A jury in New York City found Donald Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records stemming from a payment to keep adult film actress Stormy Daniels quiet about an alleged affair out of fear that it would hurt his chances of winning the 2016 election.
The jury began deliberating on Tuesday before returning the verdict Thursday afternoon. They were unanimous in their decision — which took them about 7.5 hours to reach — that Trump is guilty on all 34 counts on which he was charged.
The conviction comes in the heat of Trump’s third presidential campaign, which he has largely organized around the idea that President Joe Biden is masterminding a vast conspiracy to bring a series of criminal cases against him in order to hamstring his chances of winning back the White House. There’s no basis for the outlandish claim, which has been widely adopted by the Republican Party. Trump is the party’s presumptive presidential nominee and will debate Biden on CNN later this month.
Judge Juan Merchan set Trump’s sentencing for July 11, just days before the Republican National Convention.
It’s unclear how the conviction will affect Trump’s chances of winning the election, but there’s no doubt that Thursday’s verdict and the former president’s other alleged criminal activity will continue to dominate the campaign season. Just as Trump was the first president to be criminally charged, he would be the first convicted felon to win the presidency, should he defeat Biden in November.
The hush-money case will almost certainly be the only one of the four criminal cases brought against Trump to go to trial before the election. The proceedings were eventful, to say the least.
Over the course of six tension-packed weeks, prosecutors used documents, texts, emails, voice recordings, and witness testimony to depict Trump and his circle’s mindset and actions leading up to and following the effort to silence Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election. District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s team argued that Trump’s directives — namely to his former longtime fixer Michael Cohen, the prosecution’s star witness in the case — pertaining to the hush-money payment were intended to influence the election and defraud American voters, and that the 2017 payment to reimburse Cohen was disguised in order to cover up a crime. The jury of seven men and five women deemed the prosecution’s arguments enough to find Trump guilty.
“We’ll never know if this effort to hoodwink the American voter made a difference in the 2016 election, but that’s not something we need to prove,” Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass said in his closing argument on Tuesday. “The reimbursements to Cohen were cloaked in the conspiracy to promote the election, whether or not that conspiracy actually succeeded in tipping the scale.”
The saga that has now led to the first criminal conviction of a United States president began with Trump’s alleged affair with Daniels in 2006, before beginning to turn into something criminal as his first presidential campaign drew to a close. In early October 2016, the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape surfaced, depicting Trump boasting in 2005 how his celebrity status allows him to grope women and “grab them by the pussy.” Trump’s popularity with voters, specifically women, began to falter. Trump called his remarks “locker room talk,” a phrase Cohen attributed to Trump’s wife Melania during testimony.
Prosecutors portrayed a chaotic Trump campaign looking to mitigate the impact of the tape and prevent any other salacious stories from going public. One such story was Daniels’ account of her alleged affair with Trump at a celebrity golf tournament a decade earlier, just months after Trump’s son Barron was born. Cohen testified that Trump directed him to purchase Daniels’ life rights for $130,000 to prevent the story from coming to light. The payment was not disclosed as a campaign contribution, and Trump falsified 34 separate business records consisting of checks, ledgers, and invoices to cover up the payment, reimbursing Cohen for legal “services rendered.”
Trump and his team denied any wrongdoing, alleging Daniels has been lying about the affair and that the hush-money payment stemmed from a fear over how what they claim was a made-up story would impact Trump’s personal brand and his relationship with Melania.
The claims were largely dismantled — both by Daniels, whose much-anticipated testimony featured a detailed recounting of her alleged sexual encounter with Trump, and Cohen, who recalled a pivotal conversation he had with Trump in which the then-candidate ordered him to make the payment and joked he wouldn’t be on the “market” for long if the story got out and it meant the end of his marriage. “He wasn’t thinking about Melania, this was all about the campaign,” Cohen testified.
