Ben Shapiro: ‘Democrats Ignite Country with Trump Verdict

Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro warned of severe backlash and unpredictable consequences after former president Donald Trump was convicted of numerous felonies in New York on Thursday.

A jury voted Thursday to convict Trump on 34 felony counts based on an unspecified underlying crime over hush-money payments made to porn actress Stormy Daniels in 2016. The jury decision marks the first time a president or former president has been convicted of a crime in American history.

“It’s a travesty of justice. This case was a joke from the very beginning,” Shapiro said in a late Thursday afternoon live stream after the verdict. “Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg set this entire thing up to become more famous and more powerful. Judge Juan Merchan, who basically gave every benefit to the prosecution, whose jury instructions were unprecedented in their willingness to flout the law.”

“This was all set up to convict Donald Trump simply so that either Democrats could jail Donald Trump or spend the next few months declaring Donald Trump a convicted felon for purposes of the election,” Shapiro said.

The Biden campaign in recent days has leaned into the Trump trial after months of keeping a distance. After the verdict, the campaign released a statement declaring that “no one is above the law.”

Biden’s son Hunter is currently facing prosecution on multiple federal tax and gun charges. Two trials on those charges are scheduled for later this year.

Shapiro predicted that the verdict will boomerang on Democrats and help Trump in the 2024 election, and that Biden will face a backlash from voters who see the verdict as a “third-world” political attack against Trump.

“I think the backlash on this is going to be extraordinary because this is so obviously a manufactured case, so obviously a stupid case that has nothing to do with Donald Trump’s supposed violations of law. I don’t think the American people are going to stand for this,” Shapiro said. “I think if Joe Biden somehow believes that this is going to redound to his benefit rather than appearing as a politically motivated hit job on his political opponent in an unprecedented prosecution of the man most likely to take him out of office in November, I think he’s got another thing coming.”

The Daily Wire editor emeritus addressed the unprecedented nature of the case, walking through a number of different scenarios that could play out at Trump’s sentencing hearing. Trump being jailed and conducting a presidential campaign from a New York prison is most likely, according to Shapiro.

If Trump is imprisoned and the election is conducted while the former president is behind bars, the mistrust in the fairness of elections would skyrocket, according to The Daily Wire host.

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“The Democrats just set the country on fire. I am absolutely astonished that this trial was ever allowed to go forward. I’m not particularly astonished at the verdict, but the consequences of this are extraordinarily dire,” Shapiro said.

“If Donald Trump were to lose in November while serving prison time on a trumped up charge, the response in the United States will be absolutely explosive. You want to talk about an illegitimate president at that point, the American people will see a Democrat elected under those auspices as illegitimate. There’s just no other way to do it,” he added.

Trump found guilty. We are now in uncharted territory. There has never been anything like this in American history. Watch my complete breakdown of the Trump verdict and what this means for the 2024 election. pic.twitter.com/9hdAUKXpa1

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 30, 2024