America’s history was altered on Thursday afternoon in a Manhattan courtroom by a single word spoken thirty-four times.
“Responsible.”
A 12-member jury in New York returned this verdict, finding former President Donald Trump guilty of all 34 felony charges of using false business documents to conduct or cover up another crime. Allegations in the criminal case focused on his alleged attempt to conceal a $130,000 hush-money payment to an adult film actress in order to protect his presidential candidacy in 2016.
Trump is now the first former president of the United States to be found guilty of a felony. In addition, he is the first offender with a felony conviction who is expected to be a major party presidential contender.Regardless of how the incident influences the results of the upcoming election, experts told USA TODAY that it is a victory for the rule of law — at least for the time being.
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Trump has created history many times before. He was the first president to have no prior experience in the military or the government, the first to decline to accept a peaceful handover of power, and the first to be impeached twice. This most recent first will always be associated with him.
Historians and political scientists couldn’t agree on one unchangeable fact: the verdict will alter history books. However, they couldn’t agree on whether the verdict will have a discernible impact on the 2024 presidential race.
What’s the most important lesson learned?
Professor Jennifer Mercieca of Texas A&M University stated, “No one is above the rule of law in a nation ruled by laws, not men.” “Even the president,”
Never a moment like this
A political controversy has resulted in high-profile legal cases involving other past US presidents. The hush money case involving Trump in New York has prompted analogies to the Watergate incident, which brought an end to Richard Nixon’s administration, and the impeachment of then-President Bill Clinton in 1998, during his second term in office.
However, because Nixon and Clinton were not found guilty of a crime, Susan Liebell, a political science professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, claimed that such incidents are not comparable to Trump’s 34 felony convictions. Based on those earlier experiences, Liebell added, she is “deeply suspicious” of anyone who claims to predict how the New York judgment will affect American politics.
According to Liebell, “never has an American president been found guilty in a criminal proceeding.” “There are no examples from history.”
Nixon was never tried, in contrast to Trump. Before he could face criminal charges for his involvement in the break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices and the cover-up that followed, he was preemptively pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford. As support for Nixon’s impeachment mounted in Congress, the Republican president announced his resignation and never again sought public office.
In the meanwhile, Trump remains the presumed GOP presidential nominee and has not indicated that he intends to withdraw from the race following Thursday’s decision. Through the trial, Trump maintained his belligerent and unrepentant demeanor, insisting that he “didn’t do anything wrong.”
Although Nixon is “not typically whom historians turn to for examples of exalted presidential behavior,” Southern Methodist University’s Jeffrey Engel, director of presidential history projects, contended that the former president “knew the job, and the country, was bigger than himself.”
Engel stated, “As of right now, Donald Trump does not.”
In response to analogies to Clinton’s 1998 House impeachment for lying to investigators and obstructing justice related to a sexual affair with intern Monica Lewinsky, Engel and Shannon O’Brien, a professor and self-described “presidency nerd” at the University of Texas at Austin, fought back.
Although “sexual issues” were a part of both Trump and Clinton’s cases, O’Brien noted that “that’s about where the close comparisons end.”
After the House impeached Clinton, the Senate cleared him, and the Justice Department decided not to prosecute the Democrat at the federal level because of a Nixon-era rule that prohibits indictments against sitting presidents while they are in office. On his last day in office, Clinton also came to a deal with the Justice Department to pay a fine, have his law license suspended for five years, and publicly acknowledge that he had acted unprofessionally in order to avoid post-presidential prosecution over a similar issue.
In contrast, a 12-person jury convicted Trump guilty on 34 state criminal counts. In addition, he is still charged with crimes in three other jurisdictions: two federal cases and a state case in Georgia. These cases are related to claims he attempted to rig the 2020 presidential election, which he lost, retained classified materials in his possession after leaving the White House, and obstructed the probe into the incident. To every case, the former president has entered a not guilty plea.
Clinton did not seek public office again, similar to Nixon. Engel asserted, however, that the Democratic president’s scandals undermined Vice President Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, which went on to lose by the narrowest of margins to George W. Bush.
“We’ll say that the lesson of Clinton, and then of all presidents, is that there are places the electorate won’t go to support a candidate,” Engel stated in the event that Trump lost. The threshold is now a criminal conviction. By November, that line may very well change.
