The odds of Donald Trump being convicted in his New York trial are actually pretty strong

Donald Trump likes to boast about setting records. Remember how he claimed he had the largest crowd at an inauguration ever? (spoiler: he didn’t). But he’s on track to set a new record: not only the first former president to be indicted, but the first to be a convicted felon.

Starting today in New York City, Trump is facing what is very likely his only criminal trial to take place before the November election. He has managed to drag out the charges in all the other venues where he faces a reckoning for his behavior through a combination of legal challenges and, in the case of his refusal to turn over top secret documents after he left the White House, a friendly judge whom he appointed to the bench.

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When the first indictments against Trump – in what eventually totaled 91 and got pared down to 88 – were handed down, there was a lot of commentary about the weakness of the case. One Manhattan district attorney refused to pursue the case before his successor, Alvin Bragg, took it up.

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The basis of the case is the hush money that Trump allegedly paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels to stay quiet about the fling she said she had with Trump. “Paying hush money is not a crime under New York state law,” one attorney who worked on the investigation later wrote. The case is still referred to as being about hush money, but that is not what the trial is about. It’s about election interference, something that Trump became an expert in.

The issue in the trial is whether Trump intentionally falsified business records to hide the payment to Daniels and in so doing violated federal election law. In essence, he was hiding information from voters, thereby misleading them.

This novel interpretation was initially met with skepticism. Boston University law professor Jed Shugerman called it a “legal embarassment” in a New York Times op-ed. Now, Shugerman says that he thinks Bragg has a reasonable case, one that is likely to result in Trump’s conviction. In so doing, Shugerman joins a chorus of other legal experts who believe that Trump is heading into the trial with a strong chance of being convicted.

As a reminder, this episode has already sent one person to jail: Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen. He pleaded guilty in 2018 to a series of charges, some of which were related to the payment to Daniels. He subsequently served almost two years in jail. Cohen will be a key witness in Trump’s trial.

Trump has not fared well with New York juries. So far the cases have been civil trials involving defamation charges by writer E. Jean Carroll, whom Trump was found liable of sexually assaulting. The jury in the first trial ordered Trump to pay Carroll $5 million, but Trump kept up his attacks on Carroll. The second time around, another jury upped the cost to Trump to $83 million. Then there was the civil fraud case last February, in which a New York judge hit Trump with a penalty of more than $350 million.

All along, Trump’s strategy has been to delay his legal problems until after the election, in hopes that he would be back in the White House and could make his cases disappear. That won’t be happening for today’s case. Moreover, the polls show that if Trump is convicted, a lot of independent voters say they are less likely to support his candidacy. In a tight race, that makes a difference.

Of course, Trump has managed to convince people that the truth is a lie before, so he may yet do so even if he is convicted. But Republicans should be worried. They hitched their wagon to a deeply flawed candidate. They may find out in a few months that they hitched it to a convicted felon.