Trump found guilty, must now campaign for president as convicted felon

Donald Trump – a well-established liar and consistently cruel conspiracy theorist – will carry a new label into the 2024 presidential election: convicted felon. 
Democrats should make sure it’s all but stamped on his forehead. They should shout it from the rooftops, blast it out in every ad on every available platform. No voters should enter a polling place without knowing full well their options are between Democratic President Joe Biden and a convicted felon. 
A Manhattan jury delivered its verdict Thursday afternoon, finding Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels and influence the 2016 presidential election. Trump is the first former U.S. president convicted of a crime.
It’s an apt development for Trump, who has spent his life evading accountability, and for Republicans who allowed a transparent con artist to walk in and run roughshod over any modicum of decency their formerly Grand Old Party may have possessed.
The presumptive GOP presidential nominee will, of course, wail endlessly about the injustice brought on him by a jury of his peers. He’ll attack the jurors, the judge, the district attorney, the entire U.S. justice system, Biden, all Democrats, the news media, any relative you have who has ever cast even the mildest aspersions at him. The blast radius for his blame-casting will be global.
And some will buy it. The brainwashed MAGA faithful will continue to see their hero as a persecuted, almost Christ-like figure. The lickspittle lawmakers who’ve excised their integrity like it was a cancer and bent the knee to Trump will continue pushing lies on his behalf.
Trump is guilty.It won’t matter at all this election.
But the remaining sane Republicans will know how damaging this verdict is to Trump and to their chances of winning back the White House. And they will have to choke on the fact that the mess they’re facing – heading into the Republican National Convention with a convicted felon atop the ticket – is entirely their party’s own fault.
Despite the revisionist history Trump and his supporters promote, his presidency was a chaotic mess. It ended with two impeachments and a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.
He has never accepted the free-and-fair results of the 2020 presidential election. He has sowed doubt about the integrity of our elections, grossly eroding the very core of American democracy.
The party he co-opted for his own self-enrichment could easily have gone in a better and smarter direction. Nikki Haley, who has continued to draw a sizable number of Republican voters in primaries despite having left the race, will have mopped the floor with Biden. There was a staunchly conservative former vice president in Mike Pence, an experienced governor in Asa Hutchinson. 
The alternatives were there. But the GOP, too intimidated by Trump’s vitriolic MAGA base, went with the guy they knew would wind up in a courtroom. 
Does Trump’s verdict mean anything?Acquitted or convicted, he wins no matter what. Because he’ll say so.
And now the Republican Party – which fancifully boasts of “law and order” – is the first major political party to say to American voters: “Here’s the best we have to offer you as a choice for president. A convicted felon!”
Trump may well wind up winning. He has damaged our political system so badly and melted the brains of so many voters that I have zero confidence decency and common sense will prevail.
But they should.
When a political party offers us a candidate for leader of the free world who is an unrepentant liar, a lout and a convicted felon, that’s not an option. It’s an insult.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on X, formerly Twitter, @RexHuppke and Facebook facebook.com/RexIsAJerk