Littwin: Jurors said Trump is guilty 34 times over. Now it’s up to voters to say it just one more time.

I wish I could say that my first reaction upon hearing the news that Donald Trump is, at long last, a convicted felon was to cheer the New York jury for getting the verdict so absolutely right and doing it so quickly.

But, in truth, my first reaction was to wonder whether that hard-earned verdict will even matter. 

Whatever anyone says, including those who talk to pollsters, no one really knows what role the verdict will play come the November election. I just know that even though it’s entirely unprecedented for a former president to be convicted on 34 felony counts — or on any felony counts, for that matter — it still felt, and feels, like we’ve seen this movie before.

The precedent, when it comes to Trump, is that nothing changes for the MAGA cultists, for his hypocritical GOP enablers, for the tens of millions of voters who, in two presidential elections, have maintained that nothing Trump can do could sufficiently offend them.

We saw how the GOP primary went. We saw how the polls rose with each Trump indictment. We watch as Trump rallies grow ever more unhinged and as the cheers grow ever louder.

We saw how Nikki Haley, after saying Trump was completely unfit for office, endorsed him. Will so-called normal Republicans and so-called normal Republican-leaning independents do the same?

We see Marco Rubio, “liddle Marco,” send out a tweet Thursday comparing the New York trial to a Castro show trial. He used to say Trump was unfit for office, too. Now he wants to be his vice president. 

We’ve watched the Trumpian plot against American democracy play out, and we look in dismay at how many people seem to be rooting for the democracy deniers.

Yes, the jurors gave us a chance to rethink the issue. But two-thirds of Republicans — after years of time to think it over — still say they believe the 2020 election was rigged.

At the time, you may remember, two-thirds of House Republicans tried to abet a Trump coup, voting for fake electors. How many of them have repented?

Trump says the true verdict will come in November. I’d like to hear him someday say that while — at minimum — wearing ankle bracelets. But what I fear, as much as anything, is what the November verdict might be and what it might say about America.

You know the plot to date. Trump outlined it for us before he was ever elected in his kill-someone-on-5th-Avenue hypothesis. 

Is this verdict where the plot twists, or is this where the twisting is simply a contorted return to the same old ugly normal? I looked at the betting markets.

This is what we’ve seen before. Trump does something horrific, say inciting an unprecedented assault on the Capitol. He says, when he finally calls off the rioters, that he loves them. Yes, loves them. Just as he now says that the insurrectionists, the rioters, the violent ones and otherwise, are “hostages.” 

And none of it seems to matter.

Over this past year, judges and juries have found the presumptive GOP nominee to exhibit a lack of respect for election law, for civil law, for criminal law, for any law that gets in Trump’s way.

Doesn’t matter.

I remember when Mitch McConnell, of all people, said Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for events of Jan. 6, calling Trump “disgraceful.”

Didn’t matter. 

Didn’t even matter to McConnell, who now says he’ll vote for Trump regardless. Like Haley does. Like Rubio. Like one gutless so-called GOP leader after another.

When he is judged, by the Colorado Supreme Court no less, to be an official insurrectionist and therefore kicked off the Colorado ballot, you knew that wouldn’t matter. 

The U.S. Supreme Court not only overturned the Colorado Supreme Court, but never even broached the subject of whether Trump was an insurrectionist. The opinion basically said Trump’s behavior was, as it always seems to be, irrelevant to the case, just like Samuel Alito’s flags are irrelevant to his ability to judge fairly. Hey, I saw a tweet where someone said that after the conviction, Alito’s wife turned their entire house upside down.

Come on, what does matter?

Trump is adjudicated in a civil lawsuit to have sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. He is convicted in a civil fraud case and fined nearly $355 million.

He is a rapist. He is a fraud.

Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter.

So now, he is convicted of fixing the books in order to cover up the $130,000 payoff to a porn star. The crooked coverup, the jury found, was in an effort to keep the Stormy Daniels story from the public in the runup to the 2016 election. The coverup plot was born, as the prosecutors explained, in the catch-and-kill political deal made with the National Enquirer. This is how Trump operates. It’s how he always operated. It’s how he’ll operate forevermore.

Does it matter?

Should we have any hope that a conviction says something about Trump that people didn’t already know?

Should we have any hope that when people hear Trump say the case was rigged, that the judge was corrupt, that the system is corrupt, that the idea of 12 people tried and true is for suckers, it will seem crazy to them that he might be elected president again? 

I don’t know. 

When 12 people — yes, in liberal Manhattan, but 12 Americans who were called to duty — saw the overwhelming evidence that Trump tried to defraud the American people, they came back with blazing speed to say it had to be true.

This verdict was not only a judgment on Trump’s sleazy and illegal campaign tactics. It was a judgment on Trump’s entire adult life. It was a statement that these jurors knew a long con when they saw one. 

Come on, it’s Trump University. It’s the Trump bibles. It’s all of Trump’s lies. And most of all, it’s a verdict on Trump’s basic indecency.

The funny thing is, Trump’s lawyers made the case against him as completely as the prosecution did. But you can’t really blame them. It was certainly at the behest of their client that they had to spend so much time arguing that he never had sex with the porn star. It was certainly at his behest that they had to spend so much time arguing that Trump thought he was paying Michael Cohen for legal services and not reimbursing him. 

Was the entire Trump defense built on a lie? Sure, Michael Cohen is a liar. But Trump, through his lawyers, lied with impunity, without conscience, without any concept that everyone had to know he was lying.

But will it matter? It only has to matter on the margins, remember. Trump may be leading in the polls, but the polls are close. A two percent change could mean everything.

Sentencing is scheduled to come on July 11, just days before he will be officially nominated to run for president at the GOP convention.

At the scheduled hearing, convicted felon Donald Trump could be sent to jail, along with a Secret Service entourage. But that seems too far-fetched to imagine. He’ll certainly be fined, again. He’ll probably get community service. Someone said the service should be for him to drain a real swamp.

Still, Trump can run for president as a convicted felon. He could serve as a convicted felon. He could conceivably serve as president while in prison. The sad fact is that the Founding Fathers never considered that a convicted felon would be elected president, so they didn’t bother writing about it in the Constitution. They assumed that voters — at least those in the Electoral College — would reject such a person. They assumed the Congress would impeach and convict such a person. They may have had an Aaron Burr on their hands, but they never dreamed of a Donald Trump.

Trump’s greatest service to the community would, of course, be to go away. Republican leaders have silently hoped for years he’d go away. But he won’t. He didn’t go away after trying to steal an election. He won’t go away for a book-fixing conviction, even one that comes with 34 felony counts.

And Trump knows this is the only trial he’ll face before the election. For a variety of reasons — many of them at the dirtied hands of the Supreme Court — Trump won’t be tried by November for his attempted coup, not in Washington, not in Georgia. He won’t be tried for absconding with classified documents. 

And so, he’ll be nominated. And defended, by a Speaker of the House here, a carpetbagging canoodler there, would-be Trump running mates everywhere.

Meanwhile, Trump uses the verdict as a way to sell hats. I swear this is true. In a fundraising email, Trump calls it “the darkest day in American history,” and advises his followers, as a show of support, to buy a black “No Surrender” MAGA hat.

All you need to get the hat is 47 bucks. And a willingness not to see what 12 New York jurors, who were presented with all the evidence, saw so clearly.

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