Editor’s note: On 1 August Donald Trump was charged with four counts related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election result, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and an attempt to obstruct an official proceeding. In this article, originally published on 13 May, David Bromwich looks at how the criminal charges could send the former US president to prison — or propel him back into the White House.
“All publicity is good publicity,” according to a familiar commercial maxim that Donald Trump seems to have lived by. But the happy truism may have found its limit on 9 May, when a Manhattan jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and ordered him to pay $5m to his accuser, the former Elle magazine columnist E Jean Carroll. The standard of “preponderance of evidence” in a civil suit was sufficient to favour the plaintiff over the defendant regarding an incident in the mid-Nineties at the designer clothing store Bergdorf Goodman. The accusation as well as the verdict appeared straightforward; though Trump, being Trump, is likely to draw out the process by an appeal. Yet this was the second — and probably the less important — of his courtroom battles in New York City alone.
Content from our partners
