By Timothy L. O’Brien / Bloomberg Opinion
Donald Trump was sentenced Friday morning in New York for a criminal fraud conviction decided last May despite months of legal maneuvers aimed at forestalling the hearing and an unsuccessful, last-minute request to the Supreme Court to intervene. He’ll be a convicted felon when he is inaugurated as president on Jan. 20; the first Oval Office occupant to have that distinction on his resume.
Trump very much wanted this to be otherwise. Had he felt differently about it, his lawyers wouldn’t have pressed so hard to delay or permanently postpone today’s hearing. His strongest supporters will care little; most members of his party even less. Trump has spent decades upending so many norms, breaking so many rules and thumbing his nose at so many laws that a criminal conviction for 34 felonies orchestrated to falsify business records and bury sex scandals to keep his 2016 presidential bid afloat is weak brew.
It’s just another chapter in an extraordinary odyssey that is both historic and pulp-fiction tawdry. Trump fought the law, and the law won. He moved on and then got elected president (again!). He now owns and fronts a dynamic political movement speeding toward an overhaul of government and civil society. Half the country adores or supports him, half the country disdains or abhors him, and the American experiment trembles. You can’t make up this stuff.
More consequential court battles have disappeared along the way. Trump was mired in one federal prosecution linked to the Jan. 6, 2021, siege at the U.S. Capitol and his efforts to sabotage the presidential election he lost in 2020. He was also confronting an equally muscular federal case that accused him of allegedly misappropriating classified documents and obstructing justice. Both cases have vanished, buried by an earlier Supreme Court ruling that equated the concept of presidential immunity with a get-out-of-jail-free card and Trump’s own convincing victory in last fall’s presidential election.
Anyone concerned that the wheels of justice in the New York courts rolled unfairly in Trump’s direction should be consoled by the fact that his clear-cut abuses of power and embrace of lawlessness as memorialized in the federal cases will never be duly adjudicated. And the federal cases were much more significant tests of the rule of law and more existentially threatening to Trump than the New York action.
So Trump will be fine. He won’t like having this black mark on his record or knowing that it will be part of how he is described forevermore in history texts. On the other hand, he doesn’t read much, and by the time history gets around to fully and fairly wrestling with the realities of the Trump era, he will have passed on. Meanwhile, his advocates will package his New York sentencing as just another example of the Deep State trying to unspool the MAGA revolution and paint Trump as a martyr for a worthy cause. He’s fighting for them and their economic well-being, he survived an assassin’s bullet, his second presidential term is nigh and a criminal conviction simply doesn’t matter.
The Supreme Court could circle back to the New York case anyhow. In a terse, single-page order issued Thursday night declining to intervene, it noted that Trump can still appeal earlier court rulings that rejected overturning his conviction. It also noted that “the burden that sentencing will impose on the President-Elect’s responsibilities is relatively insubstantial in light of the trial court’s stated intent to impose a sentence of ‘unconditional discharge.’” In other words, Trump isn’t going to prison.
The court was split, 5-4, around the order, with Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito dissenting. Trump took heart from that.
“I think it was actually a very good opinion for us because you saw what they said,” he told reporters after the decision. “They invited the appeal, and the appeal is on the bigger issue. So we’ll see how it all works out. I think it will all work out well.”
It could work out well, indeed. After all, Trump, according to ABC News, chatted earlier this week by phone with Alito only hours before Trump’s lawyers petitioned Alito and his fellow justices to upend today’s sentencing hearing. Alito said that he wasn’t aware the petition was about to be filed when he got on the phone with Trump and that he only talked about a former clerk seeking a job in Trump’s White House.
Perhaps that’s all there was to the call, and perhaps there was no quid pro quo in play. Even so, Alito should have recused himself from last night’s ruling to maintain the virtues of objectivity and conflict-free judiciousness in the court’s operations. Its reputation has taken a beating recently because of sketchy financial dealings among some of the justices and the extent to which partisan politics have seeped into its rulings. Alito has contributed to those problems.
“It is not unusual for a sitting justice to offer a job recommendation for a former clerk, but it is rare, court analysts said, for a justice to have such a conversation directly with a sitting president or president-elect, especially one with an active stake in business pending before the court,” ABC noted in its reporting.
On the other hand, Alito may care just as little for the court’s reputational and legal standing as Trump does for the resiliency of the presidency and democracy. So they’re well met, these two. And Trump may have the Supreme Court in his corner should he take on the New York ruling yet again. Next time he’ll be president if he does it.
Timothy L. O’Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”
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