Through most of the milestones of Donald J. Trump’s public life, he has managed to be in the center of the camera’s eye: Hosting 14 seasons of “The Apprentice”; running for and winning the presidency; firing up a crowd before the assault on the Capitol of Jan. 6, 2021; presumptively winning the Republican nomination for a second term.
But on Thursday, as he became the first former president to be convicted of multiple felonies, he was offstage.
Because video cameras were not allowed in the Manhattan courtroom where Mr. Trump was tried, this breathtaking turn in American history, like the entire run of the trial, was read to us by TV anchors, as if off a Teletype machine.
When word broke that the jury had reached a verdict in the hush-money case late Thursday afternoon, the networks broke into coverage. And waited. There was that special, spring-loaded tension of the media apparatus readying to deliver big news after days of vamping.
“Count 1 is guilty,” Jake Tapper declared on CNN, letting the last word land, then reading out the next 33 individually for several minutes. On NBC, Laura Jarrett read at a brisk clip as the numbers raced upward in the “GUILTY” column of the network’s scoreboard-like graphic. ABC conveyed the scope of the convictions with a crowded graphic that listed each count with “GUILTY” in a red rectangle, like a departures board at an airport.
Americans have become used to seeing dramatic verdicts as they land in the courtroom, hearing from the jury and court officers, watching the defendants’ reactions. This time, it was up to the on-screen graphics to capture the moment.
And Mr. Trump? As the verdict landed he was merely a still photo in a corner of the screen. Even afterward, his brief, frowning remarks live to cameras felt small next to the long on-camera tirades he had specialized in during the run of the trial.
We cannot know how the case would have been different, or whether it would have held the public’s attention more closely, if we had had a live view. As it was, the man who had so often elbowed to the midst of the American stage seemed, if for the moment, diminished, almost peripheral. He left the courthouse as he’d entered it last spring, a glum figure in an echoey hallway. Helicopter cameras caught his departing motorcade from far overhead, snarled in Manhattan traffic.
It has been a weird few weeks on TV news. Coverage of the trial told viewers about — but could not show them — contentious exchanges and dramatic testimony from controversial figures. There was a porn star and a spurned Trump lawyer and the publisher of America’s most famous supermarket tabloid, all under the (often closed) eyes of the previous, and potentially next, president sitting in the dock. It was made for TV, and kept off it.
Relying on the staccato dispatches of courtroom observers, the news anchors were transformed into highly paid Western Union clerks, reading the text blurbs we could see running up the screen next to them. Legal and political panelists weighed in on who was winning and losing, on how effective were the prosecution and defense arguments that neither they nor we had seen delivered.
The enforced distancing from the courtroom had the effect of making this momentous story feel simultaneously enormous and small, or at least remote.
So when the verdict finally came, the abstract stakes of a trial we had experienced second- and thirdhand became suddenly, emotionally real. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. It was actually happening; it had actually happened; and hearing the words, with or without live video, was a genuine whammy.
For a few minutes, the network desks took in the gravity of the news. On MSNBC, even if much of its Trump-unfriendly audience had been rooting for a conviction, the analyst Andrew Weissmann said soberly, “No one can be happy today, but this is a day for seeing the rule of law.” On CBS, the correspondent Major Garrett said: “This is not just a legal moment for this country. This is not just a political moment for this country.”
But the political moment came soon enough. Very quickly, the coverage turned to assessing the electoral effect of the verdict — the fallout with independent voters, the potential to rally donors and supporters, the polling in Midwestern swing states.
Of course this is a political story. Mr. Trump is a political candidate. The legal cases against him could affect the fate of his presidential campaign (and vice versa). But part of the role of TV news at times like this is not just to tell us the facts (34 verdicts on 34 counts) or to bring us answers (yes, Mr. Trump can still run for office) but to show us the historical moment.
Say what you want about the charges in this case or their significance compared with the election-interference cases slowly moving forward against Mr. Trump — the onetime commander in chief being held to account under the law is big. A former president became a felon. We became a country that has a felon former president. That’s news in a larger sense — a what-kind-of-people-we-are sense — and that gets lost when we hustle on to the horse race and the hot takes.
Then again, if this conviction becomes one more unprecedented shock that we immediately absorb, become inured to and add to the long tally of partisan-talk topics, well, that says something about us too.
Certainly there was evidence of that in the ensuing cable punditry and spin. On MSNBC, the host Joe Scarborough said that Republicans defending Mr. Trump and attacking the verdict “degrade themselves and they slander America. They hate on America.” On Fox News, the former judge and conservative commentator Jeanine Pirro said, “We have gone over a cliff in America.” We seemed to have landed, however, in a very familiar place.
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