Without fear or favor: the D.A. who convicted a president

Among the most repeated spins regarding former President Trump’s recent conviction is that it was pursued by a liberal Democrat, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. We are expected to conclude that “liberal Democrat” is all we need to know about the case–that the actual specifics of the ex-president’s wrongdoing are immaterial. It is often added that Bragg ran for the office of D.A. on a promise to bring this indictment against Donald Trump.

Most of that is true. In the twenty-first century any Democrat will qualify as broadly “liberal.” We only have two major parties in this country, and the chances of a D.A. being either one or the other is near one hundred percent. The mere statistical likelihood that a defendant and prosecutor will be of the opposite party is likewise very high. Nothing really to see here so far.

It’s not quite accurate to say that Bragg pledged to prosecute Trump. The former president’s defenders have exaggerated Bragg’s statements in order to make it appear the prosecutor was acting out of partisan malice. Bragg highlighted his experience with prosecuting the rich and famous (Harvey Weinstein, eg) as well white-collar perfidy in the past, such as in exposing the fraudulent Donald J. Trump Foundation and seeing it dissolved. But the investigations into Trump’s financial statements were on-going when Bragg became D.A. in 2022, and he was initially so lukewarm concerning them that two prosecutors resigned in protest.

Beyond white collar criminality, Bragg was also known as a civil rights champion (he represented the family of Eric Garner, who was choked to death by an NYPD officer in 2014). That interest befit a member of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where Bragg was raised.

Bragg grew up in the Striver’s Row district of Harlem, foreshadowing a career which began at prestigious Trinity School and included Harvard and Harvard Law. As such, Bragg’s confrontation with Trump was at one level that of two ambitious, Ivy League-educated New Yorkers. Where Trump got his start with inherited millions, Bragg studied his way into success. Where Trump loved the public eye and even shined as an entertainer and frequent “character” in the city’s tabloids, Bragg was and is uncomfortable with media attention and is awkward in front of a camera. Even specializing in white collar fraud was about as un-sexy as the law can get. “This is the business capital of the world,” Bragg explained when questioned by skeptical reporters about this case. “We regularly do cases involving false business statements. The bedrock–in fact, the basis for business integrity and a well-functioning business marketplace–is true and accurate record-keeping.”

Trump’s real estate developments over the years have offered plenty of opportunities for questionable book-keeping, if not always outright fraud. That Trump and a Manhattan D.A might face one another at some point was far from unlikely. This, however, happened to be Manhattan’s first African-American D.A. prosecuting the man who in 1989 called for the execution of five black and Latino teenagers who were wrongly convicted of the rape and beating of a jogger in Central Park. Trump famously refused to retract his comments even after the five’s convictions were vacated in light of exonerating DNA evidence. Bragg, born in 1973, was roughly the same age as the teenagers falsely accused and convicted.

Behind all this is another neglected dimension of Trump’s trial and conviction, and that’s geography. In New York City, where you are from–which of the five boroughs–is never entirely outgrown. Bragg, as mentioned, is an African-American from Harlem. Trump hails from Queens, once stereotyped as the home of blue-collar bigots like the fictional character Archie Bunker but now famous as the most ethnically and linguistically diverse place on earth.

One can only speculate about the symbolic and emotional resonances these different neighborhood origins inject into the saga of a white male born in 1946 who idolizes a less diverse, pre-multicultural America, and is brought down by someone like Alvin Bragg, a child of Harlem more than twenty years his junior. Some future librettist will no doubt find ample inspiration in the tale.

As it stands, there’s plenty of ordinary American irony to marvel at here. Trump has a lengthy record of referring to non-white immigrants and criminals as “animals” whose lack of humanity or conscience imperils white society.

He’s used the same language with respect to Manhattan’s first African-American D.A., calling Bragg an “animal who just doesn’t care about right or wrong no matter how many people are hurt.”

And this man–who the current Republican nominee for the White House has described as “an animal”—just became the first person in American history to turn an ex-president of the United States into a convicted criminal. “While this defendant may be unlike any other in American history,” Bragg explained, “we arrived at this trial, and ultimately today at this verdict, in the same manner as every other case that comes through the courtroom doors: by following the facts and the law, and doing so without fear or favor.”