NEW YORK—In form, it looked like a sentencing. Donald Trump appeared remotely, but everything else was in place: the judge was seated up high, the defendant and prosecutors positioned down below. But the impression was fleeting. Trump, who will be President in 10 days, was represented by two lawyers who he has said will hold top roles in his Department of Justice. The judge spent most of the sentencing explaining why no real punishment could be applied to Trump.
Trump made his return to Manhattan criminal court on Friday via Microsoft Teams. For months during his spring 2024 trial, he had stayed silent as former friends, business associates, White House employees, and Stormy Daniels incriminated him in various ways. But on Friday, at the first-ever sentencing hearing for the first-ever convict President, Trump addressed the court for the first time.
It was familiar: he was full of grievance. The case “should never have been brought,” he repeated. It was a “terrible experience,” “very inappropriate,” and a “tremendous setback for New York and the New York court system.”
But there was another tinge to what Trump was saying: it was as if he needed validation from those he was speaking to, and wasn’t getting it.
At times, it almost came off as pleading.
“I got the largest number of votes by far by any Republican in history, and won, as you know, all seven swing states — won conclusively all seven swing states,” he said.
It was a very strange, but very Trumpian thing to say during a sentencing hearing for a criminal conviction: a record number of people like me! Isn’t it so exasperating that we’re here?
But his diatribe, and the hearing more broadly, was a reminder that Trump’s logic throughout his criminal cases — that the law is just people, a popularity contest to be manipulated — has mostly prevailed, so far as it concerns him. After being convicted of 34 felony counts, the prosecutors recommended that he face no punishment apart from whatever emotions and reputational sullying come with being a convicted felon. Trump defense attorney and intended nominee for deputy attorney general Todd Blanche agreed. Judge Juan Merchan imposed that sentence — of “unconditional discharge” — labeling Trump a convict without a fine, jail time, or probation.
Trump appeared on a series of small screens in the courtroom, seated in front of two American flags, next to Blanche. At times, he seemed to glower; at others, he leaned forwards towards the camera as if struggling to hear. Throughout, he looked supremely annoyed. Once the hearing concluded, he immediately logged off, leaving only a faint beep to announce that his involvement had come to an end.
His conviction is a hollow victory for the years-long effort to hold Trump accountable for criminal wrongdoing. Instead of galvanizing the idea that he was not above the law, the manner in which the sentencing proceeded had the opposite effect: demonstrating that by winning the November 2024 election, Trump had partly vitiated the criminal justice system that sought to hold him accountable.
Judge Merchan devoted much of his sentencing delivery to focusing on that issue. Trump, he explained at length, gained legal protections from prosecution because he was assuming the Office of the Presidency — not because he was Donald Trump.
“Ordinary citizens do not receive those legal protections. It is the Office of the President that bestows those to the office holder. It is the citizenry of this nation that recently decided that you should once again receive the benefits of those protections,” Merchan said.
He added later: “They do not reduce the seriousness of the crime or justify its commission in any way. One power they do not provide is the power to erase a jury verdict.”
But in politics, there’s a saying: if you’re explaining, you’re losing. Merchan didn’t do what judges typically do during sentencing, particularly of a contemptuous white collar defendant: criticize the person’s conduct in a direct and unquestionable manner. Instead, Merchan limited himself almost entirely to delineating that key difference: Trump the man versus the powers that come with the Office of the Presidency.
Only Joshua Steinglass, the Manhattan DA prosecutor who led the case, really made a full-throated effort to frame the sentencing as about upholding the principle that nobody — not even a President — can escape accountability for clear instances of wrongdoing.
Trump, Steinglass said, “sees himself as above the law and won’t accept responsibility for his actions.” He’s “caused enduring damage to public perception of the criminal justice system and has placed officers of the court in harm’s way.” The Thursday sentencing, he said, “cements” Trump’s “status as a convict” while giving the jury’s verdict its due.
Even during the sentencing, Trump repeated some of the conduct that, as Steinglass said, evinced a total lack of remorse. He repeatedly attacked a prosecutor on the DA’s team as being “from the DOJ,” and suggested at one point that Michael Cohen, a damaging witness at trial, was allowed to speak as if he were “George Washington.” “But he’s not George Washington,” Trump concluded.
The courtroom was filled mostly with media, though a few members of the public were allowed access, including one observer who has made a hobby of attending virtually every Trump-related legal proceeding he can find. But that, too, marked the strangeness of the event. The trial’s restrictions on access to nearly everyone except the press replicated the conditions that, in an earlier era, gave media institutions their power and may have played some role in preventing Trump’s brand of political entrepreneurialism from taking hold. If you wanted to find out what happened at the trial, you had to go through reporters who quite literally mediated your understanding. You could get it from Trump, but why would you? He’s a conflicted party in this.
But Trump’s influence in the courtroom setting has only grown. He won in November; before that, a Supreme Court — a third of whose members he appointed — shielded Presidents from most conceivable prosecutions for acts in office.
The effect of it all was to strip Friday’s hearing of any sense that any of this was a part of something bigger: the pursuit of justice, impartiality, or equality before the law. Rather, everyone seemed and acted as if they were diminished. Trump did his typical shtick of grievance, complaining that people didn’t realize how much he was loved; all the other parties agreed that the office, at least, meant that, for the next four years, he’s allowed to go scot free.
