- I don't think anyone should believe that Republicans or Donald Trump are happy about him being a convicted felon, or that they think it's such a great thing for his campaign.

If they thought it was such a great thing for his campaign, I think they would approach it very differently.

[upbeat music] - Hello and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer coming to you from, of all places, Las Vegas, Nevada, one of seven swing states that could decide the most surreal presidential election in US history, which brings me to today's show.

You've heard the news, you've seen the headlines.

You probably already have an opinion, but we have to talk about it.

Former President Donald Trump has been convicted of 34 felony counts in a New York criminal case about hush money payments on the eve of the 2016 election.

It's the first time any US President, current or former, has been found guilty of a crime.

And of course, everyone is asking how this will impact the election.

And the short answer, no one knows.

Political forecasting after unprecedented news is famously a recipe for regret.

But make no mistake, the verdict is having an impact.

The Trump campaign announced it raised an astounding $53 million in the 24 hours after it was announced, a sign his base, it's fired up.

- The real verdict is gonna be November 5th by the people and we'll keep fighting.

We'll fight till the end and we'll win.

- Maybe more important than what the conviction means for Republicans or capital D Democrats, it's what it means for our already fragile lowercase d democracy.

As historic as Trump's conviction is, the political response will be even more extraordinary.

- This is garbage.

- Republican leadership from far right to center has lined up behind their nominee, decrying the case as an illegitimate witch hunt and blatant political persecution.

Democratic leaders say justice has been served, that Trump was treated like any other ordinary citizen, and the verdict is a sign the system works.

- The American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed.

- Democracy needs faith to function.

We need free and fair elections, but just as importantly, they need to be seen as free and fair.

Our country is in deep crisis if half the electorate thinks Trump is an existential threat to America's political institutions and the other half are convinced those institutions have already been corrupted to their core.

So where do we go from here?

To talk through it, Preet Bharara, former US attorney and Susan Glasser, New Yorker journalist.

Don't worry, we've also got your puppet regime.

♪ Guilty, I'm guilty ♪ ♪ Guilty, guilty, guilty ♪ - But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

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- [Narrator] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Narrator] And by... - [Narrator] Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at Cox.career/news.

- [Narrator] Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [gentle music] - Joining me to discuss the Trump verdict and the implications for our election, Preet Bharara and Susan Glasser.

Delighted to see you both.

Preet, let me start with you.

So much of the backlash to this verdict from the GOP has been about the trial itself being illegitimate.

Should this case have been brought in the way that it was by the district attorney, something you have a lot of experience with?

- The accusations that some folks on the Trump side are making about how this was a politicized witch hunt, it was preordained, all of that misses a very important historical fact, and that is when Alvin Bragg came into office, there had been a number of prosecutors, including his predecessor, Cyrus Vance, who were building a case with respect to financial fraud against Trump.

They ended up quitting with some fanfare when Alvin Bragg refused to pursue that case.

So if Alvin Bragg came in with an agenda to get Donald Trump, he had a packaged case that he could have brought.

The very seasoned prosecutors who had served both as federal prosecutors and state prosecutors had wrapped up in a bow for him to do.

But he thought, in exercise of his discretion, using his judgment that that was not appropriate.

And this other case was one that after some period of time, he decided to bring.

And by the way, it was an open and fair proceeding.

There was a judge who ruled often for the prosecution, but often as well for Donald Trump's side, 12 jurors who were screened.

And by the way, the defense got to participate in this election of that jury, found him guilty pretty definitively and pretty quickly.

And there will now be an opportunity for an appeal.

So all the hallmarks of a free and open rule of law proceeding were met here.

And look, there's gonna be an appeal.

The people on the Trump side are saying it's a foregone conclusion that this conviction will be overturned.

I don't think that's the case.

In the same way that I don't think it's the case that it's 100% guaranteed that the conviction will be affirmed.

I think there are non-frivolous issues that can be raised.

And we'll see how a court of appeals thinks about that.

