Donald J. Trump was convicted on Thursday of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to derail his 2016 presidential campaign, capping an extraordinary trial that tested the resilience of the American justice system and transformed the former commander in chief into a felon.
The guilty verdict in Manhattan — across the board, on all 34 counts — will reverberate throughout the nation and the world as it ushers in a new era of presidential politics. Mr. Trump will carry the stain of the verdict during his third run for the White House as voters now choose between an unpopular incumbent and a convicted criminal.
While it was once unthinkable that Americans would elect a felon as their leader, Mr. Trump’s insurgent behavior delights his supporters as he bulldozes the country’s norms. Now, the man who refused to accept his 2020 election loss is already seeking to delegitimize his conviction, attempting to assert the primacy of his raw political power over the nation’s rule of law.
Mr. Trump showed little emotion inside the courtroom as he learned his fate, but when he emerged, holding his jaw tense, the former president spoke to the assembled television cameras. He declared that the verdict was “a disgrace” and, with a somber expression, proclaimed: “The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5, by the people,” referring to Election Day.
The judge overseeing the case, Juan M. Merchan, will sentence Mr. Trump on July 11, just days before the Republican National Convention convenes and makes him the party’s nominee, and could impose a prison term of up to four years. But Mr. Trump could receive probation instead, and may never see the inside of a prison cell. He has vowed to appeal, and will remain free at least until sentencing, campaigning for the presidency while he awaits his punishment.
A jury of 12 New Yorkers needed two days of deliberations to decide a case stemming from Mr. Trump’s first White House run, when, prosecutors say, he perpetrated a fraud on the American people. The case — colored by tabloid intrigue, secret payoffs and an Oval Office pact that echoed the Watergate era — spotlighted months of scheming that begot a hush-money payment to a porn star and a plot to falsify documents to bury all trace of that deal.
“Guilty,” the foreman declared 34 times, one for each false record, before he and his fellow jurors, whose names were withheld from the public for their safety, filed out of the Lower Manhattan courtroom.
Over weeks of testimony, the jury met a varied cast of characters, including a tabloid maestro, a campaign spokeswoman and the porn star, Stormy Daniels. Their testimony built to an epic showdown between the men at the heart of the case: Mr. Trump, a real estate mogul turned reality-television impresario who exported his smash-mouth instincts to presidential politics; and the star witness against him, Michael D. Cohen, the do-anything fixer whose loyalty he lost.
In the waning days of the 2016 campaign, Mr. Cohen paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to silence her story of a sexual liaison with Mr. Trump, who then agreed to “cook the books” to reimburse his fixer, prosecutors said. Defense lawyers attacked Mr. Cohen’s credibility — he is a “convicted liar,” they noted — and argued that Mr. Trump had never falsified any records.
But in closing arguments, a prosecutor noted that Mr. Cohen had told his lies for Mr. Trump. “We didn’t choose Michael Cohen to be our witness; we didn’t pick him up at the witness store,” said the prosecutor, Joshua Steinglass, adding that the former president had hired him “because he was willing to lie and cheat on Mr. Trump’s behalf.”
Mr. Trump, who repeatedly violated a judge’s order barring him from attacking Mr. Cohen and the jury, attended every day of the trial in a courthouse that had long ago lost its majesty, a fading hulk with cracked wood paneling and yellowed fluorescent lighting that suited the case’s seedier elements. There, in the center of a city justice system that accommodates all manner of mayhem, the former president glowered, muttered and often closed his eyes, spending much of the trial either in a meditative state or apparently asleep.
Mr. Trump still faces three other indictments in three other states, but with those cases mired in delays, this was likely to be his only trial before Election Day. The other prosecutions concern loftier issues — Mr. Trump is charged with mishandling classified documents in Florida and plotting to subvert democracy in Washington and Georgia — but this trial sprang from the seamy milieu that had made him famous as a New York gossip-page fixture.
The conviction, a humiliating defeat for a man who has dwelled in legal gray zones for decades, brings the nation’s highest office to a new low: Mr. Trump is the first president to lose, or even to face, a criminal trial.
The prosecution unfolded against the backdrop of a politically polarized nation, and reactions to the verdict could reflect that divide.
Mr. Trump’s adversaries have long hoped a conviction would wipe the former president from the political map. For them, the case could represent a rare moment of catharsis: comeuppance for a man who, in their minds, poisoned the institution of the presidency.
To Mr. Trump’s base, however, he remains not just a man but a movement, and the more legal tumult he endures, the more his supporters revere him.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump is expected to harness that image of an outlaw idol, using his conviction to paint himself as a political prisoner and the victim of a Democratic cabal. During the trial, he cast the jurors as 12 angry liberals from a hometown that had turned against him, even though they were participating in a tradition so central to American democracy that it is older than the presidency itself. And he attacked the elected Democratic prosecutor who brought the case, Alvin L. Bragg, falsely claiming he was an extension of President Biden’s campaign.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers seized on the novel nature of Mr. Bragg’s case. In New York, falsifying records is a misdemeanor, unless they were faked to hide another crime. To elevate the charges to felonies, Mr. Bragg argued that Mr. Trump had falsified the records to conceal an illegal conspiracy to influence the 2016 election.
