It took little more than nine hours of deliberation for a New York jury to ensure Donald Trump a new place in history. He was already the first US president, sitting or former, to be tried for a serious crime. Now he is the first ever to be convicted.
Sure, the guilty verdict did not come in any of the three much graver cases still outstanding against him. Like Al Capone – to whom Trump has, self-incriminatingly, long liked to compare himself – he got done on Thursday for the relatively small stuff. But the law got him in the end.
It would be nice to think this really is the end. In a normal world, it wouldn’t even be a question: Donald Trump would be done, all hope of a return to the White House shattered. “Of course,” we’d say, “Americans would never elect a convicted felon as their president! They disqualified Joe Biden back in 1988 for nicking a rhetorical riff from Neil Kinnock, for heaven’s sake – they’re hardly going to send a criminal 34 times over to the White House.”
But we left the normal world a long time ago. In Trumpworld, a guilty verdict, like the first presidential police mugshot, is a fundraising opportunity. Acolytes of the former president can point to the pattern that established itself early, by which successive legal blows only made Trump stronger, propelling him to the front of the pack during the Republican primaries as he cast himself as the victim of a liberal deep state. So you can see the logic behind Team Trump’s bullish insistence that the pattern will hold. As the man himself said, he could “shoot somebody” on Fifth Avenue and still his supporters would not abandon him.
Even so, you could see something else last night written on the faces of Trump and his advisers. They knew that the 12 jurors in courtroom 1530 had just handed a lifeline to Joe Biden – at a moment when Biden could scarcely need it more.
The incumbent president’s poll numbers are grim on every measure that counts. He trails Trump in five of the six must-win states. He’s losing ground among the very groups – Black, Latino and young voters – that took him to victory in 2020. On the all-important issue of the economy Americans favour Trump over Biden by 46% to 32%.
Through it all, there has been one consolation. Polls have consistently found around one in five Republican voters who say they would reconsider their support for Trump, or ditch him altogether, if he were to be a convicted criminal. Well, that day has come.
And this is not just something people say to pollsters. Note the stubborn number of Republicans who have already snubbed Trump in actual – recent, if barely noticed – elections. I’m referring to the state-by-state primary contests, which have rolled on through the spring well after all Trump’s opponents dropped out and he became his party’s certain nominee. In Indiana, 22% of Republicans voted for Nikki Haley – in Pennsylvania it was 16.5% – even though Haley herself had long since abandoned her campaign (and last week endorsed Trump). These are Republicans, joined in some places by independents, who bothered to go out and vote in a dead-rubber election just to take a stand against Trump.
Now, of course, some of those voters will come back home in November. But it wouldn’t take that many of them to decide the stink of Trump is too great, and that they can hold their nose no longer, to deprive the former president of victory.
That won’t happen by itself. A door opened for Joe Biden last night, but he has to walk through it. That means appealing directly to those dissenting Republicans, urging them to break their party allegiance and lend him their votes. Incredibly – maddeningly – Biden has so far made next to no effort to do that. Former presidential candidate Chris Christie, who dropped out of the race with an excoriating attack on Trump in January, revealed this week that neither Biden nor anyone in his team had so much as contacted him, neither to seek his endorsement nor even his advice. It looks like the most appalling, and unmerited, complacency.
The guilty verdict gives Biden a second chance. Of course, there are perils in using it. Press the point too hard and it will play into the false Trumpist narrative that the Manhattan trial is part of a partisan witch-hunt, in which Biden has abused the justice system to hound a political rival. Biden can’t say anything that suggests he was the author of Trump’s legal downfall. Neutral bromides about no one being above the law are the safest bet.
But that should not stop surrogates for Biden referring to his opponent in every sentence not as “former president” but as “convicted felon Donald Trump”. And when Trump claims his trial was rigged, Biden’s lieutenants should hit back hard and say that Trump’s own lawyers helped pick the 12 New Yorkers who delivered that verdict, thanks to the jury selection process. For all the crumbling trust in the country’s public institutions – a process of corrosion actively promoted by Trump – most Americans still believe in the jury system.
While he’s at it, the president should make the use of surrogates a habit. One of the most glaring weaknesses of the Biden campaign has been the intensity of its focus on Biden. When you have a flawed candidate, the best remedy is to widen the lens and show that person surrounded by an impressive, capable team. As it happens, the Democrats have some campaign stars – Pete Buttigieg, Gina Raimondo, Gretchen Whitmer, Mitch Landrieu and others – but they’re barely used. If Biden is worried they might overshadow him, or that their relative youth will make him look old, he needs to get over it. As the Republican sage Mike Murphy puts it: “He already looks old.” Better to look old and surrounded by youth than old and alone.
The message needs work, too. He has to stop rattling off stats designed to show the US economy is doing great, and show instead that he gets that Americans are still feeling the pain of high inflation. In a nutshell: “We’re turning the corner – now you need to decide whether you want a president who fights for you or a president who fights only for himself.”
I know, it seems odd to be discussing campaign tactics as if 2024 were a normal election. It’s clearly anything but. The current frontrunner is a man who tried to overturn the election he lost in 2020 and, as the court found, cheated in the election he won in 2016. He is now more desperate to win than ever, because victory on 5 November is his only sure way of staying out of jail. And, as Christie also said this week, Trump fears jail the way he fears going broke: in his bones.
The danger to the American republic, to democracy and the rule of law, of such a man regaining power could not be more severe. But simply alerting voters to that peril does not seem to be enough. This contest also has to be won the old-fashioned way, with a smart campaign and a bread-and-butter message.
So yes, those 12 citizens, good and true, have handed Joe Biden a lifeline. But now he must seize it.
• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