Trump’s team dedicated their closing argument on Tuesday to persuading the jury that Cohen was not trustworthy, with attorney Todd Blanche describing him as “literally like the MVP of liars.” Steinglass countered by pointing to all of the documentary evidence the prosecution produced. “The question is not whether you like Cohen,” he said. “It’s whether he has useful reliable information to give you about what went down in this case, and the truth is he was in the best position to know because he was the defendant’s right hand.”
The trial was every bit the circus one would have expected, with Trump airing a litany of complaints prior to and during the proceedings. He complained about the temperature in the courtroom, the sketch artists, and the lack of people visiting him. He dozed off on the first day of jury selection, and was spotted periodically nodding off for the rest of the trial. He was held in contempt for breaking a gag order prohibiting him from commenting on witnesses 10 times, with Merchan warning him that if he did so again he could wind up in jail. Trump repeatedly argued that he could not defend himself because of the gag order, while at the same time reneging on his promise to testify and set the record straight. Rolling Stone reported that Trump’s allies did not want him to testify, calling the prospect a horrible idea. The jury convicted him all the same.
Even the verdict seemed to be announced as a third-act twist. Just before 4:15 p.m. on Thursday, Merchan announced he would dismiss the jurors. By 4:35 he instead informed the courtroom the jury had come to a verdict and would need some more time to fill out their required juror forms.
Trump’s relaxed demeanor immediately soured as soon as Merchan mentioned the arrival of a verdict. As the courtroom waited in silence for the jurors to announce the verdict, Trump sat stone-faced and crossed his arms while lawyers Blanche and Emil Bove leaned in and whispered to him. As the jury foreman responded “guilty” to each count, Trump unfolded his arms, rested them at his side, his face emotionless.
“You gave this matter the attention it deserved,” Merchan told the jurors concluded before dismissing them. Trump was the last to rise when jurors were dismissed.
The former president was not happy while speaking to reporters outside court following the verdict. “Our whole country is being rigged right now,” he ranted. “This was done by the Biden administration, in order to wound or hurt an opponent, a political opponent, and I think it is just a disgrace, and we will keep fighting, we will fight to the end and we will win.”
Bragg struck a different tone while thanking the “12 everyday jurors” for their service in a press conference later on Thursday. “While this defendant may be unlike any other in American history, we arrived at this trial, and ultimately today at this verdict in the same manner as any other case that comes through the courtroom doors: by following the facts and the law, and doing so without fear or favor,” Bragg said.
Falsifying business records is usually a misdemeanor under New York law, but in this case the charges were class-E felonies, the lowest felony count in New York State, because there was an “intent to defraud” and it was done to “commit another crime or to aid or conceal” another crime — in this case, violations of election laws. Class-E felonies carry a maximum of four years in prison, although it’s rare for someone with no criminal history to be sentenced to prison for a nonviolent crime like the falsification of business records. Trump is more likely to face one to four years of probation instead.
The potential lack of prison time should not understate the severity of the landmark conviction. As the first former president in U.S. history to be charged criminally at either the state or federal level, and also the first former president to be convicted of a felony, Trump could face a rocky road both as he continues to campaign for president, with polls showing a criminal conviction would be a “disaster” for him. He could also face a rocky road as he tries to stay out of jail. He is no longer a first-time offender, and his new criminal history could bring greater sentences in any of his outstanding criminal cases.
Trump is certain to appeal the decision, but legal experts have pointed to Cohen’s witness testimony to act as a buffer for any appeals that may come forward. The merits of an appeal are substantially diminished given the jury was shown all 34 counts of fraudulent business records during the trial, providing real, tangible documents-based evidence that makes it difficult to dispute the jury’s finding.
Trump is facing criminal charges in three other cases. He was indicted in Georgia along with 18 others in August 2023 on charges of racketeering and conspiracy. The indictment stems from a two-year investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis into the alleged effort to overturn Biden’s 2020 win in the state. Willis is currently appealing a March ruling that dismissed six of those charges.
In Florida, District Judge Aileen Cannon has indefinitely postponed the federal classified documents case against Trump earlier, citing numerous issues she has yet to resolve. She dismissed claims in late May from Trump’s legal team to dismiss the indictment due to it being a “personal and political attack” against Trump, who was indicted on 40 felony counts in the case.
