A slap on the wrist for Donald Trump is a slap in the face for the American justice system.
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A unanimous jury verdict in May and a sentence on Friday from New York Judge Juan Merchan that amounted to less than a slap on the wrist all but ensure that Donald Trump will be the first convicted felon in US history to serve as president.
That should mean something — and it does. However, it means different things to different people.
To Trump and the millions of supporters who believe every word he says (as well as all of those Republicans who know better but are too afraid to speak their minds), it means that he was the target of a “witch hunt” and a “weaponized” Department of Justice.
According to the former and incoming president, those who investigated him are “deranged” and “crooked” and “corrupt.”
And, to be honest, it does seem a bit unfair that you can’t even stage a coup, send a mob to attack Congress, horde highly classified documents in your home, obstruct justice, falsify business records, or lie to investigators without facing consequences… especially if you are used to getting away with illegal and shady behavior all of your life.
What’s next? Maybe you won’t even be allowed to grab women by the pussy anymore.
Of course, if you do so in the context of an official presidential act, the Supreme Court thinks that would probably still be OK.
But we digress.
In any case, as Trump tells it (repeatedly and often in all-caps), the criminal prosecutions in New York, Georgia, Florida, and Washington, DC, were all obviously politically motivated and orchestrated by a cabal of Biden administration officials, various judges, a Republican special counsel, and many grand jurors who had reviewed mountains of evidence and voted to indict him.
Furthermore, according to renowned legal scholar Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-University of Auburn), they even turned the heat down in the courtroom.
It bears noting that this conspiracy specifically targeted the former president (and the people who covered for him), and not, for example, a certain other Republican who may or may not have paid underage women large amounts of money for sex.
Speaking of paying for sex, Trump had to shell out $5 million after a jury found him guilty of sexual abuse, i.e., the exact same thing he bragged about on camera one time. Oh, and he also paid another $130,000 for keeping an affair hidden, which triggered the events that led to his felony conviction.
You really have to feel for the guy, who is just the most upstanding of citizens. It’s clearly all terribly unfair.
And just to make sure the conspirators got that weaponization part right, they practiced on several high-profile Democrats, like a sitting senator, a member of the House, and the president’s own son.
Add it all up and, according to Trump and his cult, this amounts to a historic travesty of justice.
For once, they are absolutely right.
The fact that all he got is just one felony conviction that didn’t even result in any real punishment is a historic travesty of justice.
What’s even worse is that Trump may have come out ahead because his incessant ranting, raving, and lying about the cases were amplified endlessly by his allies, and, if you tell a lie long enough and often enough, people start thinking it may be the truth.
It is not.
Trump was unanimously convicted in the weakest case of the four (read the indictment here). The only reason he evaded punishment in the others is that his donors paid for attorneys who knew how to run out the clock.
It also didn’t hurt that Trump appointed the judge in Florida who kept making puzzling decisions favoring him. That Florida case probably had the greatest potential of a conviction because the crimes outlined in a very detailed indictment (which you can read here) are more clear cut and less open to interpretation than the two in Georgia and Washington, DC, related to Trump’s failed coup.
Anybody can understand that you shouldn’t keep top secret documents that you aren’t supposed to have in your bathroom. And, when people ask you nicely to return them, you shouldn’t lie about it and hide them.
The charges in the DC case are even more damning but also more arcane. In addition, nobody had ever tried a coup before so this is uncharted territory.
While “Conspiracy to Defraud the United States” is pretty self-explanatory, the other counts don’t sound all that serious (read about all of them in the indictment here).
But while “Conspiracy to Obstruct an Official Proceeding” may seem rather benign, we aren’t talking about crashing an OSHA hearing; we’re talking about trying to overturn a presidential election. That’s pretty much the most important official proceeding there is in the United States.
That leaves the Georgia case (and you can find that indictment here) in which Trump is once again on tape saying the thing he is accused of.
And yet, all the justice the American people get is Friday’s sentence of… nothing.
One can understand why the Department of Justice wanted to proceed with care. Charging a former president with crimes is a serious matter. But it isn’t more serious than trying to obliterate the bedrock of US democracy.
By exploiting the system, he is going to get away with it.
The people who made the decisions regarding when and how to get justice for the 81,283,501 Biden voters whom Trump tried to defraud, or for Trump jeopardizing US national security by leaving classified documents lying around his home (and sharing them with some people), ought to have known how this was going to go.
They can’t be oblivious to the fact that, when it comes to the rich and powerful, Lady Justice in the US isn’t blind; she winks at those with lawyers who know every trick in the book.
Yes, it’s important that Trump is now officially a felon, but he got away with much worse and should have been punished beyond suffering the indignity of that conviction.
