The Trump Trials, Vol. 22: All of Proof’s Viral Coverage of Donald Trump’s Election Fraud and Falsifying Business Records Trial
Proof’s public coverage of Trump’s 34-felony NYC trial—now in its jury-deliberation stage—has been seen online nearly 20 million times, and is longer than most novels. Navigate it via the links below.
The Introduction to this report is free; the remainder of the report is for full Proof subscribers. You can gain free access to the full report for a week—as well as 275+ other Proof reports—by clicking the red button below.
UPDATE (May 30, 2024): Donald Trump has been found guilty on all 34 felonies.
Introduction
Some startling numbers tell the story: 1,910 tweets, over 8 threads, totaling 94,750 words—the equivalent of a 392-page novel. 18.1 million views on Twitter. And an estimated reading time of seven or eight hours.
It’s been a pretty eventful three weeks for the public-facing side of this publication.
As many of you already know, the ongoing “Trump Trials” series in the Law Section of Proof has been following the civil and criminal cases of Donald Trump for months, sometimes with public reports and sometimes with reports for paid Proof subscribers.
However, during Mr. Trump’s current trial in Manhattan on 34 Falsifying Business Records felonies amplified from misdemeanors to felonies under an Election Fraud statute—a trial that is resolutely not a “hush-money case” as major media has framed it for mercenary, profit-oriented reasons—Proof has put most of its analysis online on social media for free. These analyses have been shared tens of thousands of times and read by many millions of people around the world, per publicly available site-visit data.
The problem is that the links to these hundreds-of-posts-long analyses will invariably disappear from ready accessibility over time.
The Proof report below provides quick-links to all of these analyses—some of which you may not even have seen when they were first posted—to ensure Proof subscribers can always easily access them. As ever, the goal of these analyses (seven in total at present, but this archive will be added to in real time as or if applicable) is to marshal my discrete areas of expertise in order to provide a view of the Trump trials you won’t find elsewhere. Specifically, these analyses bring to bear my eight years researching Mr. Trump (his life both as a politician and as a private citizen) as a multiple New York Times-bestselling Trump political biographer and presidential historian; my decade of experiences as a former federal criminal investigator and criminal defense attorney (experiences that include multiple homicide cases that resulted in acquittals); and my status as a former journalism professor at an R1 public-flagship research university (University of New Hampshire) who has been a working journalist for three decades.
Some of you may know that one of my areas of academic research as a cultural theorist—extending to my work as a professional culture critic at various publications over the last fifteen years—is metamodernism, which gave rise to my interest in curatorial journalism, another significant component of how I cover Donald Trump that differs from many other historians, non-fiction authors, lawyers, journalists, and academics.
A central tenet of curatorial journalism is that not only does the journalist aggregate reliable major-media reporting from across the world that goes back decades and crosses all interdisciplinary lines, but the also journalist—because their work involves curating rather than reporting—is free to do at volume what increasingly journalists in our postpostmodern-cum-metamodern world are starting to do anyway: distinguish between objectivity and neutrality (the former is critical, the latter a deceitful pretense) and between professional sourcing ethoi and mere access journalism (the former requires a journalist to neither uncritically repeat nor implicitly condone nor make journalistic use of statements by demonstrated bad actors and deceivers, while the latter is not really journalism at all—inasmuch as it elevates the career prospects and clickability of the journalist over providing its readers with accurate, transparent, and reliable data).
With all that said, the Trump Trials Public Archive: Manhattan Trial Edition can be found in full below.