'THE REAL verdict is going to be Nov. 5," former president Donald Trump said after a Manhattan jury convicted him last week on multiple counts of falsifying business records. That may be the only reaction to this whole reeking business on which everyone — Republicans, Democrats, MAGA cultists, and Never Trumpers alike — agrees.
To Trump's supporters, the verdict only fortifies their determination to see him recapture the White House in November. In the days since the jurors' decision was announced, my social-media feed has been full of people posting some version of "I will crawl over broken glass to vote for Trump in 2024." So many rushed to contribute money to Trump following the verdict, some for the first time, that his donation platform crashed. In the first 24 hours following the verdict, he amassed a record-shattering $53 million in donations, according to his campaign.
For Trump's diehard detractors, meanwhile, his new status as a convicted felon is, to quote The New York Times, "yet another reminder — perhaps the starkest to date — of the many reasons Donald Trump is unfit for office." President Biden followed up the courtroom news with a post on X declaring that "there's only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: At the ballot box."
My own view is that Trump's conviction will barely move the needle on his chances of winning in November. In an NPR/PBS/Marist poll released on Thursday, overwhelming majorities of respondents said that neither a guilty verdict nor an acquittal would make any difference to their opinion. An infinitesimal 2 percent of voters remains undecided, even though the election is six months away. Voters are locked into their respective camps and will not be swayed — not by the district attorney's blatantly political prosecution, not by Trump's mendacious defense, not by the 34 felony convictions the jury returned.
If Trump is elected president this fall, it will not be the first time that American voters have rewarded a convicted crook with electoral power.
![]() A statue in downtown Boston of James Michael Curley. Twice convicted and imprisoned, he repeatedly won election to high office. |
In 1982, when Mayor William Musto of Union City, N.J., was running for reelection, he was convicted on multiple charges of racketeering, extortion, and fraud. Though he was sentenced to seven years in prison, voters reelected him the very next day.
Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry spent six months in a federal prison after he was videotaped smoking crack cocaine during an FBI sting. Two months after his prison term ended in 1992, he ran for city council and won in a landslide. Then he ran for a fourth term as mayor — and again cruised to victory.
In 1988, Alcee Hastings, a US district judge from Florida, was impeached by a near-unanimous House of Representatives for bribery and perjury. He was convicted at his trial in the Senate and removed from the bench. Four years later, Florida voters elected him to Congress, where he served until his death nearly 30 years later.
Most infamous of all, perhaps, is James Michael Curley, the thoroughly dishonest "rascal king" of Massachusetts politics.
Late in his political career, running for a fourth term as mayor of Boston, Curley was indicted by federal prosecutors for mail fraud and bribery. It wasn't the first time. As a young alderman decades earlier, he had gone to prison for fraud. But that didn't keep him from being elected numerous times to numerous offices in the years that followed. Nor did his 1947 indictment stop voters from returning him to the mayor's office. When Curley was subsequently convicted and sentenced to 18 months in the federal penitentiary at Danbury, Conn., he refused to relinquish his office. For five months the incumbent mayor of Boston was locked in a prison 160 miles away, until President Harry S. Truman, under heavy pressure from the Massachusetts congressional delegation, agreed to commute his sentence.
Curley's nickname — "the rascal king" — suggests that the man had an aura of charming roguishness. But it is disgraceful, not charming, when voters elect corrupt grifters and sleazy narcissists to public office. "From first to last, crimes and scandals had marked his life in politics," Curley's biographer Jack Beatty wrote in 1992. "Politics brought out the worst in him just as it brought out the worst in the people." He was skilled at cultivating the resentments and prejudices of his base; they, in turn, responded to his rotten character by elevating him to the status of savior. Whenever his malfeasance and dishonesty caught up with him, he self-righteously proclaimed himself a martyr. After he was found liable in court of having defrauded the city of Boston of $40,000, he raged at the unfairness of it all, calling himself "the victim of the most horrible frame-up ever attempted in American politics."
Curley is long gone, but Trump is cut from the same cloth.
In 1798, a prescient John Adams warned that America's democratic system depended on a strong and widely shared sense of right and wrong. "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people," the nation's second president said. "It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Today, as more and more Americans have jettisoned religious norms and traditional virtues, replacing them with political tribalism, partisan intolerance, and ideological rigidity, the breakdown Adams predicted is palpable. From the collapse in respect for America's public establishment to a public square poisoned by bitter incivility, from the low caliber of the men running for president to the inability of government to solve pressing national problems, only the willfully blind can doubt that the country's civic substructure is slowly but inexorably giving way. Trump's conviction and the reactions to it are merely the latest steps along a path from which there may be no return.
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America isn't too crowded. If anything, it's too empty
A single line in my recent column on the Immigration Act of 1924 (see ICYMI, below) triggered nearly all the responses I received from readers.
"If not for the slamming of the gates in 1924," I wrote, "it is likely that America's population would be double what it is today." With a much larger population, I noted, the United States would be considerably wealthier, stronger, more influential, and more advanced than it already is.
Many readers found that incomprehensible. How could I possibly think that more people would be a good thing?
"Double what it is today?" one incredulous correspondent repeated. "Where would they live? What would the City of Boston do if its population were doubled?"
Another reader, who identified himself as an immigrant, was equally aghast. "Are you serious about wanting to double the US population?" he asked. "Have you tried driving on the Southeast Expressway recently?"
From a third: "If [the population were] doubled, where are all these millions more to go to live, eat, work? To say the USA would be better served by having . . . doubled our population is ludicrous. There is a finite number the USA can accommodate."
It is an old, old fallacy, this notion that the United States suffers from too many people and cannot safely absorb any more. Immigration restrictionists, both nativists and environmentalists, have been peddling that line for years. Population hysteric Paul Ehrlich, author of "The Population Bomb" and the first president of Zero Population Growth, has claimed that "the optimum population size of the US would be around 75 million people" — i.e., roughly what it was when Grover Cleveland was in the White House.
Not surprisingly, Donald Trump — whose anti-immigrant views are well known — has on multiple occasions insisted that "our country is full." In fact, he claimed during the last presidential campaign, it is "packed to the gills."
It isn't true. The United States is not remotely close to being full. Far from bursting at the seams, most of this immense country is wide open and empty. According to the Census Bureau, nearly two-thirds of Americans live in cities, but those cities make up just 3.5 percent of the nation's land area. Add in all the other places where Americans live — villages, islands, farms — and it still amounts to a mere sliver of total US territory. A 2012 federal analysis of land use in the United States reported that "urban land plus rural residential areas together comprise 176 million acres, or just under 8 percent of total US land area." In other words, the country isn't 100 percent full, it's more than 92 percent empty.
![]() Far from bursting at the seams, most of America is wide open and empty. Above: Idaho's Snake River Valley. |
Obviously some places in America have a lot of people. The Southeast Expressway during rush hour does get pretty congested. So does Logan Airport the week before Thanksgiving. Certain neighborhoods in New York City are thronged pretty much all the time. (Of course, for many people, one of the best things about New York is being around all those New Yorkers.)
Then again, with a population density of 27,000 persons per square mile, New York is considerably less dense than Barcelona, Spain (41,000 per square mile), Athens, Greece (49,000 per square mile), or Paris, France (54,000 per square mile). When was the last time you heard anyone describe those cities as bursting at the seams?
In any case, no American city comes anywhere near New York either in the number of residents or, more important, density. Boston's population density is just under 14,000 per square mile. Chicago's is 12,000 per square mile. Seattle's is 8,800. Baltimore's is 7,200. (All densities are calculated for the population of the city proper, not the surrounding suburbs). Moreover, numerous American municipalities — Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, New Orleans, St. Louis — have much smaller populations than they did decades ago. "Virtually all of our thriving cities," journalist/blogger Matthew Yglesias has written, "easily have room to grow and accommodate more people."
And if that is true of some US cities — where, as noted, two-thirds of the American people live on just 3.5 percent of America's land area — it is infinitely truer of the country as a whole, which remains wide open and mostly empty.
"Packed to the gills"? The United States has an overall population density of just 91 people per square mile (as of 2022). When the world's 250 countries and self-governing territories are ranked by density, the United States is in the bottom third at a roomy No. 187. America is far less dense than — to mention just a dozen examples — China, Egypt, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, Spain, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. And if the American population were double what it is today? Its population density would still be less than any of those countries.
Granted, the land area of the United States includes mountainous regions that do not lend themselves to large-scale settlement, but so do other countries with far higher population densities, such as Switzerland, Armenia, and Nepal. And granted, remote Alaska accounts for an unusually large swath of America's land area. But even if Alaska and Hawaii are excluded, the population density of the United States, according to Yglesias, rises to just 105 per square mile. Double the US population, and the density of the Lower 48 states would remain well below 11 of the 12 countries listed above. (Only Ireland, with 190 people per square mile, would then be moderately less dense than the 48 continental US states.)
The fear of "overpopulation" in America has no basis in science or history. Assuming a reasonable degree of political and economic freedom, a rising population invariably means more growth, more strength, more productivity, more innovation, more comfort, more opportunity, and more abundance. Population alarmists cling to the long-discredited claim by Thomas Malthus that a growing population means increased hunger and hardship. But in the real world, states and cities whose populations climb celebrate the fact. Meanwhile, dwindling places like Boston regard it as "alarming" when too many residents choose to leave.
I realize that America's population is not going to double. But it would be no bad thing if it did. Even with a population of 666 million instead of 333 million, our nation would not be crowded. What it would be is considerably better off — happier, healthier, and wealthier.
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What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "A dozen cabbies have been attacked. Does anybody care?" June 10, 1999:
In the last 3½ weeks, 12 Boston-area cab drivers have been attacked by armed passengers. All but one have been robbed; several have been seriously wounded. At first the attackers used knives. Then came handguns. This past Monday, a cabbie in Roxbury found himself gazing at the unfriendly end of a sawed-off shotgun.
The reaction has been mostly nonexistent. The Boston media have not gone into overdrive. The mayor and governor have had little to say. The city's vast array of neighborhood organizations and special-interest groups have preserved an unbroken silence. The police commissioner serenely waited until the 10th attack before making time to meet with cab officials and taxi drivers. As for a public outcry: Listen carefully, and you can hear — nothing.
Oh, well. Who cares about cab drivers, anyway? It's not like these guys getting robbed and stabbed and having guns shoved in their faces are important. Why get in a lather over people who work 12-hour shifts, don't make a lot of money, and frequently speak with an accent?
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ICYMI
My Sunday column observed that Americans are allowed to wager on countless future outcomes, from the price of orange juice to how well a movie will perform. So why should federal regulators want to forbid them from wagering on the outcome of elections? At issue is a proposal by some members of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that would ban political betting markets. For many decades such markets were common in the United States; they still are in Britain and Australia. They can be a valuable source of information, since they have a better track record of predicting election results than opinion polls. Rather than shut them down, the government should ensure that they are transparent and well-regulated, then let them flourish.
I wrote Wednesday about "the law that ruined America's immigration system" — the Immigration Act of 1924, which was signed 100 years ago. Steeped in racism and eugenics, the law overturned the policy of mostly free immigration that had prevailed for the previous century and a half. Beginning in 1924, all prospective immigrants were required to obtain an immigrant visa before entering the country. Anyone coming to America without such a visa lacked legal status and could be deported. Among its bad effects, this may have been the worst: By making it impossible for most would-be immigrants to enter the United States legally, the 1924 law guaranteed a steady stream of illegal immigration — with toxic consequences we struggle with to this day.
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The Last Line
"'You okay, Jim? How do you feel?'
'Young. I feel young.'" — Dr. Leonard McCoy (played by DeForest Kelley) to Capt. James Kirk (William Shatner) in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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