Trump Wishes His Trial Were Rigged
Shortly after becoming the first former American president to be convicted as a felon, Donald Trump told reporters outside a Manhattan courthouse that the verdict was a “disgrace,” a “rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt.”
There is a simple, foolproof way to predict when Trump will describe something or someone as rigged or corrupt: when he doesn’t get what he wants. Elections he loses are fraudulent, legal decisions that go against him are rigged, and anyone who opposes him is corrupt. In every single instance, Trump is decrying not a corrupt individual or rigged process, but a person or process that is not corrupt or rigged enough to give him the results he seeks.
Trump’s attorneys did not offer much in the , relying instead on a “haphazard cacophony of denials and personal attacks,” as the former prosecutor Renato Mariotti put it in . Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in an attempt to cover up a sexual encounter with the , in order to prevent news of the incident from breaking during the final,, the payments were made through Michael Cohen, a former Trump operative turned prosecution witness, who paid Daniels $130,000 for her silence. The defense failed to convince the jury that Cohen was not a credible witness to Trump’s crimes despite a past .
