WASHINGTON — Donald Trump has been convicted in his New York hush money trial, a landmark jury verdict making him the first former American president to be found guilty of felony crimes in the nation’s nearly 250-year history.
The jury delivered a guilty verdict on all 34 counts after more than nine hours of deliberations.
The verdict is a stunning legal reckoning for Trump and exposes him to potential prison time in the city where his manipulations of the tabloid press helped catapult him from a real estate tycoon to reality television star and ultimately president. As he seeks to reclaim the White House in this year’s election, the judgment presents voters with another test of their willingness to accept Trump’s boundary-breaking behavior.
Can Trump run for president now?
In several states, a felony conviction means that a person loses their right to vote, either temporarily or permanently.
When it comes to running for elected office, many states have laws saying that only people who are eligible to vote are eligible to run for state or local office, effectively prohibiting felons from seeking those offices until they meet the requirements of that state for regaining voting rights.
However, this does not bar the person from running for the oval office - even if they can't vote. This is because the Constitution decides who is eligible to run for federal office and does not prohibit people with criminal records from doing so.
The Constitution lays out just three requirements to run for federal office: age, citizenship and residency.
Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who serves as co-chair of the Republican National Committee, said in a Fox News Channel interview on Thursday that if Trump is convicted and sentenced to home confinement, he would do virtual rallies and campaign events.
"We’ll have to play the hand that we’re dealt,” she said, according to an interview transcript.
It’s unclear whether Trump’s once-imaginable status as a person convicted of a felony will have any impact at all on the election.
Leading strategists in both parties believe that Trump still remains well-positioned to defeat Biden, even as he now faces the prospect of a prison sentence and three separate criminal cases still outstanding. In the short term, at least, there were immediate signs that the guilty verdict was helping to unify the Republican Party’s disparate factions as GOP officials across the political spectrum rallied behind their embattled presumptive presidential nominee and his campaign expected to benefit from a flood of fundraising dollars.
There has been some polling conducted on the prospect of a guilty verdict, although such hypothetical scenarios are notoriously difficult to predict. A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that only 4% of Trump’s supporters said they would withdraw their support if he’s convicted of a felony, though another 16% said they would reconsider it.
VERIFY contributed to this report.