Former US President Donald Trump was found guilty last Thursday of falsifying business records, with a Manhattan jury agreeing that this normally minor offense influenced the 2016 election. Trump has condemned the result of the “rigged trial” and vowed to appeal.
Trump said on Friday that he would appeal the verdict, although he will have to wait until after his sentencing on July 11 to do so. If his appeal fails, the former president could face a four year prison sentence for each count, capped at a maximum of 20 years.
Whether Trump is imprisoned or not, the conviction will not prevent him from contesting this November’s election. There is no legal prohibition on convicted felons seeking office, and Trump told former Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson last year that he would not drop out of the race if he were convicted of a crime.
While some Republican politicians and pundits urged their followers to respect the outcome of the trial, the verdict was widely condemned on the right. Trump’s donation website crashed due to high traffic on Thursday evening, and the former president revealed on Friday that his campaign took in a record $39 million in contributions from small donors in the ten hours after he was convicted.
The verdict was celebrated in Democrat circles, and US President Joe Biden released a statement declaring that “In New York today, we saw that no one is above the law.” According to media reports, the White House instructed staffers not to share their personal opinions on the verdict on social media, for fear of playing into Trump’s claims that the case was “all done by Biden and his people.”
According to a snap poll published by the Daily Mail on Thursday, the conviction scored Trump a six-point bump in his approval rating among voters who said the case would influence their opinion of the former president.