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Friday
I’m still trying to process the “guilty on all counts” verdict brought against Donald Trump yesterday. Above all, I’m impressed with how the American justice system rose to the occasion, in spite of the unprecedented attempts by Trump and Trump sycophants to tear it down. The judge brought a sense of gravitas and dignity to the proceedings, and the jury took their job seriously. Instead of a circus we saw the rule of law.
As I try to imagine Donald Trump responding to the verdict the moment it was delivered, I think of Fagin at the end of Oliver Twist. Of course, there’s much more at stake in Fagin’s case: if he is found guilty of running a gang and fencing stolen goods, he will be hung. Nevertheless, Trump may well have experienced some of the same excruciating waiting. Here’s Dickens’s account of Fagin in court:
The court was paved, from floor to roof, with human faces. Inquisitive and eager eyes peered from every inch of space. From the rail before the dock, away into the sharpest angle of the smallest corner in the galleries, all looks were fixed upon one man—Fagin. Before him and behind: above, below, on the right and on the left: he seemed to stand surrounded by a firmament, all bright with gleaming eyes.
He stood there, in all this glare of living light, with one hand resting on the wooden slab before him, the other held to his ear, and his head thrust forward to enable him to catch with greater distinctness every word that fell from the presiding judge, who was delivering his charge to the jury. At times, he turned his eyes sharply upon them to observe the effect of the slightest featherweight in his favor; and when the points against him were stated with terrible distinctness, looked towards his counsel, in mute appeal that he would, even then, urge something in his behalf. Beyond these manifestations of anxiety, he stirred not hand or foot. He had scarcely moved since the trial began; and now that the judge ceased to speak, he still remained in the same strained attitude of close attention, with his gaze bent on him, as though he listened still.
A slight bustle in the court, recalled him to himself. Looking round, he saw that the jurymen had turned together, to consider their verdict. As his eyes wandered to the gallery, he could see the people rising above each other to see his face: some hastily applying their glasses to their eyes: and others whispering their neighbors with looks expressive of abhorrence. A few there were, who seemed unmindful of him, and looked only to the jury, in impatient wonder how they could delay. But in no one face—not even among the women, of whom there were many there—could he read the faintest sympathy with himself, or any feeling but one of all-absorbing interest that he should be condemned.
As he saw all this in one bewildered glance, the deathlike stillness came again, and looking back he saw that the jurymen had turned towards the judge. Hush!
They only sought permission to retire.
He looked, wistfully, into their faces, one by one when they passed out, as though to see which way the greater number leant; but that was fruitless. The jailer touched him on the shoulder. He followed mechanically to the end of the dock, and sat down on a chair. The man pointed it out, or he would not have seen it.
He looked up into the gallery again. Some of the people were eating, and some fanning themselves with handkerchiefs; for the crowded place was very hot. There was one young man sketching his face in a little notebook. He wondered whether it was like, and looked on when the artist broke his pencil-point, and made another with his knife, as any idle spectator might have done.
In the same way, when he turned his eyes towards the judge, his mind began to busy itself with the fashion of his dress, and what it cost, and how he put it on. There was an old fat gentleman on the bench, too, who had gone out, some half an hour before, and now come back. He wondered within himself whether this man had been to get his dinner, what he had had, and where he had had it; and pursued this train of careless thought until some new object caught his eye and roused another.
Not that, all this time, his mind was, for an instant, free from one oppressive overwhelming sense of the grave that opened at his feet; it was ever present to him, but in a vague and general way, and he could not fix his thoughts upon it. Thus, even while he trembled, and turned burning hot at the idea of speedy death, he fell to counting the iron spikes before him, and wondering how the head of one had been broken off, and whether they would mend it, or leave it as it was. Then, he thought of all the horrors of the gallows and the scaffold—and stopped to watch a man sprinkling the floor to cool it—and then went on to think again.
At length there was a cry of silence, and a breathless look from all towards the door. The jury returned, and passed him close. He could glean nothing from their faces; they might as well have been of stone. Perfect stillness ensued—not a rustle—not a breath—Guilty.
For all Trump’s bravado, which often took the form of attacks against the judge, the judge’s daughter, the district attorney, various witnesses, jury members, Joe Biden, and others, he was unusually subdued when he emerged from the courtroom at trial’s end. Perhaps, like Fagin, he was overwhelmed by being finally held to account. The very solidity of Judge Merchan’s courtroom signaled to him that here at least was one reality he couldn’t ignore, gaslight, or talk his way out of.
And so it was that, for the first time in American history, we saw a former president awaiting a verdict in a felony trial. “Perfect stillness ensued—not a rustle—not a breath—Guilty.”
