Trump escaped penalty, but 'felon' tag sticks; for now

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.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-trump-escaped-penalty-but-felon-tag-sticks-for-now/