RUTHFULLY YOURS

I was at a dinner event on Thursday night when the news came that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett decided to throw a sop to the left.  At issue was whether the Democrat activist New York judge and Joe Biden contributor Juan Merchan should be allowed to sentence Donald Trump in the magic bookkeeping-error-non-disclosure-agreement case in which a possible misdemeanor underwent a legal transubstantiation and suddenly became a polished thirty-four-count felony. Amazing.

Along the way, Merchan issued gag orders against Trump,  interfered with his campaigning, and generally made it plain that he was singling Trump out for unfair treatment.  Still, Roberts and Barrett joined the Court’s left flank to render a 5-4 decision against Trump. Merchan could proceed with the sentencing of the past and now future president of the United States.

Merchan found Trump guilty, guilty, guilty last May. Thirty-four times did he pronounce “guilty.”  The world was amazed. The entire case was unprecedented. Not only was Merchan himself a Democrat activist, his daughter Loren has made millions from consulting for progressive candidates from Kamala Harris on down. What a long time ago it seems. Joe Biden was still running for president in May. Donald Trump had yet to be shot by a would-be assassin.  And Kamala Harris was still cackling in the wings.

We’ve had a lot of legal decisions since then, most of which have gone decidedly against the anti-Trump, lawfare establishment.  We also had an election, which Trump won handily, and a vast and sudden change in the emotional weather of the country.

When Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, there was a surge of optimism and people said that it was “morning in America” again. The bad Carter years gave way to a period of enthusiasm and confidence. Gone was Carter’s gas rationing, his skyrocketing inflation, unemployment,  and interest rates (what Reagan called “the misery index”).  Gone too was the hostage crisis in Iran. Reagan jump-started a period of economic growth through which the developed world saw the greatest accumulation of wealth in history. Reagan’s philosophy of “we win, they lose” put the Soviet Union on the fast track to disintegration, which happened in 1991, just a couple of years after Reagan left office.

Jimmy Carter’s administration is remembered as a period of “malaise” and waning American prestige. Because Donald Trump is not shy about repeating himself, everyone now knows that the Panama Canal, one of the great engineering feats in all of history, cost some 38,000 American lives. The transoceanic passage was built by Americans, paid for by Americans, and was undertaken to serve a vital national security interest. In 1977, Carter sold the canal to Panama for one dollar, thus marking one of the nadirs of his term in office.

The “vibe shift” that Trump’s victory precipitated is, first of all, a matter of feeling and emotion, not doctrines.  As with Reagan’s “morning in America” motif, the MAGA moment involves policies.  But it is fired by an uptick in energy, enthusiasm, and cultural confidence.  From where I sit, it seems like “morning in America” on steroids. Donald Trump will not be sworn in for another week, yet already he has utterly changed the conversation on both domestic issues and, especially, foreign affairs. He has spoken early and often about retaking the Panama Canal, absorbing or otherwise laying claim to Greenland, and making official Canada’s status as a dependent of the United States. World leaders and various celebrities have flocked to Mar-a-Lago to receive his blessing or just to bask in the reflected glow of “the Trump Effect.”

All of which makes John Roberts’s and Amy Coney Barrett’s defection to the anti-Trump wing of the Court puzzling. Merchan sentenced Trump to—nothing. No fine, no jail time, no probation. Only the obloquy, such as it is, of having officially been found guilty by Juan Merchan. As the judge put it in delivering the sentence, “The only lawful sentence that permits entry of a judgment of conviction without encroaching upon the highest office in the land is an unconditional discharge.”

“Unconditional discharge.”  Is that what these months of harassment have been leading up to?

In passing sentence, Merchan indulged in a bit of stern-sounding legal persiflage about the rule of law, the gravity of Trump’s offenses, and the distinction between the privilege due to the office of the president and that due to an individual who just happened to be a former president as well as current president-elect.

Mike Davis of the Article III Project zeroed in on the bizarre nature of Merchan’s non-sentence sentence.

Q. If you really believe President Trump is a 34-time felon, why aren’t you sentencing him to prison?

A. Because you know this was Democrat lawfare and election interference all along.

“Third-world tactics,” Davis continued, “from third-world trash.”

Legal pundits across the ideological spectrum expect the sentence to be reversed on appeal. Moreover, the intended moral opprobrium is unlikely to materialize. Alan Dershowitz spoke for many when, noting that Trump would likely appeal to the Supreme Court, which would likely reverse Merchan,  he said, “I’ll never call Donald Trump a convicted felon. He is a convicted innocent man. A convictively framed-up man.” Bingo.

So here we are, a week from Trump’s second inauguration. A patently biased and conflicted judge just attempted to sully Trump with the legal stigma of conviction. Trump will obliterate Marchan’s attempted maculation like a steamroller crushing an insect.  The legal commentator Jonathan Turley, noting the fundamental “lack of seriousness” in Merchan’s case, observed that “It was more inflated than the Goodyear blimp, pumped up by hot rage and rhetoric. The sentence was the pinprick that showed the massive void within this case.” What can it mean that Merchan should thunder against Donald Trump and then conclude his remarks with this optative statement: “Sir, I wish you Godspeed as you assume your second term in office”?

Turley is right. “The verdict is in. The New York legal system has rendered it against itself.”