Just minutes ago, a Manhattan jury of all twelve members, all of them New York City citizens, rendered former U.S. President Donald Trump guilty of all 34 felony charges brought against him by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. and his team of prosecutors. Judge Juan Merchan set July 11th as the date he will render his judgment of sentencing. That will be only three days before the Republican National Convention is scheduled to begin. The Republican Party already has selected Donald Trump as its nominee for the presidential election on November 5th this year. Now, the main question is whether Judge Merchan will sentence Trump to some type of benign community service or something more, such as incarceration at Rikers Island. But after July 11th, Trump can appeal the jury’s decision, which he no doubt will do. That appeal is expected to last many months if not more than a year.
Manhattan DA Bragg–the first African-American elected to that office–inherited this case against Donald Trump while Trump was president. Bragg’s predecessor Cyrus Vance Jr., a Caucasian, had opened this investigation of Caucasian Donald Trump during his presidency, in 2019. An irony here is that Trump often has been charged with racism, especially against Blacks, and being an advocate of White supremacy. Vance was convinced that Trump had committed federal election crimes and others. Yet Vance retired at the end of 2021, leaving his successor Alvin Bragg to decide whether to continue this investigation against Donald Trump.
Right away, Bragg indicated he was doubtful that he and his office of prosecutors could win a jury conviction on these allegations against now President Donald Trump. That is the main thing district attorneys throughout the nation must decide in whether to continue a criminal investigation. That is, can they adcieve a conviction before a jury?
Because of Bragg’s seeming reluctance to continue this investigation of a now former U.S. president, Bragg’s two, elite prosecutors resigned in protest. They issued an open letter, saying they were convinced Trump was guilty of violating federal campaign election laws during the final weeks of the presidential campaign in 2016. And they critically suggested Bragg had discontinued the investigation. Bragg didn’t say much in defense. Eventually, he said his office had not discontinued this investigation.
As time went on, Bragg’s team of investigators and prosecutors dug up more and more evidence, most notably documents signed by Trump while he was president which seems to convincingly implicate him. Bragg therefore slowly changed his mind about the case. In mid-2023, he announced his office’s indictment of Donald Trump on 31 felony charges, added 3 others soon afterwards. Who is Alvin Bragg Jr.? Mr. Bragg is a Christian who believes the Bible and teaches it in his church. To learn more about him, read my blog post, “District Attorney Alvin Bragg Teaches Sunday School.”
Former President Donald Trump being convicted by a U.S. court-of-law for, not 1 but, 34 crimes is really a big deal in our nation’s history. And it affirms the thesis of my book, Bible Predicts Trump Fall (338 pp.), which was published on February 8, 2022. All throughout Trump’s presidency, this is what I was saying of him on my Kermit Zarley Blog. I got mostly pushback. Nearly all white men my age, especially evangelical Christians, strongly opposed what I was saying and supported Trump as president. I kept alleging that they were caught in a personality cult in which Donald Trump was a classic narcissist and a con artist who was deceiving them. This didn’t go over well with most people who read my blog. Even though I didn’t have a big megaphone, I kept on about it, doing what I believed was my civic duty as an American citizen who cherished our democratic freedoms. My motto was, “Evil prevails when good men do nothing.”
Kirkus Reviews says my book, Bible Predicts Trump Fall, that it is “a persuasive, well-argued case against Trump by a prominent evangelical.” However, amazon.com ended my amazon ads about this book early this year by saying it would not be allowing ads for books about Trump during this presidential election year. Here is what this book’s description says at its home page on amazon.com, where it is available for sale:
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