Moments after becoming the first former president to be convicted of a felony, Donald J. Trump walked out of the courtroom, strode toward a television camera and declared the legal system that had found him guilty — a system that presidents are sworn to uphold — a sham.
“This was a disgrace,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday evening, his first words to the public after a jury in Manhattan found him guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. “This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who is corrupt.”
Standing in the hallway outside the courtroom where he spent the preceding six weeks as a criminal defendant, Mr. Trump denounced practically every aspect of the trial he faced as illegitimate. Then, he minimized the jury’s verdict and cast it as irrelevant, encouraging Americans to push it aside and elect him in November anyway.
“The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5 by the people,” Mr. Trump said. “And they know what happened here, and everybody knows what happened here.”
Speaking for less than two minutes, a somber Mr. Trump revived his contention that the case amounted to a politically motivated prosecution intended to interfere with his bid to return to the White House.
But as he rattled off now-familiar attacks against Manhattan’s district attorney, the judge in the case, President Biden and Democrats, Mr. Trump seemed less animated than he had while addressing reporters during the duration of the trial. Rather than an energized rebuttal, his post-verdict remarks felt more like a rote recitation of grievances.
The heart of Mr. Trump’s response to the verdict was the same refrain that Mr. Trump has long used in the face of defeat, including his 2020 election loss: that a system that failed to produce his desired outcome was inherently unfair and “rigged” against him.
He repeated his unfounded claim that the entire case was orchestrated by Mr. Biden, even though Manhattan’s district attorney, a Democrat, is a state prosecutor who is outside the control of the Justice Department.
Mr. Trump reinforced this view in three different fund-raising emails and a text message appeal in which he claimed that he was a “political prisoner” and then urged his supporters to back him by donating to his political campaign. (In an illustration of how the court schedule has collided with the campaign trail, he noted that his “end-of-month fund-raising deadline is just days away!”)
During his hallway remarks, Mr. Trump once again criticized the judge in the case, Juan M. Merchan, as being biased against him, an accusation he has made for weeks.
And Mr. Trump, who throughout the trial was bound by a gag order that has restricted him from commenting on the jurors, suggested that it was impossible for him to have a fair trial in Manhattan, a Democratic stronghold. His lawyers had tried and failed to get a change of venue for similar reasons.
“We were at 5 percent or 6 percent in this district, in this area,” Mr. Trump said, though he actually received roughly 12 percent of the vote in Manhattan in 2020. “This was a rigged, disgraceful trial.”
Even as he denounced his former home turf as hostile territory, Mr. Trump during the weeks he was in court made three campaign stops in the borough and has insisted that he was making political gains in the area.
In the face of the verdict, Mr. Trump again insisted on his innocence, much as he has in all of the criminal cases brought against him. “We didn’t do a thing wrong,” he said. “I’m a very innocent man.” He and his lawyers have already indicated that they plan to appeal the conviction.
At the same time, Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, made clear that he had no intention of ending his campaign.
Sentencing in the case is scheduled for July 11, four days before the start of the Republican National Convention, where Mr. Trump is expected to be chosen as his party’s presidential nominee.
“We will fight for our Constitution. This is long from over,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “Thank you very much.”
