For Trump, ‘Guilty’ May Not Matter

The first former American president to be put on trial is now the first former American president to be convicted of a felony. Those milestones should be tombstones. A normal mortal doesn’t rise from that political grave.

But Donald Trump? I could see him skipping out of the cemetery, all the way back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I could see “guilty” being a mere bump in the road. I could even see it being an accelerant, as his indictment arguably was.

That’s because he has spent much of his lifetime and all of his political career preparing for a chapter like the current one — carefully constructing and ceaselessly repeating a narrative in which there are forces out to get him, they’ll use whatever trickery they must and their accusations are never, ever to be trusted.

I long ago lost count of the times that “witch hunt” tumbled from his lips or his keyboard. Same for “rigged.” He wasn’t just venting. He was girding, an amoral storyteller insisting on a story and a moral different from the ones that those nefarious establishment types were pushing. Trump came to understand that commanding people’s attention could get him only so far, while commanding their realities might enable him to get away with anything.

Or not. There’s no precedent for what just happened in a Manhattan courtroom, where the jury convicted him on all 34 counts, and for this juncture in American political life. There’s no way to know how it plays out. More than a few voter surveys over recent months augured trouble for Trump if the jury’s deliberations ended as they just did — with his conviction. In an ABC News/Ipsos poll released in early May, 16 percent of the respondents who identified themselves as Trump backers said that they’d reconsider their support if he were a convicted felon, while 4 percent said that they’d withdraw it. The latter group alone could be large enough to tip the election to President Biden in a race this seemingly close.

But those voters were speaking hypothetically — before learning any details of the jury’s deliberations, before the event in question actually came to pass, before Trump took his turn spinning the results, as he will furiously and flamboyantly do over the coming days and weeks.