Donald Trump, who once bragged that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters, has gotten away for years with unimaginable amounts of malfeasance.
He grifted and insulted and lied his way into the White House, embarrassed the nation while president, refused to accept his defeat to Joe Biden in 2020 and then incited a riot at the US Capitol as he tried to overturn the election.
And still, he kept his iron grip on the Republican party and maintained the adulation of his red-capped fans.
But now, each day in a Manhattan courtroom, Trump is finding out that there’s a limit. History is being made; this is the first criminal trial of a former US president. That alone is a humiliation.
And each day, he must sit there and listen to a recitation of his misdeeds (though sometimes he falls asleep instead). New York supreme court judge Juan Merchan, who has dealt with Trump cases in the past and knows the score, was considering punishing Trump for violating the rule against attacking witnesses, jurors, lawyers and court officials.
Whether Trump ultimately will be convicted of the crimes associated with hush money paid to the porn star Stormy Daniels is unknown. I have my doubts, especially after seeing a rundown of what sources of news the jurors have, according to a New York Times report based on a questionnaire. Although heavy on the Times itself, the sources also include TikTok, Fox News and the Daily Mail.
But whatever happens, the day-to-day trial is providing a measure of accountability.
It puts, front and center for the public, the facts of the case – which simply ooze with sleaze. To recap: before the 2016 election, Trump had his lawyer pay Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged sexual affair. Then he paid back that lawyer, Michael Cohen, and went on to lie on business records that the payments were legal fees, not hush money.
It’s a crime in New York state to falsify business documents for political gain, and though some would like to portray this as little more than a bookkeeping error, it’s not.
“This case is the origin story of Trump’s efforts to cheat during elections,” as Joyce Vance, a law professor and former US attorney, puts it.
I’ve always thought it would be poetic justice for this case to be the one to bring Trump down.
The tawdriness makes it a perfect fit; it exemplifies who Trump is – from his bragging about grabbing women below the belt to his love for gold-plated everything.
Classy, he is not.
The location is part of the aptness. New Yorkers know precisely who Trump is – a businessman who doesn’t pay his bills and whose touted-to-the-skies ventures often go belly-up, and a conman who never met a grift he didn’t love.
In recent weeks, he’s been hawking “God Bless the USA” Bibles for $59.99, and his wife, Melania, is selling a chintzy Mother’s Day trinket for $245. (No, a portion of these proceeds is not going to charity.)
This case “is the best chance yet to ensure some accountability for the former president and protect the country from further crimes”, Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, believes.
As he sees it, a conviction would prove, once and for all, that Trump is not the normal politician that many in the media and his political allies continue to act like he is.
“Institution after institution has passed on the chance to hold Trump accountable, from the Senate voting to acquit him after his impeachment for inciting an insurrection, to House Republicans blowing up a bipartisan commission to investigate those events, to the Supreme Court declining to enforce Trump’s disqualification under the 14th amendment to the Constitution,” Bookbinder, a former federal corruption prosecutor, wrote in Salon.
A conviction requires unanimous agreement by the jury. That’s a high bar.
After all, it’s impossible to get 12 New Yorkers to agree on the city’s best bagel joint, much less something with considerably more consequence – not to mention the likelihood of abuse after the trial should they be identified.
It might be more satisfying, of course, to have Trump’s comeuppance brought about by something more substantive – especially his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, as in the Georgia case in which he twisted the arm of the secretary of state to “find” more votes.
But for those who long have hoped for some accountability for the Fifth Avenue miscreant, a conviction here would be more than enough.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist
