Former President Trump suggested being placed on house arrest for his hush money conviction could be a “breaking point” for Americans, whom he claimed “would not stand for it.”
“I’m not sure the public would stand for it,” Trump said Sunday in an interview with Fox News’s Will Cain, Pete Hegseth and Rachel Campos-Duffy. “I think it’d be tough for the public to take. At a certain point, there’s a breaking point.”
Trump last week was convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in New York, becoming the first former U.S. president to become a convicted felon. The charges centered on reimbursements made to Trump’s onetime fixer and attorney, Michael Cohen, for a hush money payment made to porn actress Stormy Daniels.
Judge Juan Merchan set Trump’s sentencing date for July 11, four days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Trump’s legal team has vowed to appeal the case, though proceedings will meanwhile move forward as scheduled.
Trump’s team has already suggested they do not believe the former president should be incarcerated, which would be a rare punishment for a first-time offender convicted of Trump’s charges in New York.
The former president repeated his argument that the trial and conviction were “unfair.”
“But I did absolutely nothing wrong, I mean, absolutely. Think of it, you know, I hate when they say bookkeeping, this and that. It’s not. It’s called, think of it, expense. I used the word expense, legal expense,” he said. “I pay a lawyer — he wasn’t a fixer. He was a lawyer at the time. I pay a lawyer. And he’s a lawyer. It’s called a legal expense.”
Trump touted his continued standing in the national polls, in which he holds a razor-thin lead of 1.5 points as the presumptive GOP nominee over President Biden, according to a polling index by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ.