For 34 Felonies, Trump Gets…Nothing

President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced on Friday for the 34 felonies he supposedly committed in falsifying business records, and he received an unconditional discharge, which means that Trump will serve time in prison, or be fined, or even be put on probation. His sentence is nothing, which is altogether fitting and proper, since the case was nothing, the alleged offenses were nothing, and the evidence against Trump was nothing. The case that was supposed to put the left’s Emmanuel Goldstein finally behind bars ended up petering out in a Manhattan courtroom with the intended target speaking forthrightly about what the whole charade was really all about.

The charges against Trump was nothing from the beginning. He was accused of offenses that are ordinarily classified as misdemeanors, but Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg elevated them to felonies on the dubious grounds that they constituted “election interference.” New York extended the statute of limitations on these particular crimes just so that Trump could be prosecuted. And what Trump was accused of doing, paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels, is common business practice: large corporations routinely pay settlements without acknowledging guilt, just to make a nagging problem go away.

The whole idea was to make sure that Trump wouldn’t be elected president again in 2024, and it didn’t work. On Friday, the whole thing petered out with the left having the victory of being able to crow that Trump is a “convicted felon,” but with the oddity of the fact that the sentence he received in itself constitutes a rebuke of that label. If he is so dangerous, such an outrageous scofflaw, why did he get sentenced to nothing at all?

After all, Assistant District Attorney Josh Steinglass said that there was “overwhelming evidence to support the jury’s verdict” and claimed that Trump “has caused enduring damage to public perception of the criminal justice system and has placed officers of the court in harm’s way.” Now step back and think about that for a minute. Here the court has a man who has been convicted of 34 felonies, and has damaged the public’s view of the criminal justice system, and has even endangered officers of the court. And his sentence is…nothing.

Does that add up? Of course it doesn’t. Steinglass’ exaggerated claims are just one of the many disproportionate aspects of this case. If Trump really did all that, he should have gotten some penalty. Instead, the plain fact is that the case failed in its objective, and now the rats are abandoning the sinking ship, while issuing statements about how they were right all along.

The upside for Trump is that now he can appeal and get the conviction overturned; in the meantime, on Friday, he held nothing back as he commented on the whole ridiculous affair. “This has been a very terrible experience,” Trump said via a virtual hookup. “I think it’s been a tremendous setback for New York and the New York court system.”

The president-elect noted the weakness of the case from the beginning: “This is a case that Alvin Bragg did not want to bring. He thought it was from what I read and from what I hear, inappropriately handled before he got there. And a gentleman from a law firm came in and acted as a district attorney. And that gentleman, from what I heard, was a criminal or almost criminal in what he did. It was very inappropriate. It was somebody involved with my political opponent.”

Trump added: “I think it’s an embarrassment to New York and New York has a lot of problems, but this is a great embarrassment.” Yes. It’s a great embarrassment not only to New York, but to the Democrat Party, the Biden regime, and the nation in general, as the United States took its first-ever steps toward becoming a banana republic in which rogue governments defeat their opponents not at the ballot box, but by bringing them up on bogus charges and imprisoning them.

“It’s been a political witch hunt,” Trump also said. “It was done to damage my reputation so that I’d lose the election. And obviously, that didn’t work. And the people of our country got to see this firsthand because they watched the case in your courtroom. They got to see this firsthand. And then they voted, and I won.”

Yes. And soon, all those who love justice will hope that this conviction will be seen for what it is and overturned, and one of the sorriest episodes in the history of our embattled republic will finally draw to a close.