And ultimately, if there's a constitutional question, which I'm not sure that there is, but if there's a constitutional question.

- Then it would go to the Supreme Court.

- The Supreme Court.

So it's never possible to say that there's no possibility of a reversal.

But by the way, for people who are interested in the political clock here, in the timetable, there's no way that any of that's gonna happen anytime before the election.

- Right, and one thing that is gonna happen before the election of course is sentencing.

Do you have any quick view on what the likely sentence is gonna be?

I assume you don't think there's gonna be serious jail time.

- Well, the violations don't call for serious jail time.

There are factors on both sides.

On the one hand, he's a 77-year-old man who may not be a recidivist for whom this is a first time offense.

On the other hand, it's serious misconduct the way it was characterized by the prosecution.

Some of the conduct happened while he was sitting in the Oval Office as commander-in-chief and President of the United States.

He has shown no remorse.

He has violated the gag order 10 times.

You know, so those are factors in favor of some time of incarceration.

What I think is pretty clearly the case though is, even if the judge decides that some period of incarceration is appropriate, three months, six months, eight months, whatever, that he will hold that in abeyance and give him bail pending appeal, right?

Because I think he will find that there's a significant enough basis to allow Trump, and it also solves the problem of his getting criticized for putting a major party candidate in prison.

And I think he wants to avoid that.

And so he can have his cake sort of and eat it too by imposing a prison sentence, but holding off on it until a court of appeals weighs in on it.

- Susan, appreciate your patience.

I want to turn to you on the politics now.

You wrote in your column, it was last week, that the GOP's revisionist history on the trial has already begun.

Last Sunday, Republican chair Lara Trump, yes related, berated Republican candidate Larry Hogan for calling on citizens to respect the judicial process.

- He doesn't deserve respect of anyone in the Republican party at this point.

And quite frankly, anybody in America.

If that's the way you feel, that's very upsetting to hear that.

- What do you make of all of this?

- This is a marker of the escalation that we're seeing in 2024.

And so it's not just attacking the legitimacy of this specific trial or these specific charges against Donald Trump, but the immediate leap, and I should say clearly orchestrated in advance leap to a broader systemic attack.

And I think that is certainly an ominous sign as far as what Trump might do were he to be reelected to office.

But even more broadly, I think it's a sign of where the Republican party is at, that they have essentially mortgaged the party so completely to the fate of one individual that they're willing to tear down what remains of faith in our already sort of teetering faith in institutions.

So it strike me that it's sometimes hard in this kind of year nine of the Trump era to say sort of when we have crossed another line.

But to me, I think we crossed another line.

And the response to Larry Hogan, the former Republican governor of the very blue state of Maryland, was very instructive.

You know, Hogan didn't have some big statement celebrating Trump's conviction.

All he said was what in the past would've been essentially comforting mush, you know, like, yay, the system works, you know, support the right to a jury trial.

And nothing very interesting about it, except that even that is too controversial in today's GOP.

- I think Susan makes excellent points.

And it's one thing to criticize the judge, criticize the parties, criticize the press and the coverage.

It's quite a different thing to start criticizing ordinary Americans who are pressed into the civic duty of jury deliberation and service.

And the second point I wanna make is the other accusation that is being leveled, which is kind of farfetched and outlandish, which is par for the course about why Alvin Bragg brought the case and why he shouldn't have is that it was all orchestrated by the puppeteer President of the United States Joe Biden.

Alvin Bragg was not appointed like I was by the president of the United States, but was elected by the people of Manhattan.

He doesn't report to the president.

He doesn't talk to the president.

He doesn't take direction from the president.

And the other thing that makes it very peculiar and odd is that we are to believe that Joe Biden pulled the puppet strings on Alvin Bragg to get the rule of law to be shaped in the way he wanted it to take down his rival when as we speak, literally as we speak, his own flesh and blood son is on trial in federal court.

- Hunter Biden, which I wanna get to.

Yeah, absolutely.

- I mean, so what's the point?

And Joe Biden has not fired the special prosecutor.

