Trump is a felon. Should we celebrate, mourn or rage?

What's the right way to feel when a former president is convicted on 34 felony counts?

There’s literally no precedent for the moment we’re in. I’m sorely tempted to escape into a detective novel or TV police procedural.

That’s how conflicted, overwhelmed and plain exhausted I am by all things Donald Trump. And that’s what I’d most likely be doing right now if I hadn’t started a newsletter last week called “History Keeps Happening.”

Indeed it does, and never more so than on Thursday—with the first former president in American history convicted of 34 felonies in connection with a hush money scheme to help him win the 2016 election.

It would be wrong to sit this one out.

I argued in February that this case, ridiculed and scorned by some, was about much more than hush money and a sexual encounter, to put it delicately, with a porn actress. It was about a scheme to hide sordid information from voters at a critical moment in the campaign, before Trump had become “Teflon Don” and many Republican leaders were calling on him to step aside over the infamous “Access Hollywood” video and his vulgar remarks, including about grabbing women’s genitals.

“It might have changed the fate of the nation,” I wrote, and I still believe that. Trump was so vulnerable at that point that he did something I can’t remember happening before or since: he apologized. Beyond that, there are numbers:

You can read the full piece here, including which Republicans peeled off back then and why the whole saga has the feel of the Greek myth of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and melted his wings. In Trump’s case, he plunged into an arena in which secrets are almost always exposed. He had too much to hide. He thought he understood politics, but the subterfuges and manipulations and cover-ups that worked in business were dangerous risks for a presidential campaign and at the White House itself.

If you followed Trump’s trial in Manhattan, you know that the prosecutors produced mountains of documentary evidence backed up by sworn testimony of witnesses directly involved with the events in question, and urged jurors to “use your common sense.” The case seemed strong, even airtight.

But how many of us were nevertheless stunned when the guilty verdicts came down, one after another after another? Who at this point can even count the times Trump has dodged accountability? It’s necessary for self-preservation to lower one’s expectations. Always expect to be crushed.

This time, in this case, that did not happen. But there are still crushing moments ahead. Some will no doubt be delivered in the next month by the Supreme Court, which creates new angst daily and has yet to rule on Trump’s request for absolute immunity in a federal lawsuit for his role in the Capitol insurrection.

A couple of hours before Trump was convicted, meanwhile, Chief Justice John Roberts refused to meet with leading Democrats about ethics abuses and conflicts of interest at the court—including the insurrection-adjacent flags at Justice Samuel Alito’s two homes that he blamed on his wife, and the role of Ginni Thomas—wife of Justice Clarence Thomas—in trying to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 win.

This week I wrote an apparently controversial take on journalism hits and misses (my own included), and why we’re only now finding out about the Alito family flags (comments range from “masterful” to, well, the opposite). You can read it here and decide for yourself.

Though it hardly seems possible, the pace of disappointments and scandals is accelerating. Should we celebrate or mourn, tune it all out, or indulge in righteous rage against the careless Americans and Republican leaders (looking at you, Mitch McConnell) who have brought us to this tragic point and now seem intent on keeping us there?

All of the above are appropriate, even all of them at once, along with one more: Vote in November. That will be the definitive judgment, on Trump and on our national future.

Speaking of voting: This is me with suffragist pioneers Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Amelia Bloomer, on a visit to Seneca Falls, New York, on May 30, 2017. Family photo by John Martin.