Donald Trump is officially a felon.

And it won't change anything.

Jun 03, 2024

I wouldn’t say that I felt any strong emotion upon learning that Donald Trump is now a convicted felon. As someone who periodically opines about politics, I’m supposed to make some obligatory gesture towards how the fate of the republic and democracy was at stake here, but ultimately, this was a case about a shady businessman doing shady businessman dealings and banging a porn star. (It’s crazy that he bribed Stormy Daniels to shut up about their affair instead of just having her killed like Boening.) But I don’t know that I’d say I wasn’t anticipating this moment either, if only because it will add some depraved entertainment to an election featuring an octogenarian genocide enabler and Project 2025 on the ballot. For the next week, my response to anyone discussing this will be, “The worst thing in all of this is the hypocrisy!”

The most accurate way to describe this event, which is not really the most flattering to the state of our politics, is not a single person in America will change their mind on anything. If Donald Trump were a normal president, this would be a campaign-wrecking development, but Joe Biden hasn’t been stumping or even making a halfhearted case for why anyone should vote for him; it’s clear the Democrats intend to have this verdict do the heavy lifting for them.

The entire country superimposed their blowzy fixations on the rapturous CNN coverage of this trial, and steam is coming out of their ears as they try to formulate a take hot enough to meet the moment. MAGA-types are posting about how the American Dream is finished, and libs are popping champagne like Paris just got liberated. Justice Samuel Alito’s wife will put a “FREE DONALD TRUMP” pin on his jacket while he isn’t looking, while Stormy Daniels is celebrating with a 34-man gangbang with Jeff Tiedrich first up. It also feels perfectly in the moment to watch contrarian-brained cheerleaders for the Law And Order Party contort themselves into inadvertent support for police abolitionism or lashing out against the American carceral state just because they worship a whopping baby who is unquestionably unbound by any higher or finer concerns whatsoever.

The predominant feeling around Trumpism—if that's what you want to call this combination of smash-and-grab sadism and shameless disregard for the common good—is a claustrophobia edging toward mania. It is the feeling of sitting in a car in dead-stopped highway traffic, someone biking on the sidewalk right next to a cycling lane, a TV blaring on a commercial break as sunlight beams through the windows, listening to someone scrolling through TikTok, the idle and unreasoning resentment of someone ordering ahead of you at a deli. The ridiculous and implicating fact that Trump really was elected President of the United States continues to supersede any kind of sober analysis of the cultural rot and ambient grift and institutional decay that made Trump’s celebrity and ultimately his presidency possible. Then again, as someone who lives downhill and downwind of the status quo, I’m not particularly invested in explaining or preserving why Back To Normal needs to prevail here—I am emotionally invested in this election to the extent that Democrats are better than Republicans much in the same way that herpes is preferable to AIDS.

But, in the absence and abandonment of this long low moment, I expect Trump to be sentenced in the way that rich people face consequences in America, which is barely at all. The Onion’s headline this past week read, “Trump: ‘We’ll take this all the way to the Supreme Court I appointed.’” He will take it even further—all the way to Judge Judy. If America were a decent and humane society, Trump would be sent to a gladiator academy or San Quinton, or tossed into a county jail in upstate New York. And if he wins the election, he will have to be president from a jail cell, directing the Indonesian war from a Samsung phone, hosting state dinners serving only Ramen burritos and Cheetos, and eating lunch in the cafeteria with Rishi Sunak and Lil’ Pump.

In a sense, this trial was a political witch hunt, but not how conservatives would frame it: Of all the ways Trump has unleashed the full idiotic force of American sadism and that his criminality and blithe sociopathy have placed American political life under his singular damp command, this has to be the stupidest way to prosecute him. The emptiness and parlousness that Trump correctly adduced as proof of a great and longstanding betrayal of the public trust only seems to be inverted among liberal media figures and Democrat lifers as a disassociative reverence and infuriating abstraction about the inherent goodness of American institutions. The verdict was read as if the judge and jury listened to the Mueller, She Wrote podcast. Much has been made about how Trump was falling asleep or possibly soiling himself during the hearings, but this verdict is ultimately unsurprising because he definitely did that shit and Donny’s belt was working harder than his lawyers.

The crabbed and pathetic—if not bleakly hilarious—outcome of this trial will be laid bare in a forthcoming FiveThirtyEight poll revealing that Trump and Biden are still neck-and-neck. Within 24 hours of the guilty verdict, the Trump campaign donation site crashed before amassing $52.8 million in donations. Despite his presidency serving as a bulletproof avatar of a brutal and arbitrary and manifestly untenable status quo, this criminal conviction is likely to bolster Trump’s anti-establishment image. His appeal is something much more like fan-fiction than politics; some of the swirly-eyed marauders who sacked Capitol Hill were not only convinced of some incontrovertible evidence of Trump’s electoral victory but they also believed in a congeries of brutal and incoherent fantasies of his satanic enemies’ soaring cosmic perfidy. Trump is also a rancid aspirational figure, a gilded living metonym for a replacement-level asshole achieving a thwarted idea of business success, representing the exaltation and triumph of his follower’s smaller cruelties.

Donald Trump does not become president of a nation by accident: That nation would have to be depraved enough to produce someone like Donald Trump in the first place, sick enough to let someone like Donald Trump seize power, distracted and deluded enough to justify his casual public defilements, and defeated enough to almost run it back again. In a country where people do not demand anything more from their government than sadism and theatrical pomp, Donald Trump delivers truckloads of both. He has only ever risen as far and fast as he did because his opposition is too weak and too compromised to offer anything other than its own softer versions. In the absence of any capacity or will to demand anything more from it, politics just becomes what people argue about instead of what is actually happening to them. It’s just a TV show featuring different brands of stage-managed decline, and people watch it as such. This is the one big thing that Trump understands—not just that he can do whatever vile thing he wants, but how many millions there are who will elect him president again in what amounts to a casting decision for their own lurid fantasies.