The courts were never going to keep the former president from reclaiming the White House.

Follow this authorEugene Robinson's opinions

Or maybe not. A small but potentially meaningful number of Trump-leaning voters have told pollsters they would be less likely to stick with him if he were convicted of crimes, as opposed to merely being accused. How many points is “the presumption of innocence” principle worth in the crucial swing states?

The truth, I believe, is that no one knows with any certainty what impact Trump’s new status as a felon will have on his electoral prospects. In any event, politics should have played no role in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s decision to press forward with this trial.

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Falsifying business records is not as consequential as trying to overturn the result of the 2020 election or absconding to Mar-a-Lago with boxes of classified documents — the alleged conduct that led to charges against Trump in his other three pending trials. But the way Trump fiddled his numbers to hide the $130,000 payment to Daniels clearly was against the law. He desperately wanted her account of their tryst kept under wraps, at least until after the election in November 2016. Lawbreaking by a former president, or by a presidential candidate, is still lawbreaking.

Bragg offered to stand back and stand by, so to speak, and allow any of the other cases to go to trial first. Not one of the other prosecutors was able to proceed, though, so Bragg went first by default.

There was poetic justice in the fact that Trump’s first criminal trial took place in New York, the city where he once emblazoned his name across the iconic skyline and the tabloid gossip columns. It was fitting that the charges involved behavior typical of Trump’s overall approach to life: Don’t worry about what’s technically legal; do whatever they let you get away with. I’m reminded of the motto of his ruthless mentor, the legendarily unscrupulous lawyer Roy Cohn: “Don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is.”

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The judge in this........

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