2 days ago, by Gary O’Donoghue, Chief North America correspondent
It was a warm, late May afternoon in 2024 in lower Manhattan. The jury in Donald Trump’s trial over hush money paid by his former lawyer to adult film star Stormy Daniels was out deliberating for a second day.
US Supreme Court justices at the Supreme Court in 2022
Assuming we were in for a long wait, I took myself off to lunch with the BBC team at the world-famous Katz’s deli for a Reuben sandwich.
Then all hell broke loose. The jury was returning.
According to one rumour, they were just being sent home for the day; another suggested there was a verdict.
Seconds before the BBC News at Ten went on air, I arrived breathless at the live television point outside the courthouse, smashing my phone screen on the pavement in my hurry.
One by one, the verdicts filtered through: guilty… guilty… guilty… it went on.
During his recent interview with Gary O’Donoghue, Donald Trump called judges who have suspended presidential executive orders “radical left lunatics”
All 34 charges came back guilty, and I spent that night’s main news bulletin explaining the enormity of the idea that a former president was now a convicted felon – a first in US history.
As the BBC’s senior North America correspondent, I’d spent months covering the multitude of Trump’s legal problems in courts up and down the East Coast. Four separate criminal cases; several civil actions; it was coming at him from all sides, threatening not just his liberty but his whole political and commercial existence.
Spool on a year, and the boot is thoroughly on the other foot.
Three major Supreme Court judgments – one giving presidents and former presidents broad immunity from prosecution; a second dismissing the ruling that Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results disqualified him from running for office again; and a third, just last month, curbing district judges’ abilities to stall the president’s agenda – have all emboldened this president who, having reshaped the Supreme Court with a solid conservative majority, now has the lower courts in his sights.
