The hour of 4 pm Tuesday, potentially one of the most consequential hours[1] in the history of the American presidency, made clear that history books will almost certainly note Donald Trump[2]’s surprise 2016 election win with an asterisk.
Just minutes apart, in courtrooms in New York and outside Washington, DC, two of Trump’s closest aides—his longtime personal lawyer[3] and his former campaign chairman[4]—became felons, as the former pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges, and the latter was found guilty by a jury on eight other charges.
For the better part of two years, Trump has remained by all accounts obsessed with his narrow, unlikely campaign victory, bragging about his electoral college totals in numerous settings, including to foreign leaders like Vladimir Putin[5], even as he lost the popular vote by 3 million votes. Yet after Tuesday, the victory appears increasingly tainted, the American presidency as the spoils of ill-gotten gains, an election whose pivotal moments were shaped—potentially decisively—by Russian attacks overseas and hush money cover-ups at home.
After all, the question, following Tuesday’s back-to-back bombshells, is no longer whether Trump’s surprise victory was aided by criminal acts—that much has been made clear both by Robert Mueller’s sweeping indictments[6] against two dozen Russians, working for Vladimir Putin’s military intelligence[7] as well as for the Internet Research Agency[8], as well as by Michael Cohen’s decision to plead guilty to campaign finance violations.
To state that more simply: At least two separate criminal conspiracies helped elect Donald Trump president in 2016, one executed by the Russian government, another by Trump’s personal lawyer.
The questions now are how many different crimes aided the president—and how closely and personally involved