Last night I was proud to be a New Yorker.

Actually, I’m proud of that most of the time. (Exceptions: Kitty Genovese. The ’95 Knicks.) But I was especially proud when twelve brave and honest ordinary New Yorkers had the courage to do what the Republican-controlled US Senate would not—twice…..what the entire craven, erstwhile GOP has been unwilling to do….what the US justice system at large had been unable to do for more than 60 years, and that is hold Donald J. Trump accountable for a few of his many crimes.

While Congress and the federal judiciary are mired in the grip of the neo-fascist Federalist Society, New York State got ‘er done, as they say in Real ‘Merica. So hats off to that jury, and to Alvin Bragg and his team, and to Judge Juan Merchan, who presided over this fraught case masterfully and fairly, despite constant attacks from the defendant and his army of brownshirt wannabes.

What follows from here is anyone’s guess, but for one fleeting moment, we got a W. Which is more than the Knicks managed in Game 7 of the ’95 Eastern Conference Semis.

FLORIDA MAN CONVICTED

As David Leonhardt of the New York Times succinctly put it this morning, the long of the law has finally come up with Donald Trump. After 77 years of outrageously undeserved good luck, combined with a Roy Cohn-like willingness to manipulate the system, and all the benefits that obscene inherited wealth and privilege bring, not to mention a cult of fanatics and one of our two major parties defending him, he was no longer able to dodge at least this one situation.

Leonhardt:

(Trump) has spent decades on the edge of legal trouble. First, he was a New York businessman whose company violated discrimination laws, failed to repay debts and flirted with bankruptcy. Then, he was a president who impeded an investigation of his 2016 campaign, tried to overturn the result of his re-election defeat and refused to return classified documents he took from the White House.

Throughout, his central strategy was the same: delay. Try to push off legal problems for as long as possible and hope that a solution somehow presented itself. It usually worked, too. And it seemed to be on the verge of working again this year, with two federal trials and one state trial in Georgia all unlikely to finish before Election Day.

Yesterday, however, a criminal jury judged Trump for the first time. The verdict was guilty, 34 times, pronounced late in the afternoon in downtown Manhattan. The prosecutors argued that Trump had falsified business records to hide a sexual affair from voters and corrupt the 2016 election. After two days of deliberation, the 12 jurors agreed. Trump has become the first former president of the United States to be a convicted felon.

Barring a reversal on appeal, or some weird intervention by the Supreme Court (don’t rule it out), Trump will now carry the scarlet F for the rest of his miserable life. That’s especially important as this looks to be the only one of Trump’s multiple criminal trials that will take place before Election Day.

And the beauty of it is, because this is a state conviction, even if Trump somehow goes on to win the presidency despite this historic stain, he can’t pardon himself because it’s not a federal case. (So let’s keep a Republican out of the governor’s mansion in Albany, shall we?) Apparently he could, however, sue to have the conviction vacated on the grounds that imprisonment would keep him from fulfilling his constitutional duties as president. But we’ll cross the Francis Scott Key Bridge when we come to it.)

Former Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois), excommunicated from the GOP for opposing Trump and serving on the House J6 Committee, wrote in The Bulwark:

It is a sad day for our nation….this isn’t a point of pride. Despite this verdict, America still looks like so many struggling democracies, where strongmen violate laws and bend the system to their will. The anti-Trump coalition, this uneasy and awkward alliance, must stand together, united to defend the sanctity of our system and the presidency.

He’s right of course. But at the same time, it is a point of pride that we were able to overcome the Republican gaslighting and Trump’s own legal maneuvering and at last hold him accountable in a court of law, the way most reasonable nations do with corrupt former leaders. (See; France, Italy, South Korea, Peru.)

Trump now faces 20 years in prison:. (That’s four years apiece for each of the 34 charges, to be served consecutively, not concurrently, though New York state has a 20 year cap.) Of course, with no prior convictions, and a non-violent crime, and at his advanced age, it’s unlikely he’ll do any time at all. Still, it’s sobering. And let’s not forget that the judge who will decide his sentence is a man whom he has spent weeks attacking and insulting. His family members too.

There also remains the principle that the boss of a conspiracy deserves at least as much punishment as his foot soldiers. Michael Cohen got three years for his role in this exact scheme….and he expressed remorse and cooperated with prosecutors, neither of which Trump did in the slightest, of course.

So we’ll see on July 11. Meanwhile, the Times reports: “Before sentencing, Trump will sit with a psychologist or a social worker and have a chance to explain why he deserves a light punishment.” What I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall in that room, a scene that is BEGGING to be a “Saturday Night Live” sketch….except that what Trump will say is already beyond parody. Witness his rambling, unhinged speech at Trump Tower the morning after the verdict was announced.

