carefully avoided any commentary about Trump’s case during the trial, also weighed in, writing on social media: “There’s only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: At the ballot box.”

Across America, cable news talk shows launched into wall-to-wall coverage as they debated what this meant for Trump and for the presidential election.

Will the verdict help Trump by making him seem to voters like a victim of a political stitch-up, they asked. Will it hurt him given that polls have found that some Republican voters say a criminal conviction would make them reassess their support for Trump? Will the judge sentence Trump to jail when he delivers his sentence on July 11? Will Trump appeal the verdict?

As night fell on Manhattan, the country was still digesting the seismic concept that their former and possibly future president was a convicted felon.

Trump spent the night at Trump Tower, overlooking the city that had turned on him. The skyscraper he once called home now seemed like a gilded cage.