It’s Official: Donald Trump Is a Convicted Felon

A jury found Donald Trump guilty on all 34 counts on Thursday, marking the first time in U.S. history that a former president has been convicted of a felony.

The jury reached its decision after deliberating for less than 10 hours. Judge Juan Merchan announced that Trump will be sentenced on July 11 at 10 a.m., mere days before the Republican National Convention will take place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Trump was accused of using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He faced 34 felony charges in the case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime in the first degree.

In order to find Trump guilty of felony-level falsification of business documents, the jurors had to unanimously agree that he did so in order to further an underlying or separate crime. But before entering the jury chamber—and against the best efforts of Trump’s legal team—Merchan ruled that the jury did not need to agree on what the separate or underlying crimes were.

Trump listened to the verdict wearing a deep frown, while his attorneys looked away from their client.

Just before the jury began deliberating Trump’s fate, the former president slammed his own legal defense, seemingly disapproving of the strategy they had chosen. In frantic, back-to-back posts on Truth Social Wednesday morning, Trump suggested that he had wanted an advice of counsel defense, a strategy that negates the element of criminal fraud when the advice stems from “reasonable reliance” on the advice of a person’s legal counsel.

His attorneys had indicated in March that they had no intention of employing that strategy. Instead, they wanted to include evidence that centered around the lawyers in Trump’s decision to dole out hush-money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels—a strategy that Merchan described as a “presence of counsel” defense and that he ultimately deemed would be too confusing for the jury to navigate.

The outcome will have historic ramifications not just for Trump but for the entire country. If Trump does end up being sentenced to prison, it remains to be seen how the presumptive GOP presidential nominee will attempt to continue his bid for reelection from a jailhouse—a possibility that many of his followers are falsely claiming the Secret Service has already explored.

Regardless, several prominent far-right politicians have already indicated that they will continue to support Trump even if he’s convicted of a felony. In an embarrassing show during an August GOP primary debate, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and former Vice President Mike Pence all indicated that they would continue to support Trump as the Republican nominee even if he’s found guilty in his criminal trials. Others have gone even further: In November, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene told Piers Morgan that she would “absolutely” continue to support Trump’s presidency, even “from a prison cell.”

And Americans are right behind them. An April NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that nearly two-thirds of Republicans would still vote for Trump even if he was found guilty. Only November will show if they make good on that promise.

This story has been updated.

Less than two weeks after its installation, the pier constructed by the United States to facilitate aid into Gaza has been completely removed after it broke apart in the water.

The Pentagon admitted Thursday that the remaining parts of the $320 million boondoggle were dismantled after the pier was damaged in rough waters off the coast of Gaza on May 28, rendering it unusable. Israel has closed several land crossings, preventing aid from getting into the Gaza Strip, and the Israel Defense Forces have fired on food convoys and looked the other way as settlers have blocked aid from entering the remaining open land crossings. The U.S. has thus far resorted to aerial aid drops and, more recently, the manmade pier to facilitate aid, rather than demand Israel open up crossings and crack down on settler obstruction of aid delivery.

Now, according to Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh, the pier is going offline for at least the next week as it is repaired and rebuilt in Ashkelon. Since its construction, the pier had allowed for only 1,000 tons of humanitarian aid to be delivered to Gaza. According to United Nations World Food Programme chief economist Arif Husain, northern Gaza alone requires 4,500 tons of food a month.

At the beginning of May, prior to Israel’s Rafah offensive, the U.N. declared that northern Gaza had entered “full-blown famine.” The situation has worsened since then. It’s clear that, even when operational, the pier had hardly made a dent in the dire situation. Now, battered, broken, and eventually towed ashore, it stands as a symbol of American fecklessness in the face of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Asked on Tuesday about the damage sustained by the costly pier, Singh said, “If you want to characterize it as a failure, I leave it to you.”

Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s recent pardon of Daniel Perry, who shot and killed a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020, is receiving backlash from state attorneys general around the country.

A group of 14 state attorneys general, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, sent a letter on Wednesday to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s office urging the Department of Justice to look into whether Perry violated any federal civil rights laws. In addition to James, the letter was signed by the Democratic attorneys general of Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Vermont, and the District of Columbia.

“We urge the Department to open an investigation into whether Mr. Perry violated federal criminal law, including specifically several federal criminal civil rights laws,” the letter states. “We note that whether or not Texas law gives Mr. Perry a defense to state prosecution for his actions here, Texas law does not prevent a federal prosecution for Mr. Perry’s act of killing someone for racial reasons in order to prevent him from exercising constitutional rights.”

