The president-elect was sentenced Friday morning in his New York hush-money criminal case. Like most defendants, the president-elect would have preferred to not be sentenced at all. Unlike most defendants, he enjoys some enviable privileges, one of which is that he gets to ask the Supreme Court to step in and save him from further interactions with the criminal justice system.
That is hyperbole, to say the least. Judge Juan Merchan, the New York judge presiding over the case, had already said in court documents that he would not send Trump to prison—an obviously unfeasible option when Trump is set to be inaugurated as president 10 days later. On Friday, he made good on his word, sentencing the president-elect to “unconditional discharge,” meaning that he would face no punishment in the form of imprisonment, probation, or fines. Merchan said on Friday that it was the “only lawful sentence” he could hand down, given Trump’s imminent return to the White House.
The president-elect responded in a somewhat muted fashion on his Truth Social account, saying that he “appreciate[d] the time and effort of the United States Supreme Court in trying to remedy the great injustice done to me. Prior to the ruling, however, it was clear that even the mild punishment coming his way was too much for Trump to stomach; he wanted the entire case torn out root, branch, and stem.
The results of such a decision would be transformative, to put it mildly. First, Trump wants the justices to expand their original holding on “presidential immunity” to cover state crimes as well as federal ones. “President Trump noted that, upon his inauguration as the 47th President of the United States on January 20, 2025, he will be completely immune from all criminal process, state or federal,” Trump’s lawyers claimed in their stay application.
“Congress cannot act on, and courts cannot examine, the president’s actions on subjects within his ‘conclusive and preclusive’ constitutional authority,” Roberts wrote. “It follows that an Act of Congress—either a specific one targeted at the President or a generally applicable one—may not criminalize the president’s actions within his exclusive constitutional power. Neither may the courts adjudicate a criminal prosecution that examines such Presidential actions. We thus conclude that the president is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority.”
At the same time, granting blanket immunity from all state-level prosecutions to presidents could have dire implications. While federal offenses are also serious, the acts traditionally prosecuted by the states are central to what Americans consider to be criminal offenses: murder, manslaughter, rape, kidnapping, arson, burglary, fraud, shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, and so on. It is unthinkable that the justices could give anyone carte blanche to commit those crimes.
The lower court disagreed, holding to the principle that there is only one president at a time. Trump is asking the courts to instead recognize that he is effectively a quasi-president right now and thus deserves special consideration. “These demands of time, energy, and attention are just as unconstitutionally burdensome and disruptive during the presidential transition as during the presidency itself,” his lawyers argued. “They are particularly burdensome when a president-elect faces the prospect of criminal judgment and sentencing during his transitional period.” Among those burdens is planning to annex Canada and Greenland.
Finally, Trump wants the Supreme Court to expand its definition of “official acts” to cover an extremely broad range of actions. What counts as an “official act” is pivotal under Trump v. United States because it affects what kind of evidence can be admitted in court. It is worth noting from the outset that the New York hush-money case focused on actions that took place before Trump became president in 2017, and he was not prosecuted for them until after his term ended in 2021.
This drew rebukes from not only the three dissenting liberal justices but also Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who rejected it in her concurring opinion. “On this score, I agree with the dissent,” she wrote. “The Constitution does not require blinding juries to the circumstances surrounding conduct for which Presidents can be held liable.” She instead argued that judges were well equipped to handle such concerns on a case-by-case basis under the ordinary rules of evidence. The other five conservative justices disagreed.
“These public communications through President Trump’s social-media account—through which he routinely communicated with the public on matters of public concern during his presidency—were official actions of the President that could not be used against him during trial,” Trump’s lawyers argued. In other words, it was essential for the American people to read these Twitter posts in 2018, but would be unconstitutional for a New York jury to read them in 2024.
After Trump is sentenced on Friday, he will likely begin the appeals process to challenge his conviction as soon as he can. The Supreme Court’s order suggests that it is virtually guaranteed that the justices will eventually hear the matter—it takes only four votes to accept a case for review, and four justices have already signaled that they opposed the outcome here. Whether Chief Justice John Roberts and/or Justice Amy Coney Barrett ultimately give Trump what he wants on that appeal will shed light on how the court will treat a second Trump presidency—and the future of the office itself.
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