Why Trump Paid No Price Whatsoever for His Criminal Conviction

The Judge - and America - let Trump off the hook

Yesterday, the incoming President of the United States was sentenced for 34 felony counts related to paying hush money to cover up an extra-marital affair. The sentencing makes Trump the first convicted criminal to serve as U.S. President. Seems like it should be a big deal, right?

Not even close. It wasn’t a big deal politically or legally. Major media outlets covered the news, but it didn’t dominate the conversation. As the election results show, a former/future President being convicted of a crime is sort of a nothing burger. It’s just a bump in the road. If you told any historian or political observer before Trump stepped on the scene that someone would glide easily into the presidency less than six months after being convicted of a crime, you would have been laughed out of the building. But that’s exactly what happened. Millions of people who didn’t vote for Trump before the conviction did so afterward.

Perhaps decades from now (if we are lucky enough to make it that far), historians will look back on the 2024 election totally befuddled that Trump faced no political or legal accountability for his crimes.

Here are some thoughts as to why that happened.

A Two-Tiered System of Justice

Donald Trump and his allies often complained about a two-tiered system of justice. Their implication was that Trump was being treated differently because he was Joe Biden’s political opponent. They were right about the two-tiers, but wrong about what it meant.

The legal system is not designed to hold the most powerful people accountable; and that is particularly true when the person on trial spent four years stacking the courts with loyalists.

The judge in the New York Case, for reasons that would be impossible to explain to a child, decided that because Trump won the election, he should face no actual penalties for the crimes for which a jury of his peers found him guilty. No jail time, no fine, no community service, no probation. The ruling seems to establish the very strange and illogical precedent that winning an election is a literal get-out-of-jail-free card.