Two weeks ago, Abbott pardoned Perry, an Uber driver who was convicted in 2023 of murdering anti–police brutality protester Garrett Foster at an Austin Black Lives Matter rally in 2020 and sentenced to 25 years in prison. After Perry’s conviction, his messages and social media posts were released to the public, where he self-identified as “a racist” and wrote of wanting to “go to Dallas to shoot looters.” With his pardon, Abbott even restored Perry’s firearm rights, claiming that “Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney.”

The attorneys general pointed to those particular laws as being a major reason for their letter.

Mr. Foster was openly carrying a firearm at the protest—an act that is legal in Texas—and Mr. Perry claimed that he had acted in self-defense, relying on Texas’ so-called “stand your ground” law. In pardoning Mr. Perry, Governor Abbott also cited to Texas’ “stand your ground” law. The undersigned Attorneys General are concerned that these “stand your ground” laws encourage vigilantes to attend protests armed and ready to shoot and kill those who exercise their First Amendment rights.

Abbott has openly feuded with the federal government about migrants and LGBTQ+ rights, and sent state troopers in full riot gear to violently clear college Gaza solidarity encampments. In spite of, or more likely because of his actions, Donald Trump has Abbott on his short list as a possible vice president.

Chief Justice John Roberts on Thursday rejected a request by Democratic senators to discuss Samuel Alito’s impartiality following concerns about a pair of January 6–aligned flags that had been spotted flying at two of the justice’s residences.

In a letter addressed to Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Roberts claimed that “the format proposed—a meeting with leaders only of one party who have expressed an interest in matters currently pending before the court—simply underscores that participating in such a meeting would be inadvisable.”

The rejection follows a similar shutdown by Alito himself, who issued a letter to the pair on Wednesday stating that he would not recuse himself from lawsuits relating to the 2020 presidential election—specifically, Trump v. United States—and claiming that his impartiality had not “reasonably” come into question.

Alito was accused of compromising the court’s impartiality after a “Stop the Steal” upside-down U.S. flag was spotted at his house in Arlington, Virginia, and an “Appeal to Heaven” flag—a Revolutionary War symbol adopted by Christian nationalists—was seen flying at the justice’s New Jersey vacation home.

Alito has attempted to wipe his hands of both incidents, blaming the controversial messaging on his wife, whom he described as “fond of flying flags.” Her “reasons for flying the flag are not relevant” to his ability to weigh in on the immunity case, he said in his letter to Durbin and Whitehouse.

But Democrats aren’t letting up on the issue, digging up alternative pathways to hold Alito to account that don’t rely on his having the final say. In a New York Times op-ed published Wednesday, Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin argued that the executive branch could still step in to challenge the judiciary’s ethics.

“The U.S. Department of Justice … can petition the other seven justices to require Justices Alito and [Clarence] Thomas to recuse themselves not as a matter of grace but as a matter of law,” Raskin posited.

“This recusal statute, if triggered, is not a friendly suggestion,” Raskin continued. “It is Congress’s command, binding on the justices, just as the due process clause is. The Supreme Court cannot disregard this law just because it directly affects one or two of its justices. Ignoring it would trespass on the constitutional separation of powers because the justices would essentially be saying that they have the power to override a congressional command.”

The Trump campaign is predictably resorting to the boss’s tactics amid new allegations that he used a racial slur to refer to a Black contestant on The Apprentice—and that it was caught on tape.

Responding to the bombshell claims by former Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt, originally published in Slate, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung launched into a tirade on Twitter on Thursday.

“Prove it, bitch,” Cheung wrote.

“You can’t, because it’s a fake and bullshit story your dumb ass is peddling because Biden is hemorrhaging support from Black Americans.”

There’s no evidence to suggest that Pruitt, who was until this year bound by a nondisclosure agreement, is lying about Trump’s use of the n-word, or about his rigging the show so that Kwame Jackson lost in the finale of the series’s first season. But it is very much on brand for the Trump campaign, and for Cheung, an apparent “virtuoso at mimicking his boss,” in particular, to reflexively dismiss the story as “fake and bullshit.”

The Biden campaign, while not exactly “hemorrhaging support,” is struggling to retain the Black support on which Biden rode to the Democratic nomination, and eventually the White House, in 2020. According to a New York Times poll, Biden is winning only 63 percent of support from Black registered voters in a one-on-one race with Trump, down from the 92 percent of Black voters who supported him in 2020.

Meanwhile, Trump, who recently spoke at a rally in the South Bronx, is making a play to appeal to Black voters. It is unlikely that dismissing credible allegations of racism online is part of that plan. But when the only tool the campaign has is a hammer, everything, even the candidate’s reported use of racial slurs, looks like a nail.