At 5:06 p.m. Thursday, shortly after NBC News broke in with a special report, Savannah Guthrie and Lester Holt told viewers that a verdict was imminent in the first criminal trial against an American president. After weeks of dramatic testimony that, without cameras in the courtroom, had little impact on television, tension suddenly hit the airwaves.
“Oh, here we go,” Ms. Guthrie said abruptly, as the off-camera voice of Laura Jarrett, NBC’s chief legal correspondent, could be heard in the background. “Dude! We have to go,” said Mrs. Jarrett. “We have to go.”
“Wow,” Mrs. Guthrie exhorted. The camera cut to Ms. Jarrett, outside a Manhattan courtroom, as for the next 87 riveting seconds she read each charge, one by one, followed by the same two-syllable verdict:
“Guilty.”
On every major television network, anchors recounted former President Donald J. Trump’s result with the rapid cadence of an auctioneer. “Count 1, guilty; Count 2, guilty; Charge 3, guilty,” intoned Ari Melber, MSNBC’s legal correspondent, as a sober-faced Rachel Maddow sat next to her taking notes in a notebook. An open graph added up the final score: 34 guilty, 0 not guilty.
It was the kind of fascinating moment that Trump, a TV connoisseur, might have appreciated if it hadn’t been the subject. “It’s an extraordinary moment in American history,” Anderson Cooper said when CNN broke the news.
However, the announcement of the verdict quickly gave rise to sharply divergent reactions in the partisan halls of cable news.
“There is something very wrong here; “We’ve fallen off a cliff in America,” said Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News host and longtime Trump loyalist. She called the case “riddled with errors” and criticized Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and the trial judge for what she considered a politically motivated prosecution. “God help America after what I’ve seen in the last few weeks,” she said.
Trey Gowdy, another Fox News host, had already encouraged his viewers to be skeptical of a guilty verdict by calling jury instructions “pro-prosecution.” FoxNews.com’s top headline mixed news of the guilty verdict with Trump’s accusation that the trial was “rigged” and “shameful.”
At MSNBC, the atmosphere was different.
“This is a definitive and irreducible verdict,” said Maddow, who warned that the country now faced a “test” of whether Trump can “undermine the rule of law, so that people reject this as a legitimate function of the rule of law.” right in our country.” He said the jury “deserves to be thanked for his efforts and to be protected from the types of attacks and recriminations that the president and his allies have sought to bring down in this process.”
“The rule of law is deadly,” said host Nicolle Wallace, echoing an earlier comment by Maddow. “It is necessary to protect it. It is not something abstract.”
Other presenters took a moment to underscore the day’s historical significance. “Hearing that word ‘guilty’ not just once but 34 times about a former president of the United States in any context is completely uncharted territory,” said CBS correspondent Major Garrett. “It is a moment in which everything related to politics and law and our orientation towards both are convulsed like never before.”
On CNN, Jake Tapper declared the day “an incredible moment in American history,” while acknowledging that there was little immediate understanding of how the verdict would play out in this year’s presidential race.
“For those wondering about the political consequences of these 34 guilty verdicts, the short answer is: no one has any idea,” Tapper said. “Period.”
Fox News, which employs several of Trump’s top media allies, is often considered a benchmark for how the former president’s supporters will react to adverse news. News anchor Shannon Bream led the network’s coverage of the verdict, followed later by its top political anchor, Bret Baier. Several conservative experts on “The Five” weighed in shortly after 5:30 p.m.
Instead of criticizing the jury’s verdict, host Greg Gutfeld said he thought it would work to Trump’s advantage. “Americans love the story of a lone man fighting a corrupt system with his back against the wall,” he said. “They just gave Popeye a gallon of spinach.”
Jesse Watters, his co-host, agreed. “I thought I would be angry, but I feel cold resignation,” he said. “We are going to rise up, we are going to regain our strength and we are going to defeat the forces of evil that are destroying this republic.”
When the evening programming began at 7, less than two hours after the verdict, the parallel realities of split-screen cable news were on display.
Laura Ingraham opened her Fox News show by declaring “a shameful day for America, a day from which America may never recover.” And on MSNBC, Joy Reid called Trump “a hateful, angry man who hates the very system he wants to lead.”
Tiffany Hsu contributed with reports.