Also at the federal level, Trump was indicted on four charges for his alleged actions leading up to the violent riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan postponed the case until the Supreme Court rules on Trump’s claim to have presidential immunity in perpetuity for acts committed as president. Although the justices suggested they were likely to reject his claims of absolute immunity, some of the more conservative justices suggested they may limit how former presidents may be prosecuted.
Trump would be able to direct the Justice Department to drop the federal investigations if he defeats Biden, and Rolling Stone recently reported that he is scheming for ways to use the power of the presidency to quash the state-level cases, as well.
The question now is whether voters will give him the chance.
The Rise of the Digital Oligarchy
On Jan. 11, 1994, I drove to UCLA’s Royce Hall to hear Vice President Al Gore deliver the keynote address at the Information Superhighway Conference. I was in the early stages of building Intertainer, which would become one of the first video-on-demand companies. The 2,000 people crowded into that auditorium did not know it, but they were crossing a threshold. The roster of speakers read like a who’s who of industrial power: TCI’s John Malone, Rupert Murdoch, Sony’s Michael Schulhof, Barry Diller of QVC. These were among the richest and most commanding figures in American communications. Today, their combined force and fortunes are a rounding error beside Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Jensen Huang, Jeff Bezos, and Marc Andreessen. The world the Hollywood moguls walked back out into would not, in any meaningful sense, be the world they had left.
Gore’s UCLA speech now reads like a confident moment in the early‑Clinton fantasia of managed modernization: the assumption that a lightly guided market, properly “incentivized,” could be coaxed into building a new civic commons. He framed the whole project as a public utility constructed with private capital, insisting that “the nation needs private investment to complete the construction of the National Information Infrastructure. And competition is the single most critical means of encouraging that private investment.” What is striking, in retrospect, is not the technophilia but the blithe certainty that “competition” would safeguard pluralism and access, that state‑designed market rules would prevent the emergence of bottlenecks and private tollbooths. The actual trajectory of the internet — toward a stack dominated at each layer by a handful of firms from carriers to platforms to ad brokers — renders the scene almost allegorical: an administration hymning competition as the guarantor of openness while midwifing, in practice, the consolidated, quasi‑monopolistic order that would eventually narrow and privatize the very public sphere it imagined itself to be creating.
For 150 years since the Industrial Revolution, Americans had trusted that science and technology would bind the nation together, just as railroads and the telegraph had once compressed its continental distances. The historian John P. Diggins observed that “whereas the very nature of politics in America implied division and conflict, science was seen as bringing forth cohesion and consensus.” That faith was about to be tested to destruction.
Within two years, Gore and Newt Gingrich collaborated to pass the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and buried inside it was a provision — Section 230 — that would prove more consequential than anything else in the bill. It granted the new platforms a liability shield unavailable to any other business in America: immunity from responsibility for the content their users generated, moderated, or amplified. The effect was to hand the architects of the digital age a license to build without obligation. Welcome to the Wild West; the platforms own the sheriff.
What followed was an era of rapacious accumulation. In 1994, the largest company in America by market capitalization was Exxon, valued at $34 billion. Today, Google is worth $3.7 trillion. And when Donald Trump took the oath of office in January 2025, flanked by the very technocratic elite whose fortunes had grown beyond all precedent, the possibility loomed that the preceding 10 years was crystallizing into a name: techno-fascism — an authoritarian, corporatist order in which a narrow caste of technocratic elites deploys digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence to automate governance, intensify surveillance, and erode democratic accountability, all while presenting their dominion as the neutral application of expertise.