He hasn't tried to pardon his son.

He hasn't tried to interfere in that.

And so the idea that he's directing Alvin Bragg and doing nothing to save the skin of his own son doesn't square.

- No, it's on its face ludicrous.

Now Preet, I wanna ask.

you brought up the Hunter Biden trial.

It is now just underway.

Can you talk a little bit about the significance of that trial?

- Hunter Biden is a private citizen.

He has always been a private citizen.

He's not the president of the United States.

He's not running to be the president of the United States.

He's getting all this attention because of his celebrity, based on his connection by blood to the sitting president of the United States, to the counterfactual for a moment.

In a million years, can you imagine if Donald Trump got reelected and a Joe Biden appointed US attorney, who was held over for some period of time, decided to indict and go to trial against Donald Trump Jr., that Donald Trump Sr. would stand idly by, not comment on it, not pardon his son, not directly.

- It's inconceivable.

It's inconceivable.

- Inconceivable.

- That's right.

- So when you ask what's the significance of it, that significance I think is being lost on people.

Now, on the question of the seriousness of the charge, lots of people have commented that we have a series of gun laws in place.

I prosecuted a number of them of illegal possession of a handgun.

Most commonly that's brought, if you're a prior convicted felon, by the way, incidental to this, in the intersection of the Trump case and the Hunter Biden cases, Donald Trump now convicted, cannot possess a firearm.

So put that to the side for a moment.

What's also super interesting here that I haven't heard a lot talked about is you you have a strange collection of bedfellows here.

Ordinarily, right, the average progressive would say you have to enforce the gun laws very strictly.

By contrast, the average conservative who believes strongly in the Second Amendment would say that is an overreach.

And just because you've been convicted of a crime in the example I gave before, doesn't mean you should forever forfeit your constitutional right.

In the same way that a lot of people say, just because you've been convicted of a crime, you shouldn't forfeit your right to vote forever and ever and ever.

So the other significance of it is, you can sort of tell where people are tribally as opposed to where they would be if this was an anonymous unknown garden variety defendant.

- It's very important to make the distinction between, you know, these are not...

These are the ultimate sort of asymmetrical cases.

Donald Trump was accused of, you know, essentially distorting the 2016 election by paying this hush money to a former porn star.

You know, Hunter Biden is accused, private citizen is accused of owning a gun for 11 days and possibly lying on a form about it.

Now, I think you're right about the tribalism.

Absolutely.

And it does strike me that Joe Biden has had terrible, terrible luck with this son.

The timing of it is just, you know, you couldn't even make this up.

That like, literally while the Democrats finally get a couple days where they're focusing the lens squarely in this election for once, not on Biden's age or what his record is in the country, but on Donald Trump and his fitness for office, and do they want a convicted felon in the White House?

And then boom, two days later, Hunter Biden is on trial.

The timing just is a reminder that Biden can't seem to catch a break.

You know, we're talking a lot about the case itself in New York or the case itself now in Delaware, but I also think it's important to pull back and to say, why is this happening?

No matter how much they spin me, I do not believe, and I don't think anyone should believe that Republicans or Donald Trump are happy about him being a convicted felon or that they think it's such a great thing for his campaign.

If they thought it was such a great thing for his campaign, I think they would approach it very differently.

- We have also seen an extraordinary amount of money that's been raised by Trump on the back of this effort, this very coordinated campaign by Republicans to say this is a political hit job.

It's a witch hunt, it's orchestrated by the president.

And then secondly, I mean, reveal preferences.

Americans just don't seem to say that this case matters as much to them and how they vote and what they care about than issues that are closer to them on a day-to-day basis, like for example, inflation, like abortion, like the border.

We're all sitting here talking about these unprecedented threats to the democratic system in the United States, which are clearly getting worse.

And yet either elites, the media and the citizenry don't seem to be taking it enormously seriously.

- I gotta push back on that.

I think that is the kind of cynical perspective.

You know, this idea that we're gonna get into the like media and elites bashing, like Americans are perfectly in the end.

