When Donald Trump’s Thursday morning started with a former producer of “The Apprentice” accusing him of using a racist slur to describe a Black contestant, the former president didn’t know that was going to be the best news of his day.

That afternoon, a jury of his peers handed down a 34-count conviction. Quite the bookends for a man who a year ago was also found liable for sexual assault and defamation by a jury. In 2022, two of his companies were convicted of fraud.

As if all that weren’t enough reason to be concerned about the corruption a potential second Trump term could bring, there are now reports that the former president is buddying up with Elon Musk. In fact, Trump is said to be considering adding Musk as an advisor if he wins in November.

Imagine: one of the richest men in the world joining forces with a convicted felon running for president. It’s the kind of pairing Ian Fleming would have appreciated. A duo of villains worthy of Bond.

Musk wants to put a computer chip in your brain, and Trump said he wants to be a dictator for a day. Musk prevented Ukraine from using Starlink internet services in its fight against Russia. Trump admires Russian President Vladimir Putin and said he would encourage Russia to attack NATO countries.

Musk grew up affluent in apartheid South Africa and today speaks ill of diversity efforts in the workplace.

According to Trump’s niece Mary, racist slurs like Trump is accused of using on set were common in the Trump household. Antisemitic slurs as well, which probably explains why Trump said that white nationalists — the ones carrying torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us” — were “very fine people.”

That was 2017, back when Trump was calling himself the “law and order” president. I’m pretty sure his supporters didn’t take that to mean that he and many of the people he brought with him to the White House — Paul Manafort, Stephen K. Bannon, Mike Flynn, Roger Stone — would be facing jail time.

But then again, if Republicans really cared about “law and order,” Trump never would have made it to the Republican debate stage back in 2015. He and his businesses had already been involved in thousands of lawsuits. In fact, when Trump initially announced his candidacy, he was concurrently dealing with a class action suit filed against Trump University. (Alleging fraud, in case you were wondering.)

Republicans like House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who after the verdict on Thursday said “today is a shameful day in American history,” can try to characterize the hush money trial as “the weaponization of our justice system,” but the reality is Trump has been in trouble with our legal system since Johnson was in diapers. I’m not joking. The saga began in 1973 with the Nixon administration. By now, Trump’s been involved in 4,095 lawsuits and counting.

He is not a victim being unfairly targeted by Democrats.

Trump is a con artist who keeps getting caught.

When he first ran for president, he told supporters not to worry about his lack of political experience because his business pedigree qualified him for the job. And then we found out that his companies had been cooking the books for decades and that Trump’s father repeatedly bailed him out of bad financial decisions. No shame in having help, unless you’ve been claiming to be self-made and successful.

And many believed his boasts, even though he became a millionaire at the age of 8, not through shrewd deals but because of his family’s wealth.

The guilty verdict on Thursday marked the first time a former president has been convicted of a felony. That is indeed historic.

However, Trump himself being found guilty in a court of law should not surprise anyone.

Especially not in New York, where Trump grew up, made his name, made his money and had most of his run-ins with the law.

Perhaps in 2016, because of his charisma and celebrity, it was easy to overlook just how corrupt Trump was. Now, his corruption is hard to avoid.

None of this is to suggest he can’t still win the White House. However, this time around, there is no plausible pretense of “draining the swamp” or “making America great.”

No, this time around voters know Trump is a criminal. Now we’ve got the receipts.

@LZGranderson

President Biden said on Friday that the justice system “should be respected” and that it was “reckless” for former President Donald Trump to claim that the verdict in his New York trial was “rigged,” just days after he told his supporters the Supreme Court could not “stop” him from carrying out his agenda.

“It’s reckless, it’s dangerous, it’s irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged just because they don’t like the verdict,” Biden said in response to the former president’s remarks about the NY v. Trump verdict, which found Trump guilty Thursday on all 34 counts of falsifying business records related to the hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election.

“Our justice system has endured for nearly 250 years, and it literally is the cornerstone of America. Our justice system, that justice should be respected. And we should never allow anyone to tear it down. It’s as simple as that,” Biden added.

TRUMP TURNS CONVICTION INTO CASH, SPOTLIGHTS RECORD FUNDRAISING IN WAKE OF GUILTY VERDICT

Biden’s remarks came just two days after he bragged to his supporters at a rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that the Supreme Court ruling his student debt relief plan was unconstitutional did not “stop” him from canceling student loans.

“The Supreme Court blocked me from relieving student debt, but they didn’t stop me,” Biden said Wednesday from Girard College.

Biden, like several other Democrat and Republican presidents throughout history, has taken aim at the Supreme Court for a number of rulings they have made during his tenure in the White House.

During his State of the Union address in March, Biden took direct aim at the justices and insisted they had underestimated the “electoral and political power” of women in their decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. During an interview with MSNBC about his remarks directed at the justices, Biden said, “Look, I think they made a wrong decision, think they read the Constitution wrong, I think they made a mistake.”

Biden made similar comments on how the high court’s ruling “didn’t stop” him from canceling student loans in February while speaking at the Julian Dixon Library in Culver City, California.

BLACK VOTERS CRITICIZE BIDEN FOR ‘PANDERING’ AS SUPPORT SHIFTS TO TRUMP: ‘IT’S INSULTING’

The Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

“Early in my term, I announced a major plan to provide millions of working families with debt relief for their college student debt,” Biden said at the time. “Tens of millions of people in debt were literally about to be canceled in debts. But my MAGA Republican friends in the Congress, elected officials and special interests stepped in and sued us. And the Supreme Court blocked it. But that didn’t stop me.”

