Extraordinary Circumstances, Ordinary Due Process

When former President Donald J. Trump was convicted on all charges at his criminal trial in Manhattan this week, it unleashed a torrent of outrage from the right savaging New York’s legal system as better befitting a banana republic.

The judge, it was claimed, was biased. The jury, it was argued, was full of liberals. And the entire endeavor of bringing nearly three dozen felony counts against Mr. Trump as he was campaigning for the White House, it was said, was little more than an exercise in raw political power ginned up by President Biden.

In reality, the saga that began in March 2023 when Mr. Trump was indicted by a local grand jury and ended on Thursday with 34 guilty verdicts from a panel of everyday New Yorkers was an example of the criminal justice system trying to work as normally as it could under extraordinary circumstances.

At each turn in the proceeding, Mr. Trump had the chance, like any other criminal defendant, to represent his interests — and his lawyers often availed themselves of the opportunity to the fullest extent of the law. And the process is far from over: The former president has vowed to file an appeal, meaning he will have another chance or two to vindicate himself.

There is little doubt that much about the trial — in which Mr. Trump was found to have falsified business records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to derail his 2016 presidential campaign — was unusual.

Prosecutors structured their case in a complicated way, arguing that the relatively routine fraud allegations were undertaken in the service of influencing Mr. Trump’s first run for the White House. And they presented their case to the jury at a time when polls show him with an early lead in a presidential campaign that is only exacerbating polarizing differences across the country.