Donald Trump Is a Convicted Felon. What Does That Mean?

By now, everyone in the free world knows that Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 felony counts in the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial. He is a convicted felon. He also remains the Republican nominee for President of the United States. He will be sentenced on July 11th, four days before the Republican National Convention.

What does it all mean? Here we attempt to answer your most pressing questions.

Will Donald Trump Go to Prison? He could, but probably not. It’s 34 felony counts, but they are Class E felonies. The maximum sentence is four years, although most people convicted of Class E felonies are not sentenced to any jail time. But Donald Trump is not most people, and that both works for and against him. A typical person convicted of these crimes probably would not face prison. However, a typical person who violated a gag order 10 times, expressed no remorse and is facing felony charges in at least three other criminal cases very well might. That said, logistically, it’s probably difficult to put the GOP nominee and his Secret Service detail in prison. If Trump continues to seethe at the judge, I could see him put on house arrest. Ideally, at least to me (and Jimmy Kimmel), he’d be sentenced to hundreds of hours of community service and be forced to pick up trash on the side of the freeway with his Secret Service detail and a ton of cameras following him at his most undignified.

Does he have grounds for appeal? Donald Trump will appeal. He will never succeed if he tries to overturn the jury findings. His best chance — and there’s an outside shot at winning — is if his lawyers question the law used to elevate his crimes from misdemeanors to felonies. The 34 counts would have been misdemeanors but for the fact that they were committed in furtherance of another crime — here, election interference. The law that DA Alvin Bragg used to connect the crimes to election interference, however, is an old and little-used law. But it is a law, and it is on the books, and in a country where courts are resurrecting laws from the 1850s to outlaw abortion, it’ll be hard to make that argument successfully.

How will it affect the election in November? No one knows. On the one hand, Trump will forever be stained as a convicted felon. On the other hand, he’s the only President who has been impeached twice or who orchestrated a riot on the Capitol, and that hasn’t hurt him. In fact, every time criminal charges are brought against him, he seems to get a boost in the polls.

Meanwhile, Fox News and the right-wing media are having a full-on meltdown over the conviction, and so many donations were made to Trump’s campaign last night that his website crashed. It will certainly solidify his base. It will also, I think, help solidify his opposition. Biden’s support may be soft, but the left’s hatred of Trump is not. Speaking as someone whose vote was never in doubt, I will at least say that I’m even more motivated to vote against Trump because 1) I need to see him actually held accountable, and 2) the amount of damage he will cause if he wins is hard to overstate.

It will come down to independent voters in three states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The right plans to “go to war” against the Democrats and the Biden Administration. Will that motivate those voters to vote for Trump, or will it backfire and turn them off, sending them to the polls to vote for Biden? Will the election be a referendum on Trump, in which case he probably loses, or will it come down to the stubbornly high interest rates that Biden has no control over, which probably favors Trump?