Donald Trump once boasted “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” The dictum he has lived by for decades finally came crashing down Thursday when a New York jury told him: no.
One of the world’s most powerful and consequential men was finally tripped up by a porn star, convicted for lying about the hush money he paid her to keep quiet about what she says was an uninspiring tryst.
The details are tawdry, but the moment is huge.
Love him or loathe him, there is one thing most Americans agree on: in the two-and-a-half centuries since their republic was founded, there has never been a president quite like Trump.
And Thursday’s verdict adds a new, unprecedented chapter to his story, making him the country’s first former president to ever be convicted of a crime. This November he could become the first felon-president in US history.
Quite how much difference the latest scandal makes to his fans is anyone’s guess.
The New York prosecution is only one of four criminal cases against the presumptive Republican Party nominee.
And he has trashed them all as political persecution, driven at the behest of what he claims is a corrupt White House led by President Joe Biden.
Impervious to shame or even embarrassment, Trump has turned each tangle with the law into a badge of honor: proof, he says, of his conspiracy theory that a deep state is out to get him and the so-called “forgotten men and women” of working-class America.
Opinion polls that show him edging Biden suggest so far that his brand is working.
Wrecking ball
To his millions of backers, the 77-year-old is the man who broke the mold with his shock 2016 White House win against Democratic heavyweight Hillary Clinton.
To much of the country, though, he just broke America.
The Republican’s first term began in 2017 with a dark inaugural address evoking “American carnage.”
It ended in mayhem when he refused to accept his defeat by Biden, then goaded supporters into storming Congress on January 6, 2021.
In office, Trump upended every tradition, ranging from the trivial (what got planted in the Rose Garden) to the fundamental (relations with NATO).
Journalists became the “enemy of the people.” Intelligence services and the FBI were demonized. Opponents in Congress were variously branded “crazy” and treasonous.
On the world stage, it was the same story. Trump turned US alliances into transactions.
Friendly partners like South Korea and Germany were accused of trying to “rip us off.”
By contrast, Trump repeatedly declared respect for the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin or North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, about whom he said “we fell in love.”
Throughout, his wrecking ball political presence increasingly dominated the Republican Party.
When Democrats launched two impeachment proceedings, Republicans backed him to the hilt to win acquittal.
And as an ex-president, his sway is undiminished.
Never mind that voters punished Trump-backed candidates in the 2022 midterms, and have repeatedly rejected efforts by conservatives to cut back on long-cherished liberties like the right to abortion.
The party remained in thrall, as witnessed by the acolytes trooping to the dingy Manhattan court house over the last few weeks to prove their loyalty.
Autocratic drift
Before he rode down the golden escalator of Trump Tower to announce his 2016 White House bid, Trump was a popular figure whom few took seriously.
He was famous mostly for the ruthless character he played on reality TV show “The Apprentice,” as well as for developing luxury buildings and golf resorts, and for his wife Melania, a former fashion model.
But academics have noted parallels between his evolution as a politician and those of autocrats in countries where democratic institutions exist only as facades, allowing populist showmen to take power.
In office, he relished the daily controversy, joking — wink, wink — about changing the US Constitution to stay in power indefinitely. “It drives them crazy,” he said.
Despite the sounds and the fury of four years of tweeting, he got some things done — Republicans boast that the economy was better back then, and he at least started the border wall he had pledged to build.
But as 2021’s Covid tragedy spiraled, Trump looked inept, and Biden’s old-school ways and calming centrist message propelled him to a comfortable majority.
It was then, as defeat became clear, that Trump yet again did the unthinkable by refusing to concede, ultimately unleashing a mob on the US Capitol who threated to hang his former vice president, Mike Pence.