There's a long history that suggests that while issue polls are interesting and relevant, and certainly the economy you can argue has been a major driver of American elections, in the end, the history of modern presidential elections is that they are very much decided on the basis of perceptions around the personality of the candidates, number one.

Number two, it is not a media construction.

It is not an elite construction to say, just I find that to be really cynical actually, the idea that a regular American who is not a member of the media elite should not care that the possible president of the United States is gonna be a convicted felon.

I don't buy that.

I think that's what republicans want us to say.

In the end, I don't think you think, I don't think I think that fundraising numbers in June are going to have any effect on the ultimate outcome of this presidential election.

I think that we're looking at a very close race because we have a very evenly divided country.

And the question is really not what Americans in the aggregate think about this development of having a president who's a convicted felon.

The very specific question is whether in the six or seven battleground states that are going to decide this election, there are sufficient number of concerned Republicans and/or Independents who simply cannot vote for Trump because he is a convicted felon.

- I mean, I understand, but a piece of it seems to be that nobody's all that worried.

You know, maybe it's like the boy that cried wolf.

I mean, Trump was already a president once for four years and democracy didn't fall apart and a lot of people had egg on face.

And so a lot of people said January 6th was a coup.

I don't believe it was actually attempted coup.

I don't think that that was the right way to think about it.

I don't think the US system was actually in danger the way it increasingly is this time around.

But I'm discussing this in part because here we are in the middle.

We're only five months away now from the election.

Soon people are gonna start voting absentee.

And most of them, it seems to me, aren't going to be voting on the issue that we're talking about right now, that we seem to think is very important.

Preet, do you wanna weigh in on this?

- There are people on the progressive side, on the Biden side who think the democracy is in danger.

I'm one of those people.

I care about institutions.

I think people care less about institutions and less about process and less about principles than they care about outcome.

I think we become a very, not just tribal, but the part of the tribalism that I think is showing a lot of force is, is the person on your side, whether it's abortion or trade or whatever else?

And on the progressive side, the issues that they care about.

And you know, the way in which some of this conversation is a little bit elite, but I don't think that's a bad thing because I think our founding fathers were elite and lots of people on the right always invoke the founding fathers, which is a very elitist concept, right?

The idea of democracy and institutions and separation of powers and political philosophy and political theory, that's elite subject matter.

But it's the backbone and foundation of the country.

And I worry that some of that is being lost because nobody seems to care that much anymore.

All the other things that you want, whether it's the freedom to bear arms or to have reproductive rights or anything else, all relies on a well-functioning, pluralistic democracy.

And if you start talking about these as being only elitist thoughts, I think we're in big trouble.

- Well, you can see we've hit the kind of sensitive nerve of this 2024 election.

- Yes, yes.

- And I just, again, on the point about whether this is an elite preoccupation or not, I think it's actually at the core of the matter because it strikes me that what Trump tried to do and what this conviction is about, what he tried to do in 2020 as well as 2016, was to nullify the votes of an election, and therefore, of the people.

The mass' votes, not the individuals.

Remember that millions and millions more Americans voted for Joe Biden.

You're dismissing January 6th as sort of, I'm not sure what, but this was a direct effort to seek to stop the certification of the people's votes, both the millions of Americans who voted more for Biden than Trump, and also in the states Biden's victory.

And it wasn't about the solidity of the institutions or the idea that democracy held.

It's that they were much more vulnerable and fragile.

And that after the 2020 election, we were much closer than we thought we would be because it wasn't the institutions, it was one individual.

We were one attorney general, one acting attorney general, one vice president, one chairman of the joint chiefs away from what would have been a coup on the constitutional order.

I don't know why it is that people find it too hard to remember that occurred only not even four years ago, but that is literally like an unthinkable thing.

And having crossed that rubicon, I think that the idea that we're just treating this as a normal election between two warring tribes with different ideologies is really that's what history is gonna remember about this moment, unfortunately.

- We've grown accustomed to the luxury of repeated peaceful transfers of power.

