Donald Trump leaving the courtroom Thursday after he was found guilty on 34 felony counts/AP

By Lisa Van Dusen

May 30th, 2024

With Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts by a Manhattan jury on Thursday, the election campaign in which Mr. Trump’s improbable candidacy has provided a relentless source of previously unthinkable headlines, norm-blastings and legal melodrama now has a chance to correct to something resembling baseline reality, as opposed to debasing reality show.

Will this moment of breakthrough in America’s post-Obama psychodrama produce a return to the sort of reasonably plausible politics that characterized the pre-2016 era in the world’s flagship democracy? That pre-chaos utopia in which the closest thing to a combustible Trumpian disruptor was Joe the Plumber?

Or will the post-internet narrative warfare that has produced a string of gobsmacking propaganda extravaganzas and democracy-degrading set pieces over the past eight years escalate into something more determinative and gruesomely cinematic than even the swarming of the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021?

Will it be a pendulum swing back toward sanity, or a “Cue the cosplay Vikings” moment in which an army of out-of-work actors, so-called QAnon shamans and weaponized wankers supply the Cecil B. DeMille crowd corroboration for Donald Trump’s next performative tour de force?

Trump’s status as both a former president and convicted felon is indeed unprecedented. In January 2001, on his last full day in office, Bill Clinton reached a deal with Ken Starr’s successor as independent counsel, Robert W. Ray, to avoid a post-presidential indictment for his misleading statements to a grand jury about Monica Lewinsky.

Will it be a pendulum swing back toward sanity, or a ‘Cue the cosplay Vikings’ moment in which an army of out-of-work actors, so-called QAnon Shamans and weaponized wankers supply the Cecil B. DeMille crowd corroboration for Donald Trump’s next performative tour de force?

But Donald Trump is no Bill Clinton. In a foreign-policy discrediting, hate-tweeting, vulgarity-normalizing, scenery-chewing rampage through American political convention in general and the institution of the presidency in particular, Trump has been impeached twice as opposed to once, been criminally convicted as opposed to not, and generated a sex scandal involving not a naïve White House intern but a quite-canny porn star. Donald Trump has been such an effective one-man burnisher of the Clinton legacy that at a certain point in 2016, we began referring to him as “Clinton surrogate Donald Trump.”

Trump is also a blatant, full-frontal puppet of the world’s anti-democracy interests, as was obvious throughout his presidency, throughout his propagation of the “Big Lie” characterization of the 2020 election results and in his treasonous incitement of a deadly riot in an attempt to prevent President Joe Biden from taking office.

Since then, the propaganda tactics that have repeatedly hijacked America’s political discourse, monopolized media coverage, legitimized Trump’s preposterous presidential candidacy and de-legitimized Biden’s authentic one, have only grown more brazen. Whether that trendline will now see a crescendo in the form of a disruptive, diversionary, violent response to Trump’s conviction by the same narrative impresarios who delivered to history the feces-smearing, cop-killing cast of characters that made January 6, 2021 such an unprecedented triumph of anti-democracy stuntery, remains to be seen.

On Thursday evening, President Biden said on X: “There’s only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: At the ballot box.”

Meanwhile, in the firehose of falsehoods wielded by Fox News and backed by the GOP bucket brigade, a miscarriage of justice was being vehemently decried — nominally on behalf of a sedition proxy who should’ve been tried for treason but also in aid of wittingly obfuscating the truth to rationalize an otherwise ludicrous election narrative. Revolution requires the discrediting of the status quo to pre-emptively disarm resistance to its destruction, even if, as in this case, the people lying about it are just as bamboozled as the voters they’re bamboozling.

New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan has scheduled Trump’s sentencing for July 11th, four days before the Republican National Convention. There are a number of possible outcomes in that process, from no jail time to home detention to years of prison.

The implications for American democracy and therefore democracy in general will depend on just how crazy events become based on the plot twist of Trump’s conviction and sentencing. Will this mark the beginning of the end of Donald Trump’s utility as a democratic disruptor, or just the beginning of an uglier endgame?

Policy Magazine Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen was a Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington. She covered the 2008 presidential campaign as a columnist for Sun Media.