Convicted Felon Donald Trump
34 down, 54 to go...
Reports of the devastation and violence of Israel’s invasion and bombardment of Rafah are harrowing. Please continue to call your Representative and Senators to let them know in no uncertain terms that the number one priority should be an immediate ceasefire and that we should not be sending any aid or weapons to Israel while their military commits these atrocities. You can find a guide to making these phone calls here. You can contact the White House to tell them the same here. And you can find verified GoFundMes to help Palestinians here.
At the end of May, former President Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts related to his attempts to illegally influence the 2016 election by covering up his affair with Stormy Daniels, a woman who starred in adult films and with whom Trump had an affair. He was convicted by a jury of his peers after nine hours of deliberation, making history as the first American president to ever be convicted of felony crimes. Today, Monday, he has his probation interview scheduled, the first part of the deliberations around his sentencing.
It’s worth stopping to think about it for a moment. The role of the president is to ensure that our laws are faithfully executed. Donald Trump has demonstrated time and time again that he has no respect for those laws, no intention to be governed by them, and does not believe he can or should be held to account for breaking them. He is propped up by the Republican party who couldn’t care less about his felonies as long as they get to cut taxes for rich people, cut public services for everyone else, and take fundamental rights away from all of us. Even in sentencing, he expects exceptions. It is highly unusual for sentencing interviews to happen virtually, and yet Trump will be calling in from Mar-a-Lago. Whether or not Trump will be sentenced to jail time is an open question.
And somehow, for a host of reasons, he is essentially a mere coin toss from winning this election and returning to the White House. Weirdly, the Constitution doesn’t actually have a lot to say on who is eligible to run for president. Making sure that this matters in the upcoming election, that it is given appropriate weight in voters' minds as they head to the polls, is contingent on us making it matter. We have to make sure that it breaks through our rigidly separate information bubbles, through the morass of parent-teacher conferences and bills and doctor’s appointments and shopping trips and vacations and all the other ands that make up our much more immediate concerns. Voters need to know that former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump is a convicted felon.
I have to admit, however, that branding Trump as a convicted felon as a shorthand for his unfitness for the office of the President makes me a little uncomfortable. “Convicted felon” is a moniker applied much too liberally by our so-called justice system, and once the label is applied, particularly to Black and brown people, it is notoriously difficult to shake. It keeps people from getting jobs and housing, prevents them from traveling to certain places, voting, and accessing some programs and services regardless of how much prison time they’ve served, community service hours they’ve completed, or recompense they’ve paid. We have an overly punitive justice system that defines people by their worst mistakes, often well beyond what is proportional to the crime they committed, and which does not account for mitigating circumstances, penalties served, or amends made.
Of course, Trump does not have mitigating circumstances. He has never faced consequences that actually impacted his quality of life, and he has never made amends. In fact after he was found liable for defaming and sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, he kept defaming her and was forced to pay her an additional $83 million. Trump famously took out a full page ad in the New York Times, calling for the death penalty in the Central Park Five case, and despite the exoneration of the Central Park Five, not only has refused to apologize for calling for their deaths, but in fact still seems to believe in their guilt. Trump has had every advantage, every opportunity, every resource, and yet he is still well known for ripping people off in his business ventures, used the presidency to enrich himself, his family, and his political allies.
Trump also faces about 50 additional felony charges. These charges include mishandling sensitive government records and obstructing the Department of Justice, notable not just because it shows how little care Trump gives to the presidency, but also because of the striking resemblance they bear to the many conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton that he is responsible for. Me thinks the gentleman doth protest too much.
And then of course, there are the two other cases where he has been charged for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, defy the will of the voters, and subvert the peaceful transfer of power. Just a couple of minor charges that are fundamentally and diametrically opposed to the job of president he is currently seeking.
It is unfortunately possible that we will not see the results of any of these remaining cases before we head to the polls in November. In addition to the advantages of his gender, race, and class, Trump also was also able to appoint several of the judges and Justices currently holding his fate in the palms of their money and influence grubbing hands. Most people, when heading through the criminal justice system, don’t have the advantage of having appointed three of the Justices on the Supreme Court who will decide whether they are immune from prosecution because of the results of the election they have been convicted of interfering in by a jury of their peers. And to add insult to injury, if Trump wins reelection, it’s likely that the two oldest conservatives, Sam Alito at 73 and Clarence Thomas at 75, will retire and allow Trump to appoint two 25 year old law students from the Federalist Society and we’ll be able to enjoy that insanity for the next 50 years.
Trump deserves to be known for his crimes. Not just those he was convicted of last month, or the felonies he still has pending. He deserves to be known for separating families at the border, and putting children in cages, for punishing his political enemies and exacerbating the COVID-19 pandemic and lying to the American public about it. But his conviction in a court of law by a jury of his peers does, for some voters, prove beyond the shadow of political motivations and partisanship that Trump is only out for himself, and that he is willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get what he wants.
I don’t really have a good answer to the discomfort I feel at labeling Trump a convicted felon. On the one hand it reinforces our tendency to reduce people to the labels slapped on them by a discriminatory and harmful system. On the other hand, Trump went into that system with every possible advantage and still came out guilty, and if that shorthand helps remind people that he’s eager to break the laws he’s meant to protect then it's both useful and necessary.
Either way you look at it, however, one thing is clear: we really, really, really cannot let that man become president again. If you want to help keep that from happening, head to Vote Save America and sign up today.
You raise a good point, Sara, and I almost wish you hadn't!
But since Republicans and the right-wing ecosphere have no qualms about using false sticky labels for Biden, other Democrats, and progressive issues, I think we need to use this one true sticky label for Convicted Felon Donald Trump.