New York State Judge Juan M. Marchan made it official today: Donald Trump, twice elected president, formally is a convicted felon. Case closed with a guaranteed first line in his eventual obituary.
The judge said “Donald Trump the ordinary citizen, Donald Trump the criminal defendant” was not entitled to the protections of the presidency. Trump’s conviction was formalized, but the sentence was “discharged” or all but waived over the impossibility of making it stick because Trump is about to reenter the White House.
By any measure, the conviction in the state hush-money case arising from the 2016 election is a kind of Pyrrhic victory for the legal system itself more than any true accountability moment for Trump. After all, Trump has delayed, appealed, twisted and turned legal accountability on its head to avoid other cases arising from election denial plots and illegal obstruction of justice in hiding classified documents and sinking the state election case in Georgia. He continues this week to fight against the release of a Special Counsel report on what was learned in investigating Trump’s behavior and role in schemes leading to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection attempt.
Though Marchan had said he would keep sentencing to a paper acknowledgment of the jury decision without further punishment and offered appearance over the internet, Trump continued his attempts to halt the sentencing date, losing last-minute appeals to New York’s top court and, by a narrow vote, the U.S. Supreme Court. Though Trump would not agree with this outcome, it is a remarkable torque of the justice system to end up with 34 guilty findings on felonies with no tangible fine, confinement, probation or jail time.
Even at the sentencing, prosecutors were still pressing that Trump has spread disdain “for our institutions and the rule of law.” On video screen, Trump scowled in defiance and used his moment of speech to deride the charges, the system, his gag order, and his political opponents. There was no contrition from Trump, who had chosen not to testify in his trial.
Still, the bottom line is that Trump formally becomes the first felonious president-elect to face taking the inaugural oath to uphold the nation’s laws and Constitution. No wonder he is embarrassed by the duality presented by that image. So am I.
Talk of Decency and Character
Just yesterday, Trump sat in a row of the living presidents at the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter, apparently incongruously listening to florid eulogies that celebrated a life of service and Carter’s public and private life fully based on his personal character and pursuit of human decency.
It was obvious that Trump’s path to politics and his motivations, behaviors, policies and approaches arise from something quite different from Carter’s devotion to faith and helping others.
Rather, Trump’s approach — as a politician, businessman or president — is to bully, to seek power to demand outcomes in business or politics, with rules, laws, truth all malleable to the idea of winning. Indeed, even Trump’s boastful acknowledgement that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still maintain his hold on others is a marker worth noting.
Judge Marchan made clear that even as a president-elect, even with a Supreme Court immunity decision, Trump is a citizen, subject to criminal law. Immunity covers the office, not its occupant, said Marchan.
Those remarks echo the dressing down by civil case judges in the never-ending defamation suit against Trump filed by columnist E. Jean Carroll that found that Trump indeed was liable for sexual abuse in a New York department store. It follows Trump’s own videoed statements about his right as a rich celebrity to assault women. It follows any number of other court judgments about stiffing workers or contracts with The Trump Organization, or the finding, fines and ban on his use of fraudulent Trump nonprofit entities and a long list of litigation losses.
The remark come as Trump even this week called Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito over a job recommendation for a former Alito law clerk on the same day that Trump’s lawyers were filing his last-minute appeals to stretch the recent court ruling on presidential immunity to someone who is almost president.
Even his most ardent supporters say that ethics, empathy, and exactitude are not in Trump’s wheelhouse or anywhere nearby.
A Love for Admiration
Still, Trump insists on being loved for being Trump. He will squash his perceived enemies or banish them or threaten to investigate and prosecute them with his White House power. He wants universal acknowledgment as the dominant force in our times and in our lives.
In return, he promises to love all who love him. If not, truth should give way to propaganda and made-up stories to undermine the other guy. The Art of the Trump Deal is to sink the other guy first and permanently. Rules, truth and law are situation; there is only Winning.
The very same lawyers who filed his last-minute appeals for immunity and who got federal District Court Judge Aileen M. Cannon to issue a stay order on the special counsel report in a case which she had declared closed — leaving her with no legal authority to issue a ruling — are now headed for jobs near the top of the U.S. Justice Department. The U.S. Appeals Court in Atlanta overturned Cannon’s decision yesterday, greenlighting the release of the prosecutors’ report, though the Justice Department wants to withhold specific classified documents mentioned.
Trump continues to have business interests of his own and of his associates mixing easily with policy directives — fueling those ethics complaints. And the basis of much of his public program promises are based on pardoning rioters from January 6 who showed up to support him and to investigate those who launched probes into his own behaviors. Amid a raging firestorm emergency in Los Angeles, Trump has doubled down on offering partisan criticism of the Democratic governor rather than any word of empathy or help for victims.
Donald Trump, convicted felon for the tacky crime of paying off an adult film actress for sex and then hiding it in the sworn legal documents filed to meet required campaign finance laws.
If Character is the word of the week, the sentence for this felon is that he can’t claim it as a political asset.