For the past decade I have written about the almost theological divide between two competing creeds. The gospel of nostalgia promises to “make America great again” — its default logic being that the America of the 1950s, when white men’s assumptions went unchallenged by people of color, women, immigrants, or queer individuals, was a more stable and legible world worth recovering. The gospel of progress, as Andreessen has written, holds that “there is no material problem — whether created by nature or by technology — that cannot be solved with more technology.” Its default logic is simpler: stop complaining. Flat wages, rising social media–induced mental illness, falling homeownership, a warming planet — perhaps, but at least we have iPhones. But the philosopher Antonio Gramsci had foreseen this dialectic in 1930: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum many morbid symptoms appear.”
After the Republican midterm disappointments of 2022, Thiel called for a party that could unite “the priest, the general, and the millionaire”— a formula that reads, with hindsight, as a precise blueprint for Trump’s second administration: Christian nationalism, military force deployed at home and abroad, and a financial oligarchy powerful enough to steer the state. By the election of 2024, the gospel of nostalgia and the gospel of progress had concluded a short-term bargain to elect Trump. The result is the rise of an oligarchy of fewer than 20 American families.
The Copernican Moment
A deep unsettlement runs beneath our society today. Just as Nicolaus Copernicus displaced the Earth from the center of the cosmos, we are now displacing the human from the center of consciousness. New discoveries about cognition in other animals and organisms — octopuses dreaming, bees counting, trees retaining memory of drought — suggest, as Michael Pollan has written, that thought and feeling are not human monopolies but properties of life itself. The first Copernican revolution humbled our astronomy; the second threatens to humble our very being.
Yet the revelation carries its twin anxiety. If mind is no longer our exclusive inheritance, what becomes of that inheritance when machines begin to mimic it? Artificial intelligence poses not merely a technical challenge but a metaphysical one. It asks whether consciousness can exist without vulnerability — without the pulse and jeopardy of a life that can be lost. The Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio reminds us that the brain evolved to serve the body, that consciousness begins in feeling. Machines, however elaborate, know no hunger, no pain, no desire. To be conscious in the human sense is to participate in necessity — to be held by one’s own fate.
The real danger is not that machines will become like us, but that we will become like them: efficient, unfeeling, exquisitely programmable. A people habituated to passivity and optimized for consumption may eventually forget the work of building a world together. What once belonged to politics — the imaginative labor of collective destiny — has been quietly surrendered to the corporate logic of the algorithm. The result is not enlightenment but enclosure: a society awake to everything except itself.
This interregnum, then, is not a pause but a rupture — a suspended time in which institutions still stand yet no longer persuade, in which the future arrives in forms no one quite intended. What began for my generation as the optimistic dream of a communications revolution has matured into a general condition of American life: a digital oligarchy adrift between orders, armed with enormous power but uncertain whom, or what, it serves. Some of us glimpsed the terrible risk when it was still only a risk — that the principles of kleptocracy would become America’s own. That grim vision is now arriving, in real time, in the person of Trump. As David Frum wrote in The Atlantic, “The brazenness of the self-enrichment now underway resembles nothing from any earlier White House, but rather the corruption of a post-Soviet republic or a postcolonial state.” And the techno-fascist oligarchs are at the trough, waiting to be fed.
The Age of Surveillance and Simulation
The first clear sign that the promise of the digital commons had curdled came with Edward Snowden’s disclosures in 2013, when Americans learned that Google and Facebook had opened their back doors to the security state. What had been marketed as an architecture of connection revealed itself also as an infrastructure of monitoring.
By the mid-2020s, the fear had hardened into habit. A 2025 YouGov survey found that nearly a quarter of Americans admitted to censoring their own posts or messages for fear of being watched or doxxed. Surveillance no longer needed a knock at the door. The mere awareness of a watching eye did the work. What had been a public square had become, almost imperceptibly, a panopticon of self-restraint.
Into this apparatus stepped a new class of private overseers. Palantir, the data-mining firm Thiel co-founded, grew from a counterterrorism instrument into a generalized engine for correlating personal information — tax filings, social media traces, the bureaucratic exhaust of ordinary life. Insiders warned that data citizens had surrendered to the IRS or Social Security for basic governance could be recombined for far more intrusive purposes. The point was not simply that we were being watched, but that we were being rendered legible — sorted, scored, and classified in ways invisible to us. As Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times, the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure is effectively nullified by AI:
It is not illegal to put cameras around everywhere in public space and record every conversation. It’s a public space — you don’t have a right to privacy in a public space. But today, the government couldn’t record that all and make sense of it. With AI, the ability to transcribe speech, to look through it, correlate it all, you could say: This person is a member of the opposition — and make a map of all 100 million. And so are you going to make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment by the technology finding technical ways around it?
We are witnessing the first serious moral battle of the AI era, and its front lines run straight through the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Anthropic drew them first. The company refused to allow its systems to be turned on the American public in the name of security and declined to let the Pentagon wire its AI into autonomous weapons capable of identifying and killing without human authorization. To the Defense Department, accustomed to purchasing compliance along with contracts, the idea that a vendor might set moral limits on military use was borderline insubordinate. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk to national security. President Trump, on Truth Social, called the company “radical woke” and ordered federal agencies to stop using its technology. Anthropic had been, in effect, blacklisted for conscience.
What happened next revealed something important about the moral landscape of the AI industry. OpenAI, which had publicly positioned itself as sharing Anthropic’s red lines — Sam Altman insisted his company, too, opposed mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons — moved swiftly to fill the vacuum. While Anthropic was being frozen out of Washington, D.C., OpenAI quietly negotiated and signed a deal of its own with the Pentagon, granting the Defense Department access to its models for deployment in classified environments. OpenAI then published a blog post with a pointed aside: “We don’t know why Anthropic could not reach this deal, and we hope that they and more labs will consider it.” The company that had stood shoulder to shoulder with Anthropic in principle had, in practice, used Anthropic’s exclusion to capture the contract.
The backlash was swift — and came from inside the house. Caitlin Kalinowski, who had led OpenAI’s hardware and robotics teams since late 2024, publicly announced her resignation. Her statement, posted on X and LinkedIn, was brief and precise: “AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people.”
The formulation was careful, almost scrupulously fair to her former colleagues. But the substance was damning. A senior technical executive, one who had spent her career building the physical systems through which AI meets the real world, had concluded that OpenAI had crossed lines it had publicly promised not to cross — and had done so without the internal deliberation those lines deserved. Some users canceled their ChatGPT subscriptions in protest. Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, became the number-one free app in the Apple App Store, displacing ChatGPT. The market, in its way, had registered a verdict.
What the episode exposed is the hierarchy of pressures operating on every AI company at this moment. Altman’s public statements and OpenAI’s private negotiations inhabited different moral universes, and the gap between them is a measure of how quickly principle buckles under the combined weight of government contracts, competitive anxiety, and the intoxicating proximity to power. Hegseth and Trump have sent the clearest possible signal: Companies that draw lines will be punished; companies that erase them will be rewarded. The outcome of this first moral battle of the AI era will do much to determine the shape of every battle that follows.
But erasure, in this case, is not incidental — it is the business model. The questions that seem separate — who controls the weapons, who watches the citizens, who owns the culture, whose labor trains the machine — are in fact a single question, asked of us all at once: whether humanity will remain the author of its own story, or be quietly written out of it.
The Technocracy’s Bargain
Artificial intelligence functions in this landscape not only as a tool, but also as an ideology. The systems that now summarize our news, grade our tests, and generate our images are built entirely from accumulated human expression, yet are heralded as replacements for the slow, wayward work of thought. By design they remix rather than originate; they automate style while evacuating risk. The consequence is a flood of synthetic prose and imagery that feels like culture but carries none of the scars of experience. Anyone with a prompt can simulate the surface of artistry, further collapsing the distinction between the crafted and the merely produced.
We need to insist on the human self as something more than a flicker of circuitry or an echo of stimulus — to hold that our consciousness is not reducible to mechanism, that our art, our music, our capacity for beauty and sorrow carry a dignity no machine can counterfeit. We need to imagine a future in which humanity still governs its own creation — not as the object of its inventions, but as their author and their measure. A world that offers consumption in place of purpose courts a different and more corrosive kind of unrest.
