Retribution

Chapter One

Felon and Front-Runner

The day after Donald Trump won the Iowa caucuses in January 2024, the insurance company Allianz published a so-called Risk Barometer that warned of growing political unrest around the globe. "We have an increasing detachment of the political elite from the working class and the people that actually go to work every day," said Oliver Bäte, the company's CEO. "And that, I see as the number one risk for our societies."

The Risk Barometer didn't get much attention outside the business world, but it described precisely the conditions-the detachment of the political elite from the people who actually go to work every day-that made Donald Trump's improbable return to power possible.

After his lonely departure from the White House in 2021, Trump was detested by elites of all kinds-in the world of politics, yes, but also in business, law, academia, and media. Large corporations had refused to donate to candidates who had supported him. Major law firms had refused to represent him. Big tech companies had banned him from their social media platforms. Many of the people who served in his own administration had abandoned him, some darkly warning that he must never be allowed to return to power.

Hatred of those elites quickly became the driving force of Trump's 2024 campaign. He told his supporters that their problems and frustrations were caused by those same elites who had denounced him, had investigated him, and were now prosecuting him. The more he was attacked-by powerful figures in law, politics, and the media-the stronger his connection with the people who felt let down by those powerful figures grew. If voters returned him to power, he promised he would root out not just his own enemies but the enemies of ordinary, working-class Americans as well.

"For those who have been wronged and betrayed," he declared at a March 2023 rally in Waco, Texas, "I am your retribution."

By mid-April 2024, Trump had vanquished all his rivals in what had become one of the most lopsided, contested presidential primaries in American political history. More than thirty states had voted, and Trump had won all but one of them: Vermont, arguably the most liberal state in the country, had gone for former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. His opponents had high profiles, and several of them were very well funded, but they had all dropped out by the first week of March. And unlike in 2016 and 2020, Trump also consistently led his likely Democratic opponent in the polls-and he had for months.

Politically, he had never been stronger.

Nevertheless, Trump was angry when he stood before the cameras on April 18, 2024-because he was not a free man. For the third day that week, he had been ordered to sit in a New York courtroom where he would have to relive an embarrassing and decades-old chapter of his life that had come back to haunt him. The jury his lawyers had worked to select that week would decide the fate of the first former president of the United States in history to be charged with a felony-or thirty-four felonies, to be precise.

On the days the court was in session, Trump wasn't allowed to travel around the country to campaign. He couldn't play golf. He couldn't even leave the confines of the New York courthouse at 100 Centre Street in lower Manhattan. Aides and Secret Service agents would make a daily lunch delivery to his grimy holding room, giving him some fast food to eat during the court's brief midday break.

To make matters worse, the decrepit old courthouse had a notoriously bad heating and air-conditioning system. The place was frigid. Shortly after the court reconvened for the third day of jury selection, Judge Juan Merchan issued an apology from the bench. "First, jurors, I want to apologize that it's chilly in here," he said. "We're doing what we can to control the temperature, but it seems like it's one extreme or the other. So, bear with us as we try to work that out."

Once the day's proceedings ended, Trump exited the courtroom and turned left down a dark hallway. With his entourage of lawyers and advisors lingering near the entrance to the courtroom, he walked along the worn tile floor and stopped to speak to a small group of reporters and a single television camera shared by the networks on the other side of a security barrier. The reporters were far enough away that he had to raise his voice, almost to the point of shouting, to be heard, his words echoing along the courthouse's marble walls.

"I'm sitting here for days now, from morning till night, in that freezing room," Trump complained. Looking directly into the camera, he said he should be out campaigning, not forced to defend himself against charges brought by Manhattan's Democratic district attorney.

"I'm supposed to be in Georgia," he said, his voice straining to reach the microphone on the other side of the metal bike-rack barricade. "I'm supposed to be in North Carolina, South Carolina. I'm supposed to be in a lot of different places campaigning, but I've been here all day on a trial that really is a very unfair trial."


In reality, though, Trump hadn’t campaigned much in the weeks before the trial began. With his Republican rivals vanquished, the presumptive GOP nominee was spending as much time selling Trump-branded products as he was campaigning. A few weeks after winning the New Hampshire primary, for example, he helped launch a line of Trump “Never Surrender” sneakers-bright gold and just $399 a pair!4 And not long after Nikki Haley, his last remaining rival for the Republican nomination, dropped out, he kicked off a joint venture with country music singer Lee Greenwood selling “God Bless the USA Bibles” for $59.99 the week before Easter. It was, according to the marketing materials, “the only Bible endorsed by President Trump!”

The leading candidate for president of the United States hawking his wares like this was certainly a spectacle, but Trump was facing a serious cash crunch. He had been ordered to pay a $454 million judgment after losing a civil fraud case earlier that year, and he had been hit with a separate $88 million bill after being found liable for sexually abusing and damaging the reputation of a woman named E. Jean Carroll.

Now Trump had no choice but to spend four days a week (the court was not in session on Wednesdays) in a New York courtroom for the duration of his criminal trial, which was expected to last about two months. Over the course of the first three days, 190 potential jurors had been questioned, but a complete jury-including six alternates-had still not been chosen.

