Donald Trump: Realtor, showman, president, criminal

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump once boasted “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

The dictum he has lived by for decades finally came crashing down Thursday when a New York jury told him: no.

One of the world’s most powerful and consequential men was finally tripped up by a porn star, convicted for lying about the hush money he paid her to keep quiet about what she says was an uninspiring tryst.

The details are tawdry, but the moment is huge.

Love him or loathe him, there is one thing most Americans agree on: in the two-and-a-half centuries since their republic was founded, there has never been a president quite like Trump.

And Thursday’s verdict adds a new, unprecedented chapter to his story, making him the country’s first former president to ever be convicted of a crime. This November he could become the first felon-president in US history.

Quite how much difference the latest scandal makes to his fans is anyone’s guess.

The New York prosecution is only one of four criminal cases against the presumptive Republican Party nominee.

And he has trashed them all as political persecution, driven at the behest of what he claims is a corrupt White House led by President Joe Biden.

Impervious to shame or even embarrassment, Trump has turned each tangle with the law into a badge of honor: proof, he says, of his conspiracy theory that a deep state is out to get him and the so-called “forgotten men and women” of working-class America.

Opinion polls that show him edging Biden suggest so far that his brand is working.

To his millions of backers, the 77-year-old is the man who broke the mold with his shock 2016 White House win against Democratic heavyweight Hillary Clinton.

To much of the country, though, he just broke America.

The Republican’s first term began in 2017 with a dark inaugural address evoking “American carnage.”

It ended in mayhem when he refused to accept his defeat by Biden, then goaded supporters into storming Congress on January 6, 2021.

In office, Trump upended every tradition, ranging from the trivial (what got planted in the Rose Garden) to the fundamental (relations with NATO).

Journalists became the “enemy of the people.”