Former President Donald Trump may have been found guilty of all 34 felony counts levied against him by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, but the only real crime is not Trump’s supposed falsification of business records — it’s the rigged verdict resulting from a kangaroo court that ought to offend our sense of common decency.

Trump was not judged by an impartial jury of his peers but rather by a bench stacked with New York Times subscribers and TikTok stans from an electorate that favored President Joe Biden in 2020 by a 53.5-point margin. The verdict was not based on witness testimony by paragons of virtue and honesty. Spearheading the prosecution’s case was Michael Cohen, the convicted perjurer. Stormy Daniels, the porn star who parlayed her one-night stand with the then-married Trump from a jovial cash cow that brought her income from a media blitz and nationwide strip-club tour, transformed her tawdry tale on the stand into a sob story, intimating that this consensual case of adultery was actually an abuse of power.

And what exactly was the crime at the core of this case?

Contrary to the narrative constructed by the prosecution, a political candidate trying to silence an unsavory story before an election is not a crime, and that’s not the allegation Bragg even pretended to levy at Trump. Rather, Bragg charged Trump with felony counts, outside of the five-year statute of limitations dictated by New York law, of falsifying business records “when his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.”

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Of course, the prosecution never explained who Trump attempted to defraud, nor did it hone in on a single underlying crime the convicted charges were meant to conceal. Hence, the Biden-donating judge’s ridiculous instructions that the jury did not have to agree on what underlying crime Trump was trying to conceal, only that Trump’s payments to Cohen, presumably in repayment for his hush money check to the dignified Daniels, were criminal because he logged them as payment for services rendered rather than reimbursement.

When Trump lost the 2020 election, he lied that the Democratic Party did so by stealing it from him. As he heads into the 2024 election as the odds-on front-runner, he will remind us that the Democratic Party has tried, is trying, and will continue to try to steal it from him, and he will be correct.