I know a lot of people—Trumpies, and even non-Trumpies, and a number of hardcore anti-Trumpies—have pooh-poohed the New York case as trivial. It was a “mere” hush money trial, involving a porn star, and did not exactly have the epoch-shattering gravitas of the Florida documents case, or the January 6 case in DC, or even the election interference case in Georgia. Right?

Wrong. This is not a “hush money” case, except insofar as that payoffs were part of election interference. Which is how we should always always always—correctly—frame it. The whole case hinged on the fact that the payments to Stormy Daniels were designed to avoid damage to Trump’s presidential campaign. If it were just about hiding a one night stand from Melania, he would have been acquitted. This case was anything but trivial. It is of a piece with the election interference cases in Georgia and DC.

THE ART OF THE (IM)POSSIBLE

So that’s the legal end of it. Politics is a different matter.

There is of course a lot of wild speculation about whether the convictions will hurt Trump, help him, or have no effect. In the words of Tevye, I’ll tell you:

I don’t know.

But first of all, it doesn’t matter.

Just like the impeachments which we correctly carried through with despite the fact that we knew there would be no convictions by the cowardly Republican-controlled Senate, Trump has to be held accountable for his various crimes if we have any hope of maintaining the rule of law in this country. That is true even if his convictions have no effect on the election: we do not pursue criminal prosecution for political purposes, no matter how much Trump and his fans want us to believe that we do. That’s what they do.

I would even go so far as to say we had to pursue this prosecution even if we knew or feared that conviction would help Trump politically, again, just as we did with the impeachments. Because in long run, doing otherwise would be worse for American democracy. Please recall: Trump’s two impeachments, even absent convictions, did not cause him to be re-elected as Republicans had warned, Br’er Rabbit-like.

So, having just said that the as-yet-unknown political fallout of yesterday’s events doesn’t matter, let me simultaneously argue that it does. Very much.

Because regardless of what people say, genuinely or with an agenda, it’s kind of a big deal when a former US president is convicted of 34 felonies. Democrats and other anti-Trump forces should shut that from the rooftops and never let the Republican Party or American voters forget it.

What will Trumpists say? They’re already saying it: that it was a sham trial, politically motivated, orchestrated by Biden, blah blah blah. All lies, and total projection of what they want to do. But let’s not let them get away with that and control the narrative. We have to counter it with our own message, which is the truth. And you can tell that Republican leaders are afraid of that truth because of the desperate ferocity of their outrage over the verdict and their pathetic efforts to show Donald Trump how much they are on his side.

POLL POSITION

For some time now polls have shown—remarkably—that a small but significant number of would-be Trump voters have said they would abandon him (or at least consider abandoning him) if he were convicted of crimes. That always surprised me. Why would that be the thing that changed their minds after sticking with him through so much else? Especially when one could easily see MAGA Nation chalking a conviction up to the Deep State unfairly going after him, which is exactly what Donny & Co. pre-emptively claimed, and have doubled down on overnight?

Yet now that it’s happened, we’re instantly seeing a Joey Chitwood-style, screeching rubber, tire-smoking 180 to the received wisdom that of course it won’t have any effect.

The pessimism is understandable, because we’ve been burned before, over and over. There have been so many things over the past nine years that should have sunk Trump, beginning with “McCain’s no hero,” all the way through Access Hollywood, revelation of the Stormy Daniels incident itself, Russian interference in 2016, wanton corruption while Trump was in office, the Zelenskyy call, telling people to drink bleach, and on and on all the way up to and including an attempted coup. So we can be forgiven for being beaten down, and jaded, and—Charlie Brown and the football-like—bearish on the notion that this at last will be the camelback-breaking straw.

But it might be. And we shouldn’t forfeit the chance to make it so. If not, it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is exactly what the right wing would like.

Here’s Bill Kristol in The Bulwark:

Inflection points don’t inflect themselves. We have to act to make certain moments inflection points.

Later on, long after the struggle is over, commentators will say this or that moment was an inflection point. But it only became an inflection point because people at the time, in real time, made it an inflection point.

So Trump has been found guilty by a jury of his peers of 34 felony counts. But it’s up to the rest of us to make sure our fellow citizens know this, understand this, grasp the significance of this. It’s up to us to make sure Trump and his apparatchiks don’t succeed in gaslighting Americans about this.

The coming weeks—and there only about 20 of them before Election Day—are uncharted waters, and promise to be rough ones. (Eddie would go? Yeah. But in this case, we are all Eddie, and we have no choice.) No one knows how any of it will shake out, including the consequences of yesterday’s verdict.

But one thing we should absolutely not do is cede the fascists an advantage and downplay how damning yesterday was for Donald Trump, and the starker-than-ever electoral choice that is now before the American people.

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Photo: Justin Lane/Pool Photo via AP