Politics - News Analysis
Trump’s Name Will Have an Asterisk in History Books Because of the One Thing He Couldn’t Escape – And He’s FURIOUS
We know how much he loves being the only one to do something — but not this.
Donald Trump lives his life according to superlatives. I think his vocabulary is probably pretty small outside of words that indicate “most”: Biggest, fastest, best, strongest… It doesn’t matter what it is, Donald Trump is the most of that thing in his head.
So it stands to reason that the man who calls himself “Your Favorite President” might want to take home the title of Greatest President of All Time. Not only has Trump already ranked in the bottom five for his first term, it’s not likely he’ll be moving up the ranks this time around, either.
And the reason for it has already happened.
Trump was able to successfully avoid any consequences for everything he was investigated for, everything he was impeached for, just everything. All except for the pesky 34 felony counts he was convicted of in the New York hush money trial. That case was the only one of the four major indictments he faced between leaving the Oval Office and his return to have been completed in the interim.
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He was convicted on all counts. And they’re not federal charges, so he can’t just pardon himself when he takes office. Presidents can’t pardon anyone for state charges, or it would be a violation of the Tenth Amendment that Republicans love so much.
That means that he will have a special distinction next to his name in history: The very first president of the United States to also be a convicted felon.
He tried furiously to get the case thrown out when it was in the trial phase. Once he was convicted, he tried and tried to get the convictions thrown out, especially after the Supreme Court ruled that he was immune to prosecution for almost everything.
But these 34 state felony charges all fall into that “almost” gap, and the judge in charge of the case isn’t throwing anything out.
Back in May, Trump was convicted of falsifying business records to conceal payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels that were intended to keep her quiet about their affair during his wife Melania’s pregnancy with Barron Trump.
If that doesn’t sound like it should be a felony to you — the way most of his supporters claim the charges were (ironically) “trumped up” — you have to consider that it’s an election law violation as well. He made the payoffs before the election expressly to improve his chances of winning. It was easy to prove: The affair took place in 2006 and he didn’t bother to pay her a dime until it could negatively affect his chances in the 2016 election.
Trump was initially scheduled for sentencing in late November. Then he won the election.
Now, nobody asked me, but if you did, I’d have said Trump shouldn’t even have been eligible to run after his MAY conviction. Heck, that’s before Joe Biden even dropped out of the race. I personally don’t think that the Constitution should allow for a felon to serve as President of the United States.
But after he won, his sentencing was postponed. And he was once again emboldened to demand that the convictions be thrown out. He and his lawyers’ reasoning was that as president, he should be immune from prosecution to begin with, so he never should have been sentenced.
But that’s not what the Supreme Court ruled, and it’s not what Judge Juan Merchan ruled yesterday. Trump’s legal team had argued that some of the evidence should never have been introduced because it was peripherally related to the “official acts” that SCOTUS did rule Trump was immune for.
In his decision, Merchan wrote “This Court concludes that if error occurred regarding the introduction of the challenged evidence, such error was harmless in light of the overwhelming evidence of guilt. Even if this Court did find that the disputed evidence constitutes official acts under the auspices of the Trump decision, which it does not, Defendant’s motion is still denied as introduction of the disputed evidence constitutes harmless error and no mode of proceedings error has taken place.”
That was enough to set Donald Trump’s hair on fire. Surprising absolutely no one, Trump took to social media to light up Judge Merchan’s decision, and his post contained some critical errors:
BREAKING: In a completely illegal, psychotic order, the deeply conflicted, corrupt, biased, and incompetent Acting Justice Juan Merchan has completely disrespected the United States Supreme Court, and its Historic Decision on Immunity. But even without Immunity, this illegitimate case is nothing but a Rigged Hoax. Merchan, who is a radical partisan, wrote an opinion that is knowingly unlawful, goes against our Constitution, and, if allowed to stand, would be the end of the Presidency as we know it. Merchan has so little respect for the Constitution that he is keeping in place an illegal gag order on me, your President and President-Elect, just so I cannot expose his and his family’s disqualifying and illegal conflicts….
If you guessed that what was wrong with that statement was “everything except the proper nouns,” congratulations! You’re smarter than the guy who’s about to take office in January.
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