Although the trial hadn't really started, the once-and-future president had already endured multiple indignities. The seventeen-story courthouse was not only cold; it was constantly under construction, with scaffolding surrounding its exterior for the entire trial. At the same time, the building seemingly hadn't been renovated since it was built in 1941. The place was filthy, and parts of the courtroom were held together with duct tape. "DANGER" signs in the hallways warned that asbestos removal was underway. There was a plastic device filled with bait and poison just outside the main entrance: a trap to capture and kill rats.

The court proceedings themselves would bring a series of embarrassments to Trump. Stormy Daniels, the porn actress at the center of the case, testified, in rather graphic detail, that she'd had sex with Trump just four months after his wife, Melania, had given birth to their son, Barron. She would also testify, in Trump's presence, that he had asked her to spank him with a rolled-up magazine that featured an article praising him as a business genius. Her deposition led Trump to audibly curse from his seat at the defense table, prompting Judge Merchan to call Trump's lead counsel, Todd Blanche, to the bench for an admonishment. Blanche needed to keep his client under control.


Even the mundane process of selecting the jury included its share of humiliation. As prospective jurors were questioned, Trump’s lawyers highlighted the harsh things some of them had posted about him on social media. One juror apologized after the former president’s counsel read an old social media post of hers aloud: “I wouldn’t believe Trump if his tongue were notarized.”

As both prosecutors and defense lawyers know, an entire case can be won or lost during the jury selection process, a reality Trump seemed keenly aware of as he sized up each person who could potentially control his fate.

On the final day of jury selection, a prospective juror asked to skip her questioning, telling the lawyers she was "sure" she'd be disqualified. Before she was asked any questions, she told the court to look at page 3 of the written questionnaire she, like all prospective jurors, had been asked to fill out. "I served time in Massachusetts," she said. "I wrote down all my crimes-and I am about to cry, sorry. It was over ten years ago, and you guys keep calling me back for jury [duty]. I am pretty sure I shouldn't be here."

Wiping away tears, she told the court her story of being arrested and convicted on drug-related charges while working as a dental hygienist. She served her time, and although she couldn't return to her previous job because of her criminal record, she found work managing a gym and began to rebuild her life. But she lost friends. And she stopped staying in touch with two cousins who worked for the federal government-keeping their calls "short and sweet," she said-because she worried that their jobs meant they couldn't be associated with a felon.

Donald Trump, seated just ten feet away from the woman, watched intently as she spoke.

"I am a firm believer that when people do something, they should be accountable for their actions, and it is probably because of what I went through," the woman said. "I believe in the Constitution, so yes, I believe in all of this and I will be impartial to everything."

But the former dental hygienist wouldn't be serving on this jury. She was dismissed after Judge Merchan ruled that paperwork issues related to her decade-old felony conviction rendered her ineligible. As she left the courtroom, she turned to Trump and his lawyers and said, "Good luck."

This little, long-forgotten episode at the outset of Trump's criminal trial served as a vivid reminder that, for most Americans, a felony conviction is something that turns your life upside down. Even after you serve your punishment, being a convict can cost you your job, your friends, and, in some circumstances, even your ability to serve on a jury.


Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case was the first-and, as it turned out, only-criminal case against Donald Trump to go to trial. But for Trump’s opponents who were hoping to see the former president be held accountable for his actions, Bragg’s was the last case they wanted go forward. On the long list of Trump’s alleged misdeeds, the allegations underlying the Manhattan case seemed downright trivial.

Consider the facts: Trump's one-time lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election to keep her from speaking publicly about a sexual encounter she claimed she had with Trump years earlier. But Trump wasn't charged for paying the hush money itself; he was charged over how he'd accounted for it. Prosecutors alleged Trump had concealed the payments, falsely labeling them in his business records as legal expenses rather than reimbursements to his lawyer for the nondisclosure agreement.

As Trump put it, he was stuck in a Manhattan courtroom for two months over bookkeeping. "A legal expense is a legal expense. It's marked down in the book, quote-'legal expense,'" Trump said. "It's perfectly marked down."

Bragg and his team relied on an unorthodox legal theory, indicting the former president on felony charges-not misdemeanors-by arguing the alleged falsification of business records was in service of another crime.6 That second crime, according to Bragg, was the violation of a rarely used state election law that prohibits politicians from using "unlawful means" to influence an election. Trump bought Stormy Daniels's silence, Bragg argued, to protect himself from another embarrassing story in the wake of the leaked Access Hollywood tape in 2016, in which he was heard boasting that he could get his way with beautiful women because he is famous. "When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything," he said to Billy Bush in the recording that threatened to destroy his 2016 campaign. "Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything."

So . . . the guy who had been indicted in two separate federal cases for allegedly pilfering America's most sensitive national security secrets and unleashing a mob on the US Capitol building in an effort to overturn an election was on trial for mislabeling hush-money payments to a porn star. He had been indicted for far more serious federal crimes by special counsel Jack Smith and District Attorney Fani Willis in Fulton County, Georgia, but Trump's legal team had successfully delayed those proceedings, making it unlikely they would go to trial anytime soon.

The allegations in the New York case may have been true-and the jury ultimately found them to be-but the relatively trivial and convoluted charges made it easy for Trump to portray himself as the victim of a political prosecution. Unable to join the fawning crowds of his supporters at rallies, Trump made the "witch hunt" against him the central message of his campaign while the trial was underway.

For those weeks in April and May 2024, Trump brought the campaign to the criminal court building at 100 Centre Street in Manhattan. The dark hallway outside his courtroom became his rally stage.