• “Imagine there’s no Heaven,” they sang at Carter’s funeral, and that pretty much was how his presidency felt.
• Judge Juan Merchan appears anxious to impose sentence on Trump later this morning, and he can now proceed now that a closely divided Supreme Court has denied the defendant’s petition to halt the proceedings. In May, a jury found Trump guilty of falsifying business records. That’s usually a misdemeanor, rarely prosecuted in New York, but inflated by Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s elected progressive district attorney, into 34 felonies, and portrayed by the judge (an activist Democrat whose daughter is a campaign operative who worked for Kamala Harris) in crime-of-the-century terms, as part of a successful plot to steal the 2016 election. Yet Merchan does not take his own rhetoric seriously: He has promised Trump will not face either jail or probation. The judge just wants the sentencing pronounced and the judgment formalized so that Trump enters the presidency in ten days as a convicted felon. This he will now do, though with several asterisks.
Comments