The outlines of that unrest were already legible by the middle of the decade. In labor reports and think-tank bulletins one could trace the quiet unmaking of the white-collar world. Young graduates, credentialed and deeply indebted, were discovering that the jobs they had trained for no longer existed in familiar form; whole categories of administrative and creative work were being absorbed by AI or retooled around its efficiencies. Commentators spoke of an “AI job apocalypse” not as metaphor but as demographic fact — an educated stratum slipping downward, its ambitions collapsing into precarity. History offers a warning: When a surplus of the educated meets a scarcity of opportunity, turbulence and unrest follows. The clerks and interns of the knowledge economy can become the dissidents of a new era.
But many of the technocrats already sense what is coming and prefer to prepare their escape. They buy compounds in New Zealand, secure airstrips in remote valleys, fortify estates on distant islands stocked and wired for siege. The gesture betrays everything: They, too, expect the storm. They simply mean to watch it from a safe distance — beyond the reach of the graduates, the strivers, the displaced millions who will inhabit the world their machines made. In that distance — the gap between those who build exits and those who have nowhere to go — the interregnum takes on its most recognizable shape: a society waiting, with gathering impatience and anger, for a new settlement that has yet to arrive.
Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters, said something recently about AI and labor that hangs in the air like a change in pressure: For once, those who have never known economic danger are about to feel what it means to be exposed — to live without insulation from the market’s weather. According to The New York Times, “The unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 soared to 5.6 percent at the end of last year.”
For 30 years, the country has drifted ever further from the world of things. The old economy of matter — of tools, factories, and physical production — was gradually exchanged for an economy of signs. We learned to believe that the future belonged to those who trafficked in abstractions: the managers of systems, the manipulators of symbols, the custodians of information. That belief became the moral core of the professional class. To think was noble; to make was obsolete.
For decades, the professional class watched the industrial world hollow out and mistook the spectacle for confirmation of its own permanence. It confused exemption with destiny. Now, the correction is arriving — not from the shop floor, but from the circuits.
This is one meaning of the interregnum: a pause in which the old class myths no longer align with material reality, and no new story has yet cohered. In the space between, people who once felt like authors of the future are discovering that they were also characters, written into a script whose logic they did not fully control.
Yet another path exists, if we can summon the imagination to take it. Rather than waging a doomed Luddite resistance, we might seek a grand bargain with the architects of the new order — entering into direct negotiation with Big Tech over the political terms of the transition. The question is not whether AI can be stopped; it cannot. The question is whether its spoils can be shared.
How much of the immense stream of revenue flowing through the platforms and hyperscalers could be redirected toward a sovereign fund, a common dividend for those whose labor has been displaced? Anthropic’s Amodei has suggested a tax of three percent of AI revenues to seed the sovereign fund. It is a moment that calls less for purity than for negotiation — an uneasy but deliberate partnership between humanists and technologists, aimed at keeping a frustrated graduate class from becoming the raw material of a larger revolutionary breakdown.
Marshall McLuhan believed that new media were creating “an overwhelming, destructive maelstrom” into which we were being drawn against our will. But he also believed in a way out. “The absolute indispensability of the artist,” McLuhan wrote, “is that he alone in the encounter with the maelstrom can get the pattern recognition. He alone has the awareness to tell us what the world is made of. The artist is able [to give] … a navigational chart to get out of the maelstrom created by our own ingenuity.”
Our great inquiry now must be: How do we quit the politics of national despair — a maelstrom that our own ingenuity has created? It will be hard, because a vast media industry depends on your engagement with its outrage. Three companies — X, Meta, Google — monopolize the advertising revenue that flows from that outrage. Seventy-eight percent of Americans say these social media companies hold too much power. To break the spell, we need to understand the roots of the phony culture war they have cultivated — and remember that America has had a real promise. Only when we recover that memory can we begin to imagine what the new promise of American life might look like.