It was billed as an event at which Donald J. Trump would make remarks about his criminal conviction.
Instead, the former president and presumptive Republican nominee held a discursive mini-rally on Friday that was filled with misleading statements about what happened in a Manhattan courtroom a day earlier and well-known campaign attacks against President Biden and his Democratic allies.
“This is a case where if they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone,” Mr. Trump said of prosecutors from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg’s office, who secured a conviction against him. “These are bad people. I think in many cases these are sick people.”
He then began switching back and forth between the trial and the standard speech, generally portraying immigrants crossing the border as violent, mentally ill criminals.
After seven weeks of attracting media attention from the start of jury selection to the reading of his guilty verdict, Mr. Trump spoke on Friday in the lobby of Trump Tower, jumping from one topic to another for 33 minutes as photographers and television cameras gathered crescent-shaped around its podium. A few dozen supporters, all employees who work in the building, flanked his other side.
Mr. Trump complained about the allegations against him and then about his own lawyers, whom he privately verbally abused throughout the trial. “Falsifying business records in the first degree – that sounds so bad,” Trump said. “I said, ‘Wow.’ And I’m even very annoyed with my own lawyers because they don’t say what it’s about.”
He again claimed that he wanted to testify on his own behalf, but said he ultimately decided against it after concluding that he would have been asked many questions aimed at catching him in a lie .
“I would have liked to testify; I would have liked to have testified to this day. But you said something unusual, like, ‘It was a beautiful, sunny day,’ and it actually rained,” Trump said.
He denigrated witnesses whose names he never named and insisted he remained bound by a code of confidentiality that prevented him from doing so. He criticized Michael D. Cohen, the key witness against him, without naming him, but also insisted that he was an “effective lawyer” and not a “fixer” as he was described.
But Mr. Cohen did almost no legal work for Mr. Trump during the time he was paid money that was recorded as legal fees. These expenses were actually a reimbursement of a hush money payment to a porn star, prosecutors argued in the trial. The jury agreed.
Friday’s situation signaled something of a shift as Mr. Trump pushes for a return to the White House. Although he has held some rallies during his trial, Trump’s public statements over the past six weeks have largely been limited to the drab, sterile courtroom hallway, emphasizing his status as a criminal defendant.
The return to Trump Tower’s marble and brass decor and lines from his brief speech felt like an announcement — that his first criminal trial was over and that he was now free to get back on the trail, albeit as a convicted felon. As he began his remarks, Mr. Trump strode past the escalator that had taken him to his 2015 campaign announcement, a descent and a decision that made the events central to his beliefs.
Mr. Trump, who has been impeached four times in four different jurisdictions, described himself as tarred for fighting for the country and once again portrayed himself as a victim of political persecution.
“I’m doing something for our constitution,” he said. “It’s very important, far beyond me. And that shouldn’t happen to other presidents and shouldn’t happen in the future.”
Mr. Trump took the opportunity to venture into areas that may be less politically advantageous for him, highlighting: the investigation conducted by a congressional committee into his conduct leading up to the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. His advisers generally favor He does not talk about the events surrounding this attack by a pro-Trump mafia, which they see as a political risk.
Mr. Trump once spoke about the trial through the lens of Christian morality, arguing that witnesses whose testimony corroborated his were “literally crucified” by the judge, who Mr. Trump said “looks like an angel but is actually an angel.” devil is”. ”
Mr. Trump portrayed his conviction as part of a larger moral question facing the country after a prosecution that he and his supporters — and, privately, some Democrats — see as flawed. “This is bigger than Trump. This is bigger than me,” he said. “This is bigger than my presidency.”
Mr. Trump often points out that something he has been accused of doing is something many other people have also done, and he relied on that argument again on Friday.
“I could go through the books of every businessman in town and find things that theoretically say, ‘Let’s impeach him, let’s destroy his life,'” Trump said.
Mr. Trump said he would appeal the ruling on several grounds, a decision his lawyer Todd Blanche announced a day earlier. “We will appeal this fraud,” Trump said. “We will be appealing on a lot of different things.”
Less than 24 hours after a jury made history by making Mr. Trump the first former president to be sentenced as a convicted felon, Mr. Trump sought to downplay the significance of the verdict. He concluded his remarks by saying that the only verdict that matters to him is the verdict at the ballot box.
“Remember, November 5th is the most important day in our country’s history,” Trump said. “Thank you very much.”
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2024-05-31 17:53:51
www.nytimes.com
