After decades of living in the guardrail of legality, Donald Trump has finally been caught up in his own actions.
---
Lee este artículo en español.
---
The president of the United States between 2017 and 2021, and with aspirations to become president again starting in 2025, was on Thursday found guilty of 34 felony criminal charges stemming from actions he took to conceal in his business records a $130,000 payment he made to the pornography model known as Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an intimate encounter they had in 2006.
The historic implications of this monumental event represent an unprecedented shake-up of U.S. federal institutionality, which has been tested as never before by Trump’s irresponsible and reckless actions since he burst into politics.
With attacks on the courts, on his own government’s law enforcement agencies, on the opposition, on members of his own party, on the press, on Puerto Rico and, above all, on immigrants, Trump has violated every standard of civility that has existed for centuries in American public debate.
To his long list of reprehensible acts, which also includes the unusual and extremely serious action of not recognizing his defeat in 2020 and trying to prevent the transition, inciting a violent riot on January 6, 2021 in the Capitol that cost the lives of five people and the imprisonment of close to 500, is now added the very dishonorable distinction of being the first former president convicted of criminal offenses.
Predictably, Trump’s reaction to this was neither prudent nor decorous. He claimed, without any basis whatsoever, that the trial was “fixed” and that the presiding judge is “corrupt.” At this point, of course, no one would have expected anything different from a character who has demonstrated ad nauseam that he has absolutely no respect for democratic and civil norms.
Of Trump, who has three other criminal prosecutions pending, among these one for insurrection on Capitol Hill and another for conspiring to reverse the outcome adverse to him in 2020 in Georgia, although none of these cases will be heard before the election, no one should doubt any longer that he is incorrigible.
The challenge is more to institutionality and even to his own party, which has turned a blind eye to the former president’s incessant gaffes and, judging by the reactions Thursday of its top leaders, lacks the will to cease its support, even now that Trump is nothing less than a convicted felon.
It is up to the institutions, including Congress, the courts and law enforcement agencies, to handle firmly but prudently the other prosecutions of the former president and ensure that they are conducted in a climate of serenity and unassailability, despite the contumacity with which Trump, with the complicity of his party’s leadership, intemperately attacks the foundations of the law and order system and attempts, through intimidation, to derail the prosecutions.
The steadfastness shown by prosecutors and judges in New York, in Washington, in Florida and in Georgia, despite the inflammatory expressions and the climate of tension fostered by Trump and his enablers and supporters, deserves applause.
It is up to the Republican Party and the voters to examine Trump’s figure with a magnifying glass and ask themselves, once again, if a character with such enormous shortcomings deserves the precious opportunity to lead once again one of the longest-lived and most stable democracies on the planet.
America has had in Trump arguably its most important challenge since the Civil War. Despite the deep divisions of which Trump is both the result and instigator, the vigorous federal institutionality has so far managed to pass the test. The nation does not need, nor does it deserve, to go through that Stations of the Cross again.
---
This content was translated from Spanish to English using artificial intelligence and was reviewed by an editor before being published.
