I had convinced myself Trump would never be convicted. I’m

So rarely held to account, Trump has finally had a small taste of justice. This is a good day for American democracy

The former president of the United States, and the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2024 election, is now a convicted felon 34 times over. In New York on Thursday, 12 jurors found Donald Trump guilty of falsifying business records in order to influence the 2016 election. It is the first criminal conviction for Trump, who has also been charged with felonies in three other criminal cases currently underway in Florida, Georgia, and Washington DC. He is the first former president to ever stand trial on criminal charges.

The jury found that Trump, who denies the charges, falsified business records in 2016 and 2017, when he made a series of payments to his lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, to reimburse Cohen for a payment of $130,000 that he had made to Stormy Daniels, a pornographic film actor, in exchange for Daniels’ silence about a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. Paying Daniels to shut up, the prosecution had argued, amounted to a conspiracy to influence the election. Labeling the payments to Cohen, as Trump and his flacks did, as payments of Cohen’s “legal retainer” was a fraud committed in furtherance of that conspiracy.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist