Is Trump toast? Only if Joe Biden seizes the lifeline this guilty verdict has given him

The incumbent president is badly behind - but now he has a chance to woo disenchanted Republicans who can't bear Donald's stink

It took little more than nine hours of deliberation for a New York jury to ensure Donald Trump a new place in history. He was already the first US president, sitting or former, to be tried for a serious crime. Now he is the first ever to be convicted.

Sure, the guilty verdict did not come in any of the three much graver cases still outstanding against him. Like Al Capone - to whom Trump has, self-incriminatingly, long liked to compare himself - he got done on Thursday for the relatively small stuff. But the law got him in the end.