A crowd gathers at Trump Tower after a guilty verdict against former U.S. President Donald Trump in his hush money trial.Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
Within minutes of the guilty verdict against Donald Trump, the fundraising appeals began to pour out on social media.
“The best way to fight back right now against the sham trial is to donate to the Trump campaign,” urged Republican senator J.D. Vance.
”Don’t just get angry about this travesty, get even!” added his Republican colleague Marco Rubio.
“Stand with President Trump today by making a donation to support his campaign to Save America,” wrote Elise Stefanik, the Republican representative who, like Mr. Vance and Mr. Rubio, is seen as a possible vice-presidential running mate for Mr. Trump.
Ms. Stefanik linked to a fundraising website that had already been remade with an image of Mr. Trump alongside the text: “POLITICAL PRISONER.”
Trump supporters call for riots and violent retribution after verdict
Mr. Trump’s sentence will not be delivered until July, and he is expected to appeal.
The felony conviction of a former president seeking a return to the White House is without precedent in the United States, a sobering moment for a country that has seen itself as a global democratic standard-bearer but has spent years grappling with the candidacy of Mr. Trump, a former television entertainer who has eschewed political norms.
The guilty verdict, some Democrats said Thursday, constituted a victory. “It’s a win for an idea. The idea that we all follow the same rules. The rule of law won today,” Eric Swalwell, a Congressman from California, wrote on the X social media platform.
Some conservatives, too, warned against dismissing the importance of a jury finding Mr. Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records. “Today’s verdict is a fire-bell in the night,” John Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, warned on X. “The Republican Party now has one last chance to change course, and not nominate a convicted felon for President.
But in a bitterly divided country where many have given up faith that even the institutions of law can adjudicate without political taint, the verdict showed little sign of prompting introspection.
Instead, Republicans and Democrats alike seized on it as campaign fuel.
“If you share my outrage at how the Dems want to weaponize our legal system, destroy the rule of law, and make America look like a banana republic, listen to what President Trump said: ‘The real verdict is going to be November 5th by the people,’” Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, wrote on X, referencing Mr. Trump’s remarks after the verdict was delivered. He, too, linked to the Republican Party’s WinRed political donation platform, which appeared to crash briefly on Thursday.
“Chip in now to stand with President Trump and against these partisan attacks,” added Eric Schmitt, Mr. Cotton’s Senate colleague from Missouri.
Becoming a convicted felon does not change Mr. Trump’s status as the Republican nominee, and the indictments against him have not shown any sign of dampening his popularity.
Mr. Trump’s opponents sought immediate political profit from the verdict, in a preview of messages that are likely to form a key plank of Democratic attacks in the months to come.
“Donald Trump has always mistakenly believed he would never face consequences for breaking the law for his own personal gain,” the campaign for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris said in a statement.
“There is still only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: at the ballot box,” the Biden-Harris campaign wrote, accusing the former president of running an “increasingly unhinged campaign of revenge and retribution.”
Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labour under Bill Clinton and now a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, noted in a short social media video Thursday that “a criminal record like Trump’s would be a serious obstacle to getting any job in the White House, let alone the highest office in the land.”
If the Republican Party “continues to support a criminal convict as their nominee, they have no business calling themselves the party of ‘law and order’ ever again,” he said.
The conviction “proves what we have known to be true all along – Donald Trump is unfit to serve in any elected office, let alone President of the United States,” Jerry Nadler, the top Democratic Representative on the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement.
Republican leaders, however, sought to use the verdict to further galvanize support for Mr. Trump, who has maintained a lead over Mr. Biden in months of polls.
Mike Johnson, the Republican House Speaker, called Thursday “a shameful day in American history,” decrying “the weaponization of our justice system.” Democrats, he wrote on X, “will stop at nothing to silence dissent and crush their political opponents.”
Lindsey Graham, a senior Republican senator, suggested the felony finding would help to propel Mr. Trump’s return to the White House.
“This verdict says more about the system than the allegations. It will be seen as politically motivated and unfair, and it will backfire tremendously on the political Left,” he said in a statement.
It’s unclear how the conviction will affect Mr. Trump’s political standing. His opponents have held out hope that undecided voters will balk at casting a ballot for a felon. A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll, however, found that overwhelming numbers of Mr. Trump’s supporters intended to stay the course, with just 4 per cent saying they would withdraw their support after a guilty verdict.
For some, the verdict raised fears of further consequences for a country that has yet to fully assess the legal implications of past moments of intense political division, such as anger over the results of the 2020 election, which led to a violent rampage at the U.S. Capitol. Mr. Trump and his acolytes continue to deny his loss in that vote.
On Thursday, pollster Frank Luntz held a focus group to assess initial reactions. “The consensus: People are worried about violence,” Mr. Luntz wrote on X.
Mr. Trump, who in brief remarks outside of court called himself “a very innocent man,” moved quickly to condone reprisals.
Shortly after the verdict was released, he posted to Truth Social an excerpt from a Fox News interview with John Yoo, a legal scholar at Berkeley who was a lawyer in the George W. Bush administration.
Mr. Yoo called on Republican district attorneys to respond by prosecuting Democratic office-holders and executive branch officials – perhaps even Mr. Biden.
“That’s the only way, I think, to put a stop to this,” Mr. Yoo said. “Otherwise what we’ve seen is the crossing of a constitutional Rubicon where suing presidential predecessors is going to just be the norm.”