Trump convictions should be a tombstone for his career

Donald Trump’s conviction for cooking the books to hide a hush money payment to keep his sexual encounter with an adult-film actress being revealed before the 2016 election is the sort of milestone that would have been a tombstone for an American political career in less mad days.

In saner times, Gerald Ford preemptively pardoned Richard Nixon following his Watergate-prompted resignation and paid the penalty when voters turned to Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton made an out-of-court legal settlement to bury allegations of dodgy behaviour on land deals during his previous job as governor of Arkansas that eventually morphed into his behaviour in the White House with an intern that not only destroyed his legacy but damaged his wife, Hillary’s, political career.

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But until Trump, no former US president had ever been convicted let alone faced criminal charges. Now, the US and the world can only wonder what effect the court case decision will have on Trump’s chances of recapturing the presidency.

If the world has learned anything about Trump since he unexpectedly won in 2016, it is that he is a man who never accepts losing, not in a heroic way, but rather more like a petulant child. True to form, the New Yorker emerged from his hometown court’s 34 guilty verdicts on Friday and declared: “I am a very innocent man..… We have a country that’s in big trouble, but this was a rigged decision right from day one, with a conflicted judge who should have never been allowed to try this case.”

Trump’s cries of victimhood and persecution by the Biden administration have ensured supporters shower money on him in the belief that only he can make America great again. Constant publicity about his legal tribulations, golden basketball boots, and marital troubles have snatched the PR weight of incumbency from President Joe Biden. For most of this presidential election year, Trump’s transactional sense of opposition has continued to be the big story in US politics, pushing aside Biden’s handling of the Middle East and Ukraine.

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Friday’s guilty verdicts end one playbook for Trump. The former president has indicated he will appeal should he be put behind bars on July 11, which would keep him free until the November vote. In either case, he has managed to dodge consequences for far more serious matters. Already found liable for bank fraud and sexual abuse, the charges Trump faced in New York paled somewhat against indictments for mishandling boxes of classified information and obstructing justice and his behaviour when supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington in January 2021 – 14 days before Biden was sworn in – that have still to come to court.

In what has been a truly strange and sad day for the US, Americans are now presented with a choice between an 81-year-old man with a long record of government and public service or a 77-year-old convict with a long record of self-promotion whose shambolic presidency left little but 400,000 dead from COVID-19, and memories of cosying up to Russian, North Korean and Chinese despots while advocating the abandonment of NATO and Ukraine.