The defense argued that Mr. Bragg was stretching the law, deploying a little-known state statute in a case involving a federal election. That approach could, they argue, lay the groundwork for an appeal.
Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer, Todd Blanche, also sought to play down the importance of the case, deriding the false records as mere “pieces of paper.”
Yet the verdict is a career-defining victory for Mr. Bragg, who had cast the fakery as an affront to New York, the financial capital of the world.
“The bedrock, in fact, the basis for business integrity and a well-functioning business marketplace is true and accurate record-keeping,” Mr. Bragg said when announcing the case last year.
The Conspiracy
Five years ago, when Mr. Bragg announced his run for district attorney, he vowed to shake up the criminal justice system in Manhattan. No more, he said, would there be two systems — one for the rich and one for everyone else. He then brought a difficult case against the 45th president, charging Mr. Trump, as he would any other defendant, with the innocuous-sounding crime of falsifying business records.
Mr. Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of that charge, one for each document he falsified as he reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the $130,000 hush-money payment to Ms. Daniels. The records included 11 invoices Mr. Cohen submitted, 12 entries in Mr. Trump’s ledger and 11 checks sent to the former fixer.
Mr. Trump signed nine of the checks from the White House, his own outsize Sharpie signature sealing his fate.
The documents, prosecutors argued, disguised the nature of the repayment to Mr. Cohen. There were no references to the hush money, only to ordinary legal expenses that arose from a “retainer” agreement.
Mr. Blanche argued that the records were accurate — Mr. Cohen, after all, was a lawyer who had expenses — but the prosecution showed that the expenses and the retainer were both fictional. Mr. Blanche also sought to minimize the election plot, asserting that “every campaign in this country is a conspiracy.” But Mr. Bragg argued that the American people were victims, deprived of important information about the candidate, and that the tactics of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign were not only distasteful, but unlawful.
Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors, eliciting lurid testimony of sex and scandal, persuaded the jury that Mr. Trump had orchestrated a conspiracy with Mr. Cohen and David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, to buy and bury stories that could have upended his candidacy. It began with a meeting in summer 2015 at Mr. Trump’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters — prosecutors called it “the Trump Tower conspiracy” — and ran through Election Day 2016.
Mr. Pecker, the prosecution’s leadoff witness, nonchalantly explained to the jurors how the co-conspirators had soon confronted salacious stories about the candidate’s sex life.
The first came from a doorman at a Trump building who had heard a false rumor that Mr. Trump had fathered a child out of wedlock. Another belonged to a former Playboy model who said she had carried on a monthslong affair with Mr. Trump. Mr. Pecker bought both of those stories and never published them, a practice known as “catch and kill,” a dark art in the supermarket tabloid world.
After the election, Mr. Pecker testified, Mr. Trump summoned him to Trump Tower. There, the president-elect, having just met with the head of the F.B.I., thanked Mr. Pecker for burying the stories.
Mr. Trump was supposed to repay Mr. Pecker, and prosecutors played a surreptitious recording that Mr. Cohen had made of Mr. Trump, who wanted to buy all the dirt that The Enquirer had accumulated on him over the years, in case something happened to the publisher or his tabloid.
“Maybe he gets hit by a truck,” Mr. Trump said, instructing Mr. Cohen to “pay with cash.”
The Porn Star
Mr. Pecker ultimately refused Mr. Trump’s payment, worried that it might implicate him in a crime.
And he wanted nothing to do with purchasing the third and most troublesome story — Ms. Daniels’s account of sex with Mr. Trump. She was shopping it at a vulnerable moment for the Trump campaign, just as the world heard a recording in which he boasted about grabbing women by the genitals. The tape, from the set of “Access Hollywood,” sent the campaign into a frenzy, according to testimony from Hope Hicks, its former spokeswoman.
Ms. Hicks, who teared up on the stand, took jurors behind the campaign’s scenes as Mr. Trump careened from one crisis to the next. He denied Ms. Daniels’s story, telling Ms. Hicks it was “absolutely, unequivocally untrue.” (He denies it still, and Mr. Blanche portrayed Ms. Daniels as an extortionist.)
The week after Ms. Hicks testified, Ms. Daniels showed up to contradict Mr. Trump from the stand, offering a graphic recounting. In riveting testimony, she described how he had summoned her for dinner inside a palatial Lake Tahoe, Nev., hotel suite in 2006. She returned from the bathroom and found Mr. Trump in his boxer shorts and T-shirt, she said. Then, they had sex.
“I was staring up at the ceiling, wondering how I got there,” she told the jury, adding that the act was brief and that Mr. Trump did not wear a condom.
