As a felon, Trump upends how Americans view the US presidency

WASHINGTON – A big economic package, mass deportations, maybe even some invasions of other countries. Oh, and one more item. “I’ll do my little thing tomorrow,” a busy President-elect Donald Trump mentioned the other night.

That little thing was the first criminal sentencing of an American president. That little thing was confirmation that Trump, just 10 days later, would become the first president to move into the White House with a rap sheet. That little thing is the latest shift in standards that once governed high office.

Trump does not really consider it a little thing, of course, given how strenuously he sought to avoid the Jan 10 sentencing for 34 felony counts in his hush money case. But to a remarkable degree, he has succeeded in making it a little thing in the body politic. What was once a pretty-much-guaranteed disqualifier for the presidency is now just one more political event seen through a partisan lens.

After all, no one seemed shocked after the

Jan 10 sentencing

in New York. While Trump was spared jail time or financial penalties, he effectively had the word “felon” tattooed on his record for all time unless a higher court overturns the conviction. But that development was already baked into the system. Voters knew last autumn that Trump had been found guilty by a jury of his peers, and enough of them decided it was either illegitimate or not as important as other issues.

“It speaks to the moment we’re in,” said Mr Norman L. Eisen, a former White House ethics counsel to president Barack Obama who has closely tracked Trump’s various legal cases and has founded a new organisation aimed at defending democracy. “You have somebody who is an adjudicated felon 34 times over, but you also have a nation that is either so numb or so in shock that it does not know how to react.”

And so the nation will soon witness the paradox of a newly elected president putting his hand on a Bible to swear an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”, the supreme law of the land, barely a week after being sentenced for violating the law.

This will be a national Rorschach test. His critics will find it appalling. His admirers will see it as vindication.

That is no accident. Trump for years has worked to discredit any and all criminal and civil cases against him as nothing more than politically motivated witch hunts and found plenty of Americans to agree with him. His supporters do not view him as a villain but as a victim. Even a significant number of opponents have grown weary of it all, or their outrage has faded into resignation.

“What is extraordinary about Trump’s behaviour and record is that the electorate does not care, as it once did, that a president pay public fealty to law and norms and other traditional expectations of the office,” said Professor Jack Goldsmith from Harvard Law School, a former assistant attorney-general under president George W. Bush. “Trump has revolutionised how the public thinks about the presidency even before his second term has begun.”

Indeed, he has not only moved the bar for the presidency, but is attempting to do the same for senior Cabinet positions and other top officials in government. He has picked Mr Pete Hegseth, a Fox News personality, to be secretary of defence despite the allegation that he raped a woman at a Republican political conference and a report that he was pushed out as head of two veterans organisations after being accused of mismanagement, drunken behaviour and sexual impropriety.

Mr Hegseth has insisted the encounter at the conference was consensual, and police did not file charges. But Trump has selected other candidates for top positions who have been accused of sexual misconduct themselves or failure to stop it. Most of them, like Mr Hegseth, dispute the allegations and Trump and his allies seem willing to accept their denials. But there was a time when an incoming president would have avoided nominees with such baggage in the first place.

Trump’s allies maintain that if standards have shifted, the President-elect’s pursuers have only themselves to blame by initiating unfounded or overhyped investigations as part of what they said looked like an effort to stop a political opponent. Trump’s adversaries cannot win at the ballot box, his camp charges, so they have abused the justice system.

“Our norms have changed in what we will accept in presidents because federal and state Democratic officials debased prosecution by deploying it as a political tool to influence presidential elections,” said Professor John Yoo, another former Bush Justice Department official now teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.

A YouGov survey released on Jan 10 found that 48 per cent of adults said they believed that Trump had committed crimes in the hush money case, while 28 per cent did not and 25 per cent were not sure. Following the sentencing, 19 per cent said it was too harsh, 24 per cent said it was about right and 39 per cent did not think it was harsh enough.

On the broader question of whether Trump was politically singled out for the worst treatment, most Americans disagreed. Forty-two per cent said they thought Trump was actually treated more leniently than other people and 14 per cent said he was treated about the same, while 30 per cent said he was treated more harshly. That 30 per cent clearly reflects Trump’s hardcore base, and enough other voters evidently concluded that they were not bothered enough to vote against him and cared more about inflation, immigration or other issues.

Even some who have been critical of Trump questioned whether the hush money prosecution was worth it, especially since it was brought by a Democratic district attorney who reopened the matter after his predecessor opted against filing charges.

“Of all the cases against Mr Trump, the New York case was the most partisan and least meritorious,” said Professor Michael W. McConnell from Stanford Law School, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by Mr Bush. “The conviction says more about the low standards of prosecutorial integrity in the once-vaunted Manhattan DA office than about Mr Trump.”

Even the judge’s sentence seemed to undermine perceptions of the case’s seriousness. Rather than try to impose jail time or financial penalties, the judge gave Trump what is called unconditional discharge, a concession to the reality that an actual penalty was implausible 10 days before the inauguration.

At the end of the day, beyond the minimum qualifications in the Constitution, the standards for who is fit to be president are determined not by politicians or a judge or jury but by the voters. In this case, the voters gave their verdict long before the official sentencing.

And that is no little thing. NYTIMES