Yes, Trump's Conviction Should Make You Deliriously Happy (2024)

Well that was quick—former President Donald Trump was convicted Thursday on all 34 counts in the Stormy Daniels hush money trial. A lot of commentary in the coming days will focus on how sad it is for the country that the former president of the United States and the current odds-on favorite to be planning a second inaugural in five months was just convicted of a scheme to fraudulently conceal payments to a p*rn star. But Trump finally being held accountable for the first time in his life by anyone for anything isn't a tragedy—it is deliverance, and you should feel fantastic about it.

Of course, ideally former presidents would not be convicted unanimously after a short period of deliberation during which the jurors pored over a mountain of indisputable evidence that Trump falsified business records. In a perfect world, the future president wouldn't order his erstwhile attorney to take out a home equity loan on his house to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels, with whom our illustrious 45th president apparently (she testified) had brief, joyless, unprotected sex (he still denies it) while his third wife was four months postpartum with their son. I think I speak for everyone when I say that I wish that none of this utterly unwelcome information was taking up a single byte of storage in my brain and that I could have very happily lived out my days in a world in which Donald Trump remained the lecherous, tic-tac–popping host of The Celebrity Apprentice and never ran for president.

But none of this is our fault, and we shouldn't feel guilty or hesitant about celebrating the long-overdue delivery of justice—justice that President Biden's wan attorney general was incapable of pursuing for so long that he allowed Trump and his upside-down-flag-waving pals on the Supreme Court to effectively run out the clock after running a failed coup operation. It's not the fault of the tens of millions of people who until yesterday had grown cynical about the possibility that the man who tried to overthrow the American constitutional system of government live on national television could ever possibly experience consequences for what he's done to the country. It's not the fault of the prosecutors and civil servants risking their lives to do the right thing while MAGA revolutionaries doxx and threaten them and their families day and night.

The blame lies with three different but overlapping groups of people: first and foremost, with GOP primary voters, who have now picked this narcissist with a lifelong trail of personal and professional turmoil as their party's nominee for president not once, not twice, but three times.

The second is Republican senators, who had two different opportunities to convict Trump after his impeachments and thereby rid us all of this scourge forever, and instead chose to fold like holders of a poor poker hand.

The third is the much larger group of GOP sycophants, officeholders, aspiring MAGAworld hangers-on and the gigantic cottage industry run by merch-peddling and conspiracy-mongering "patriots" that has sprouted up around Trump, including the pitiful gaggle of wannabe veeps and later-to-be-indicted goons intended to violate gag orders for him.

Any one of these three groups could have, at any moment in the past nine years, put a stop to the total madness that has taken over their party and gravely undermined the legitimacy and functioning of American democracy. But again, and again they chose to capitulate to Trump and his minions, and the only ones who reluctantly and very occasionally did the right thing were immediately chased out of office like party-crashers by the GOP's primary voters.

No one could do it. They caved every single time, each humiliation greasing the skids for the next, each moral compromise made easier by the last, each affront to the spirit of democracy making another, even graver one inevitable, until eventually none of it felt wrong to them. And so here we are, with the Republican nominee for president now a felon saved from dozens of other convictions only by the six partisan operatives using their total impunity and lifetime sinecures to grant a series of far-right wish fulfillment fantasies.

These convictions don't make Trump's election impossible, or even necessarily less likely. What they should do is remind voters that the man they seem to be on the precipice of electing president is a seedy huckster—and a convicted one, at that.

And the outcome should buck up everyone who spent most of the last decade dreaming of this moment and being told by Very Serious People that it would never and should never come, that it would somehow be more dangerous to prosecute Trump than it would be to just let him waltz into the White House with an army of right-wing fascists and declare himself the king America has gone without for nearly two-and-a-half centuries.

Now the voters need to finish the job.

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.