Things always work out for the United States of America.

We're the greatest country in the world and have been for a very long time, the greatest country ever for a lot of reasons, notwithstanding the crises we find ourselves plunged into now.

And so there's a tendency in the part of some people, I think, when other people ring the bell and worry that you're overreacting.

And you know, my concern is that the rest of the folks are underreacting and it's impossible...

There is nothing that guarantees in the rule of law, in the world order or by God's grace if you believe in that, that just because the United States has been a great democracy, it will persist in being democratic.

And just because we haven't before elected someone like Donald Trump, a deceitful populist who likes to pit people against each other, he's a different order of person.

And I think that people are underestimating the pain and damage that will be caused to the country if he's reelected.

And a part of that is because of perpetual American optimism, I think, that things always work out.

We get into a recession, we get into a depression, we work our way out of it.

The world is plunged into war.

America comes to the rescue.

America always is resilient and resolves to fix itself.

And I just don't know that that faith is as well placed as it used to be.

- Susan, last word to you.

- Yeah, I mean, this is a powerful conversation, Ian.

We may have a history that marks us as different than all the other countries in the world, but at the same time, I think the events of the last eight years have shown pretty clearly that we might not be as exceptional as we think we are.

It's not an accident that there have been these kind of rise of far right populism in so many countries around the world over the last few years.

There's a pretty clear playbook that shows that Trump is running down the checklist of a would-be authoritarian.

And that's the context in which I think we should view things like the attack on the jury's verdict in the trial.

And by the way, I don't think we know the answer yet.

I don't think we know the outcome yet.

And I remember the words of the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, when he was asked, what's the election gonna be about?

And he said it's gonna be two things.

It's gonna be democracy and Dobbs.

That's the Supreme Court ruling throwing out Roe v. Wade.

There's a strong chance that he's correct about that.

- Well, that's what he wants it to be about, certainly, there is no question.

- Yeah, well, we'll see, we'll see.

- Susan Glasser and Preet Bharara, thanks so much for joining today.

- Thanks for having us.

[gentle techno music] - And now we have your puppet regime.

- In the days since Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies, both he and his opponent, Joe Biden, have been refining their campaign messages accordingly.

- What a disgrace.

I can't believe that fake jury of my peers found me guilty.

What was that, some kind of noise when I said I was guilty?

It's like every time I say the word guilty, a felon gets his wings.

Boy, this could be some kind of surrogate dance.

Let me give it a shot.

[upbeat music] ♪ Guilty, I'm guilty ♪ ♪ Guilty, guilty, guilty ♪ ♪ The thing I did was filthy and they all said I'm guilty ♪ ♪ Guilty, guilty ♪ ♪ I'm guilty, I'm guilty, guilty, guilty ♪ ♪ Everybody knows I adore everything that's guilty ♪ ♪ Yeah, I'm guilty, so guilty ♪ ♪ Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty ♪ ♪ When I say, "I'm guilty" ♪ ♪ All my fans say, "Okay, bill me" ♪ ♪ So I'm guilty, I'm guilty ♪ ♪ I'm guilty, guilty, guilty.

♪ ♪ The Deep State wants to kill me ♪ ♪ But to start, they found me guilty, guilty, guilty ♪ ♪ Yes, guilty, guilty ♪ What's that?

♪ Guilty, guilty, guilty ♪ ♪ Guilty, so I'm guilty ♪ - Folks, my opponent has recently faced some unspecified legal troubles.

But I want to talk to you about something we can all agree on.

Israel and Palestine.

♪ Puppet regime ♪ - That's our show this week.

Come back next weekend if you like what you see, or even if you don't, but you're worried about whether or not the US is still gonna be a democracy.

Why don't you take a minute and check out our website, gzeromedia.com.

[logo dings] [upbeat music] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music continues] [logo swooshing] - [Narrator] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com - [Narrator] And by... - [Narrator] Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at Cox.career/news.

- [Narrator] Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [gentle music] [upbeat music]