Ms. Daniels said that when she asked Mr. Trump about his wife, he told her not to worry, that they didn’t even sleep in the same room — testimony that prompted Mr. Trump to shake his head in disgust and mutter “bullshit” to his lawyers. His outburst was loud enough that it later drew a rebuke from Justice Merchan, who called it “contemptuous.”
The former president’s lawyers, cross-examining Ms. Daniels, sought to paint her as an opportunist capitalizing on a fiction, noting that she had sold “Team Stormy” T-shirts, a $40 “Patron Saint of Indictments” candle and even a comic book dramatizing her clash with the former president.
“You’re celebrating the indictment by selling things from your store, right?” a defense lawyer asked.
“Not unlike Mr. Trump,” Ms. Daniels replied, perhaps a reference to the $59.99 Bible he is peddling.
The sordid elements of her testimony had little bearing on the charges of faked business records. Her payoff did. In a crucial passage of testimony, Ms. Daniels confirmed that she had “accepted an offer” from Mr. Cohen to stay silent.
The Showdown
Even that did not prove that Mr. Trump had falsified records to disguise his reimbursement of Mr. Cohen. For that, the prosecution needed Mr. Cohen himself.
During his decade as a Trump henchman, Mr. Cohen distinguished himself with his volatility. On the stand, however, he was mostly steady, and he offered jurors the only direct link between the former president and the false records.
Mr. Cohen testified that, just days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, he had met with the president-elect at Trump Tower. There, he said, Mr. Trump gave his blessing to a simple way to hide the payoff while making Mr. Cohen whole: pretend the reimbursement was for legal work. Mr. Trump’s chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, handled the details, but as was customary, Mr. Cohen testified, “the boss” granted permission.
During closing arguments, the prosecution sought to corroborate Mr. Cohen’s account, producing what one prosecutor called “the smoking guns” of the case: Mr. Weisselberg’s handwritten notes about the reimbursement. The jotting appeared on a copy of Mr. Cohen’s bank statement — the very one showing that Mr. Cohen had paid off Ms. Daniels.
“Did Mr. Weisselberg say in front of Mr. Trump that those monthly payments would be, you know, like a retainer for legal services?” Susan Hoffinger, one of the prosecutors, asked Mr. Cohen.
“Yes,” he said.
“What, if anything, did Mr. Trump say at that time?” she also asked.
“He approved it,” Mr. Cohen replied, noting that Mr. Trump had then added: “This is going to be one heck of a ride in D.C.”
The plot reached into the Oval Office, where Mr. Cohen said he met again with Mr. Trump, who promised that a check would soon arrive.
A year later, they had a falling-out after the hush-money deal came to light in The Wall Street Journal, and Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to federal crimes involving the hush money. Mr. Trump washed his hands of Mr. Cohen, who turned on the man he had once idolized.
During Mr. Cohen’s testimony, Mr. Trump brought his campaign to the courtroom, summoning an entourage of supporters to sit in the rows behind the defense table. The guests included the speaker of the House and other members of Congress, his adult sons, the actor Joe Piscopo and a former leader of the New York chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang.
With Mr. Cohen on the stand, Mr. Blanche assailed his credibility, highlighting his criminal record, his pattern of lies and his obsession with exacting revenge on Mr. Trump. Mr. Blanche also argued that Mr. Cohen had profited from his hatred for Mr. Trump with two books and a lucrative podcast deal. He played the jury an excerpt from the podcast in which the former fixer sounded nearly maniacal as he reveled in the news of Mr. Trump’s 2023 indictment in the case.
“I truly hope that this man ends up in prison,” Mr. Cohen said giddily.
On the stand, Mr. Cohen was more subdued. He bent, but did not break under the pressure. And when the prosecution questioned him a second time, he stuck to his testimony that Mr. Trump had approved the scheme to falsify the records.
“When you submitted each of your 11 invoices,” Ms. Hoffinger asked, “was that true or false?”
“It was false,” Mr. Cohen confirmed.
And the check stubs that reflected a supposed retainer?
“False.”
Mr. Blanche argued that Mr. Trump had signed the checks without paying them much mind, and that Mr. Cohen was responsible for the invoices. But the prosecution highlighted evidence that portrayed Mr. Trump as a penny-pinching micromanager who would never miss that sort of detail, including Mr. Trump’s own books, which contained a chapter called “How to Pinch Pennies” and the advice “always question invoices.”
The criminal conviction capped a brutal stretch of legal defeats for Mr. Trump in New York. He started the year in a federal courthouse, where a jury found him liable for defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll when he claimed he hadn’t sexually abused her, and ordered him to pay her more than $80 million. The next month, a judge concluded that Mr. Trump had fraudulently inflated his net worth to win favorable financial deals, and imposed a judgment of more than $450 million.
While those cases delivered devastating personal financial blows, only Mr. Bragg’s trial could send the former president to prison, and America into an era of uncertainty.
“This is long from over,” Mr. Trump declared on Thursday, minutes after his conviction.
