Sensemaker: Trump’s awful day

• German officials said 25 people had been arrested on suspicion of plotting a coup.
• Protestors called for a three-day nationwide strike in Iran over disputed claims that the morality police would be disbanded. 
• The EU said passengers would be able to access 5G broadband signals on civilian aircraft from next year.

All in one news cycle, Trump’s man lost in Georgia and the Trump Organization was convicted of criminal tax fraud in New York. Jurors found it guilty on 17 counts in a verdict the prosecution said was all about “greed and cheating”.

• Yesterday’s Senate victory for Raphael Warnock over ex-NFL star and alleged abuser Herschel Walker in Georgia showed once again that if Trump was ever good at picking winners he has lost his touch. 
• The Trump Organization verdict is not about the man, but it is about his business, and Trump is all about his business.

So what? It’s far too soon to count him out as the next US president, but for now Trump’s bid to exact revenge for the humiliations of the past two years is treading water.

New York. The Trump Organization could be fined $1.6 million but will stay in business. Trump himself wasn’t in the dock and can still run for president. But…

• The prosecution repeatedly linked its case personally to Trump, arguing he paid executives in untaxed perks to lower his corporate tax bill. Jurors didn’t buy the defence claim that his chief lieutenant, Alan Weisselberg, did all the dodging for himself.
• The verdict will give ammunition to any Democrat running against him.
• It will give lenders pause before backing the Trump Organization again. 
• It will give political donors grounds to fear their money is being used to pay legal bills, since there’ll be an appeal and there are plenty more legal fights to come (see below).
• It will embolden other Republicans to run against him for the nomination, as will…

Georgia. The Trump plan was to declare for president before the midterms and confirm his supremacy within the party by backing winners in Congress and state assemblies. Instead, most of his protégés lost – including Walker in the Georgia run-off despite a tele-rally Trump hosted for him on Monday. This extends Republicans’ unbroken string of defeats and disappointments since 2018 and gives Democrats a vital one-vote cushion in the Senate. 

Scott Jennings, a former aide to Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, tells the NYT Georgia “may be remembered as the state that broke Trump once and for all”.

Unforced errors. Trump keeps making them. Last month he hosted Ye, the anti-semitic rapper formerly known as Kanye West, and Nick Fuentes, an avowed white supremacist, for dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Last week he said the US constitution should be “terminated” for allowing what he continues to call the fraud of the 2020 election. Almost no one has defended him. Loyalists have rolled their eyes. Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Israeli prime minister, has asked him to apologise. He has not.

Legal pipeline. To be Trump is to be sued. Yesterday’s verdict could be the first of many given the number of ongoing investigations of his businesses, personal life and presidential term. They include probes into 

• the removal of government documents – 100 of them classified – from the White House and their storage at Mar-a-Lago;
• whether Trump played a role in the January 6th assault on the US Capitol;
• whether his attempt to challenge Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Georgia broke the law; and
• alleged financial crimes committed by the Trump Organization (a civil probe separate from Bragg’s, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James).

As things stand the Georgia case is the closest thing to a material threat to Trump’s liberty. There’s a smoking gun: his 2020 phone call to Brad Raffensburger, the secretary of state,  asking him to “find” votes. But he hasn’t even been indicted yet, and he can weaken every legal case against him by branding it political. 

To remember: Trump’s base is intact – 40 per cent of Americans still have a positive view of him, around the same as when he left office – and their grievances against the political establishment run deep. They are rooted in the 2008 crash and the polarisation of US politics since then. 

To ask: wherefore art thou, Rupert? Murdoch has abandoned Trump as a candidate, although how this plays out in his outlets remains unclear. As of this morning, from Fox News and the New York Post on the Trump Organization’s criminal conviction, not a word.