What Trump has done, by consistently defending his criminal associates, and by attacking the prosecutions as politically motivated or corrupt, is make the implicit obvious: Regular people go to prison; rich or connected people do whatever they want. At least most of the time. The surprise is not that Trump surrounded himself with advisers who committed crimes, or that Trump himself encouraged his advisers to flout the law. The surprise is the mere possibility that any of them will pay for it.

Even more shocking is that the list of the president’s criminal associates is long: There’s Manafort and Cohen, but also former National-Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Manafort’s former deputy Rick Gates, and the former campaign foreign-policy hand George Papadopoulos. The president is either spectacularly corrupt, or he has a knack for choosing advisers who manage to find themselves on the wrong side of a legal system designed to protect people like them.

Prior to Manafort’s trial, Trump had all but urged the non-sequestered jury to nullify the charges—that is, refuse to convict, regardless of the evidence—because of Manafort’s membership in the same gilded class as the president, and their proximity to each other. Cohen pleaded guilty without going to trial, and he has broken with Trump since federal investigators raided his office, home, and hotel room in May. At the time, Trump called the raid “an attack on our country, in a true sense.”

Trump has tweeted that he thinks “the whole Manafort trial is very sad,” and that Manafort is “a good person.” In declaring that he thinks “it’s very sad what they’ve done to Paul Manafort,” the president sent the message to the jury that the federal government is engaged in an illegitimate prosecution. Convicting Manafort is a violation of the unwritten rules that protect people like him, and like Trump. The president went out of his way to persuade the jury not to convict Manafort, not because of what he did or didn’t do, but because of who he is.

Manafort had ostentatiously flouted the law. It wasn’t simply that he had made his living influence peddling. He laundered millions through schemes so transparent prosecutors were able to document them easily in his indictment. His attempt to circumvent the judge’s gag order by ghostwriting an op-ed was foiled by the track-changes feature in his word processor. He even sought to tamper with witness testimony. When placed in solitary confinement, he bragged that he was being treated like a VIP. If Manafort’s schemes seem obvious and brazen, it is only because he had all the reason in the world to believe he would never be indicted for anything he did, let alone be convicted. And despite his conviction, the possibility that he will go free—either through a presidential pardon, or a successful appeal through a sympathetic judge—is far from remote.