WASHINGTON — Donald Trump is guilty but not ashamed. The question now is whether he will suffer politically for his crimes.
The first former American president convicted at trial — found guilty Thursday on all 34 counts of scheming to help his 2016 campaign by covering up an alleged sexual encounter — Trump rallied quickly to raise money and votes from the verdict.
He blasted out a fundraising message to donors just minutes after the jury finished its work, and he vowed in the courthouse that “the real verdict is going to be Nov. 5 by the people” when he faces President Joe Biden in a rematch of their 2020 election.
Biden agreed.
“There’s only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: At the ballot box,” he said in a statement posted to X along with a link to donate to his campaign. He took no victory lap, uttered no insult and offered no prediction of Trump’s political demise.
Trump also called himself a “political prisoner” in another fundraising appeal shortly after the verdict, even though he is not in prison.
There is simply no precedent for a convicted candidate’s carrying a major party’s banner into a general election. Many political experts say it is too early to tell whether the outcome will add fuel to Trump’s campaign or make it toxic to persuadable voters.
“What no one knows yet is what independent and swing voters are going to do,” said Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist who has worked on multiple presidential campaigns.
Democrats who spoke to NBC News on Thursday were split on whether Biden might get a bump from the verdict, with some seeing genuine upside to Trump’s troubles and others expressing more doubt.
“This is the result we wanted and is another talking point against Trump but doesn’t mean a lot for actual votes,” said a Biden campaign official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to give an assessment without fear of retribution.
On the other side of the political divide, Republicans followed Trump’s lead, voicing confidence that the jury’s decision would create a powerful backlash in his favor.
James Blair, political director for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, conducted a conference call with GOP state party chairs shortly after the result was made public, according to two people who were on the call.
“There’s a clear message they want us to convey,” a participant said of Trump’s political apparatus. “It is an unjust witch hunt. We will appeal, and we will win the appeal. Guys, we just elected the next president of the United States.”
If anyone has a playbook for this moment, it is Trump. He rode Republican outrage over his indictments in two federal and two state cases to a political rebound that helped him secure a third straight Republican nomination this year.
Lacking evidence of any coordination between Biden and the New York prosecutors who tried the case — much less the dozen jurors who voted unanimously to convict him on all counts — Trump nonetheless accused the president of abusing his power to harm a rival.
“This was done by the Biden administration in order to wound, to hurt a political opponent,” Trump said at the courthouse.
His son Donald Trump Jr., reviving a controversial framing from Trump’s presidency, said in a social media post that the U.S. is now a “s—hole” country.
While Biden took a more subdued approach to the verdict Thursday, some Democrats said it should help him sway voters.
“The jury verdict affirms that former President Donald J. Trump is an unprecedented criminal who occupied the Oval Office and seeks to do so again,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas. “Joe Biden needs to remind all Americans of good conscience that such a person is completely unfit to serve as president. He’s clearly a danger to democracy.”
A longtime Democratic operative said the trial is “all upside for Biden,” in part because it will remind voters of “the chaos of [Trump’s] presidency.”
To the extent that undecided voters are dissatisfied with Biden, the operative said, “I don’t think this helps Trump become more appealing with that group.”
Trump runs the risk of blowing a political opportunity if he leans too heavily into his personal animus against Biden, Republican strategist Brad Todd said.
“Alvin Bragg and 12 New Yorkers just elected Donald Trump — if he plays his cards right,” Todd said, referring to the Manhattan prosecutor whose office tried the case. To do that, Todd said, Trump has to make sure that his response is aimed at voters: “not about him, but about them.”
That is already taking the form of Trump and his campaign arguing that Democrats are trying to use the court system to deny the public a choice in the election.
“This is outrageous,” said Brian Ballard, a Florida lobbyist who raises money for Trump. “It’s going to help not just with small-dollar donors but with everything. The intensity both from a fundraising standpoint and from just a political energy standpoint is going to be huge. Whatever Democrats hoped to get out of this has backfired.”
It is not clear that Republicans would have portrayed any verdict — conviction, acquittal or a hung jury — as a political defeat for Trump. And there can be little doubt that he would prefer to have avoided the criminal label.
News that the jury had reached a verdict circulated through the Trump and Biden camps in the minutes before the convictions were returned.
Biden’s camp scrambled to send messaging guidance to operatives once Trump had been pronounced guilty — but not before — according to a person familiar with internal deliberations.
In Trump’s orbit, there were signs that a conviction would not be seen as the full victory that some in the party were quick to claim.
“The quickness of this decision is probably not a good sign,” a senior Trump campaign official said just before the jury rendered its judgment.
Jonathan Allen reported from Washington, D.C., and Matt Dixon from Tallahassee, Florida.
