I can’t tell you if Donald Trump will spend a day in jail after a Manhattan jury’s guilty verdict in that absurd hush-money case. What I can report with a great degree of certainty is that Trump isn’t a guy acting particularly worried about the outcome; in fact, he thinks it’s going to propel him back into the White House.
That’s the read I’m getting from members of the billionaire and multimillionaire GOP donor class who were hanging with the former and possibly future president, now a convicted felon, at an Upper East Side residence just hours after the perversion of the justice system Thursday.
Among the deep-pocketed group of about two dozen — some who were initially reluctant to support Trump for many reasons, including the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill fiasco — were private equity honcho Steve Schwarzman; real estate titan Steve Witkoff; Jeff Sprecher, the CEO of the Intercontinental Exchange that controls the NYSE; his wife, the former Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler; NFL New York Jets owner Woody Johnson; Jacob Helberg of Palantir; John Catsimatidis, the supermarket and media entrepreneur; and hedge fund billionaire John Paulson.
They met at the behest of Pepe Fanjul, the South Florida real estate and sugar magnate who owns the swanky venue.
I am told that Trump, with his son Eric, arrived a little late (for obvious reasons) — not with a scowl but a smile. He began by cracking jokes to his guests about what just went down in that lower Manhattan courtroom and then got down to business about how he plans to reverse the corrosive elements of Bidenism when he gets re-elected.