Trump's punishment for his crimes? None | Moira Donegan

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

52% : In a sense, the sentencing merely confirms what many of us already know: that by virtue of who he is, Trump is beyond the reach of consequence.
41% : What the law means, we have found, tends to be different depending on who it is being applied to; it is different, and less severe, when it is applied to Donald Trump.
40% : Those cases came to nothing after the supreme court, packed with Trump loyalists and appointees, intervened to stop them.
39% : Tremendous effort went into these attempts to hold Trump accountable through the institutions of government.
35% : There have been so many attempts to check or punish Trump's abuses of power through formal state mechanisms, the ones that we were told, in our grade school civics classes, existed precisely to stop a man like Trump from using the presidency the way he uses it.
34% : Trump was never likely to get jail time, which would have been unusual for any defendant faced with these charges, and over the past days Merchan had signaled that he would not impose probation, either.
30% : Merchan had delayed the sentencing several times, so as not to appear biased ahead of the 2024 election; Trump himself had petitioned to have his conviction vacated, arguing - following the supreme court - that as a former president, he is largely immune from criminal prosecution.
30% : Perhaps that victory is a sign of just how low our standards for institutional response to Trump have fallen.
23% : There was, that is, no formal mechanism really available by which the criminal justice system could punish Trump for the crimes he was convicted of.
23% : Trump was impeached twice, and neither time was he convicted.
21% : And maybe that's just as well - any punishment or sanction at all that he had imposed on Trump would have been likely to be appealed and suspended, at least for the duration of Trump's time in office.
18% : Merchan denied that petition in his own New York state court, but Trump made a last ditch effort to ask the supreme court to prevent him from being sentenced last week, a request the court denied not long after news leaked that Trump had a highly irregular and inappropriate personal phone call with Justice Samuel Alito just hours before his petition to the court was filed.
12% : With Trump's non-sentencing, then, we might be able to finally abandon the futile hope that the institutions of liberal democracy can check him, that the lies and corruptions that our system of government has enabled Trump to pursue might be curtailed by some other, nobler, hidden function of that same constitutional system.

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