Last June, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that federal law does not allow Biden’s Secretary of Education to cancel more than $430 billion in student loan debt. Biden promised at the time that his administration would continue to push for his student debt relief plan.

Shortly after the court’s ruling, Biden said: “I think the court misinterpreted the Constitution.”

Earlier this year, Biden announced the Savings on Valuable Education (SAVE) plan that cancels debt for enrolled borrowers who have been in repayment for at least 10 years and hold $12,000 or less in student loan debt. Those with larger debts will receive relief after an additional year of payments for every additional $1,000 they borrowed.

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Biden campaign spokesperson James Singer said: “Expressing disagreement with a Supreme Court decision – as all Presidents do – is not the same as attacking the rule of law and undermining our judicial system.”

Following the verdict in Trump’s trial, Biden took to social media on Friday to claim, “No one is above the law.”

President Biden speaks in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on May 31, 2024. (Michael Reynolds/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

He has also used Trump’s remarks to raise funds for his re-election campaign, claiming in another post on X that Trump “questioned our judicial system.”

“Donald Trump is threatening our democracy. First, he questioned our election system. Then, he questioned our judicial system,” Biden wrote Friday.

Biden said Friday that Trump, who is the first president to be convicted of a felony, will “be given the opportunity, as he should, to appeal” the conviction.

Fox News’ Lindsay Kornick contributed to this report.

Former President Trump stood in the lobby of his namesake office tower in New York on Friday morning, lashing out at “fascists” in the government, a “sleazebag” star witness and a judge who is “crooked,” “a devil,” “a tyrant” and “can’t put two sentences together.”

He complained for 40 minutes about a “rigged trial” that resulted in his 34 felony convictions Thursday, detailing procedural objections as he vowed an appeal, while occasionally insisting that “it’s not about me.”

President Biden had a more typical day for an incumbent head of state, returning to the White House from an overnight stay at his Delaware beach house to welcome the Kansas City Chiefs to celebrate their Super Bowl win, meet with Belgium’s prime minister behind closed doors and deliver public remarks unveiling a proposed cease-fire in the war between Israel and Hamas.

Friday offered the type of contrast that Biden and his allies have been trying to showcase for months: between a president performing a normal mix of duties that range from the ceremonial to the profound and a former president mired in his insular world of grievance.

“The American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed,” Biden said from the State Dining Room on Friday before delivering his Middle East proposal. “It’s reckless, it’s dangerous, it’s irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged just because they don’t like the verdict.”

Biden won the White House in 2020 with a promise to return to normality, offering his five decades in mainstream politics as a steadying alternative to Trump’s chaotic pandemic news conferences and shattering of norms that would lead ultimately to the violent Jan. 6 insurrection.

“Trump has sought to remake this nation in his image: selfish, angry, dark and divisive,” Biden said in 2020. “This is not who we are. At our best, America’s always been — and if I have anything to do with it — it will be again, generous, confident, an optimistic nation, full of hope and resolve.”

But four years later, polls show that the nation remains deeply divided, pessimistic and concerned about the future and that a large share of voters have forgotten much of the turbulence of the Trump era, or at least decided they are willing to live with it. The former president has a slight edge in national and swing state polls, with voters giving him credit for the pre-pandemic economy while blaming Biden for the inflation that came with the recovery.

It remains unclear whether Thursday’s verdicts in the election interference trial will alter those dynamics.

Trump supporters have stuck with him through any number of crises that would have sunk other politicians, including the insurrection, two impeachments and numerous former officials from his inner circle calling him unfit to serve. His three other criminal cases remain unresolved and will probably hang over him during the November election.

Trump boasted Friday of what he said was a record $39-million fundraising haul that came in the first 10 hours after his conviction. (The numbers have not yet been officially reported or verified.)

“So far, I guess it’s backfired,” he said of the prosecution brought by New York’s district attorney, for which he has falsely blamed Biden, before saying that he would have preferred to skip the ordeal and defeat Biden “legitimately.”

He also returned to the themes his advisors hope will win him a return to the Oval Office, including his mainstays of immigration and “rampant crime.” But the former president who campaigns on law and order is now basing much of his case for reelection on calling out the criminal justice system as rigged and “a scam,” at least when it applies to him.

When Larry Hogan, a Republican former governor running for Senate in Maryland, wrote on social media that people should “respect the verdict and the legal process” Thursday night, a top Trump aide, Chris LaCivita, rebuked him immediately on the platform X.

“You just ended your campaign,” LaCivita wrote.

Biden has tried to seize that ground from Trump. But after he defended the rule of law on Friday, the subject of his subsequent remarks offered a reminder that life is different for an incumbent president than a challenger.

Biden has been unable to end the war in the Gaza Strip, which has sparked mass protests on college campuses and anger from many on the left who blame him for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and thousands of deaths of Palestinians. Even as Biden urged the Israeli military to avoid civilian deaths, he has supported Israel’s right to defend itself after Hamas killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped about 250 on Oct 7.

Biden on Friday detailed a three-phase deal proposed by Israel that he says would lead to the release of hostages in Gaza and could end the conflict with Hamas. Previous attempts at a deal have failed, provoking further anger on the left that he was enabling Israel’s assault, coupled with criticism from Israel’s moderate and conservative allies that he was wavering in his support as he tried to pressure the government to scale down its counteroffensive.

“I know this is a subject on which people in this country feel deep, passionate conviction,” Biden said Friday. “So do I. It’s been one of the hardest, most complicated problems in the world.”

Trump had no further public events planned for Friday.