Trump verdict confirms how far former master of New York City has fallen

NEW YORK – New York City was once Donald Trump’s playground, the place where he made his name and then plastered it everywhere he could.

Now, the city that helped make him rich and famous has become his battleground. And Trump keeps losing.

His

conviction this past week

was the third and heaviest blow the former president has been dealt in his erstwhile hometown this year – a series of challenges to his ego, his bottom line, and now, perhaps, his freedom.

His felony conviction on May 30, delivered by a jury of 12 Manhattan residents, brought with it the possibility that he could eventually be imprisoned in New York, a far cry from the image he spent decades cultivating as a real estate mogul and man about town.

In February, Trump endured another humiliation: a judgment of more than US$450 million (S$608 million) in a civil fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James for overvaluing his net worth. The ruling undermined a central element of his public identity as a brilliant business person.

And in January, another jury in Manhattan ordered the former president to pay US$83.3 million for defaming writer E Jean Carroll, whom Trump had been found liable for sexually abusing in a changing room at Bergdorf Goodman in the 1990s.

Taken as a whole, the three cases have steadily chipped away at the persona Trump built across his decades in New York City, even as most polls show him continuing to lead this fall’s presidential race.

Election results from 2016 and 2020 in Manhattan, where Trump lost badly, suggest he wore out his welcome there some time ago. On May 31, as the latest big blow sunk in, some New Yorkers seemed to suggest they were happy he had relocated to Florida.

“I think that a lot of people feel that way about him: that he is old news,” said Mr George Arzt, a long-time political and media consultant who has known Trump for decades and who worked for Mayor Ed Koch, who died in 2013 and was one of Trump’s nemeses. Many New Yorkers, Mr Arzt said, “would like to push him out of the headlines”.

Trump, at a Trump Tower news conference on May 31, criticised the 34-felony verdict sharply and said that he planned to appeal. But he also seemed to acknowledge that the charges he had been convicted of – falsifying business records – hit at the heart of his image as a master of financial dealings.

“It sounds so bad when they say falsifying this, that’s a bad thing for me,” he said. “I’ve never had that before.”

The criminal trial, like the civil fraud case, pulled back the curtain on many of Trump’s business practices, as prosecutors dove into his penny-pinching and his refusal to pay debts, including initially stalling to pay a porn actor, Ms Stormy Daniels, the US$130,000 sum at the centre of the case.

Such a tale – sex with a beautiful woman – might once have fit perfectly with the image of Trump as a bachelor playboy, which was burnished by the city’s tabloids.

But Ms Daniels’ testimony was anything but flattering to the former president.

Sex with the married Trump was brief and unmemorable, she said, and was followed by requests for more encounters, which she rebuffed. Trump denies having had sex with Ms Daniels.

On May 31, Republicans were furious about the verdict, with conservative leaders urging Republican district attorneys and attorneys general to “indict the left” while other supporters of Trump called for a boycott of New York City.

Trump’s Republican allies in Congress called Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and one of the prosecutors who worked on the case, Mr Matthew Colangelo, to testify there.

Much of the outrage among conservatives was met with outright joy in many corners of New York City.

“I woke up with a smile on my face,” said Mr Robert Clark, 63, a photographer who lives in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighbourhood and who had spent the morning hunting for a copy of The New York Times to add to his collection of famous front pages. “I want to see the cover!”

Others were even more blunt.

“His legacy is just beyond trash,” said Mr Mark Samuels, 70, a retiree who worked in advertising and grew up on Staten Island. That was not always so, he added. For a time, he said, Trump made a certain garish sense in the New York of the 1970s and ’80s.

Those days are long over, Mr Samuels said: “We’re in one of the most important cities on Earth and he came and he fell. It’s his rise and fall.”

Trump’s reputation among some of the city’s elite was always tied to his origins as a striver from Queens whose father was also a developer who made his name and fortune outside Manhattan.

Trump tried and succeeded in breaking into the Manhattan market. But Ms Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a business group, said he was “not a joiner” when it came to New York’s business community.

“He always wanted to be the Lone Ranger,” she said.

That included when he was embarking on seemingly civic-minded projects like his much-ballyhooed (by him, among others) renovation of Central Park’s Wollman Rink.

And so, she said, the city’s business community had not exactly turned on him: “Because who was ever rooting for him?”

Trump has his supporters among the city’s 8 million-plus residents. There are more conservative neighbourhoods in all five boroughs, and a Republican stronghold – and member of Congress – on Staten Island.

On May 31, in front of Trump Tower, his supporters filled the sidewalks, engaging in shouting matches with anti-Trump protesters. They carried handmade signs and flags, including one seen in front of a Prada store reading “Trump or Death”.

Ms Colleen Ortiz, 50, who was on her way to work, said she felt “the Democrats and the powers that be do not want him in office”.

“I personally feel this is going to backfire and he is going to win in November,” added Ms Ortiz, who lives in the Bronx.

Inside, Trump, who had been giving remarks in a courthouse hallway every day during the trial, seemingly sought to regain some glamour during the news conference, in the building’s marble-and-brass atrium. On his way to the lectern, he passed the escalators that carried him down to his 2015 announcement of his first run for president.

Standing in front of a row of American flags, he gave a rambling speech, attacking the case, the judge and Democrats, and expounding on baseless conspiracy theories about President Joe Biden orchestrating the Manhattan case, and a nefarious plot to rid the nation of cars. He called the trial “very unfair” and a “scam”. He left without answering questions.

At Trump Village Estates, an apartment complex in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn that Trump’s father Fred Trump built, Mr Vernon Schlamowitz, 89, said it was not surprising that 12 Manhattan residents had convicted the former president.

“Just like the judge, hand-picked. All Democrats,” Mr Schlamowitz said of the jurors. The jurors’ identities have not been made public, and their party affiliations are unknown.

He also seemed proud to live in a building that bears the Trump name.

“I think he was a better businessman than his father,” he said, “but he took a lot more risks, and has fallen into a lot of problems along the way”.

Some New Yorkers seemed to recognise that the city itself – with its “make-it-there, make-it-anywhere” ethos and constant capitalist churn – had helped to create Trump’s identity.

“I suppose New York allowed some of it to flourish,” said Ms Sarah Williams, 72, a semi-retired psychiatrist for the city who has lived in Brooklyn for 36 years. She sighed. “That’s New York,” she added. “I think more and more we’re all just about money. Which is really unfortunate because I love New York.”

Still, for many city residents, the verdict itself seemed to vindicate their distaste for the 45th president.

Mr Lennox Hannan, 63, a writer who lives in Williamsburg, said he was “overjoyed” and compared Trump to a mafia boss, Mr Richard Nixon and even more unsavoury characters.

He also said the verdict also swelled his pride as a New Yorker, saying “the beginning of his downfall” had happened in the city.

“It’s fitting the first justice he’s faced has been in New York City,” Mr Hannan said. “It all comes back to New York City.” NYTIMES