MAGA bullying pays off.
That’s what we may have just learned, now that the judge in Donald Trump’s hush-money case in Manhattan announced Friday that he will delay Trump’s sentencing until well after the presidential election. Judge Juan Merchan ruled that the sentencing for Trump’s 34 felony convictions will be handed down not on September 18—the original date he had set—but on November 26, three weeks after the voting concludes.
For years now, as Trump has faced accountability for an extraordinary string of misdeeds, his strategy has been to attack all efforts to apply the law to him as inherently illegitimate. The intent has been to cow judges and other administrators of justice into treating Trump differently from other ordinary defendants, lest they face up-is-down accusations of politicizing the law against him. Merchan—who has faced intense personal attacks from Trump—has generally not been cowed into granting him special treatment, insisting throughout that the law must be applied to him just as it is to everyone else.
But now, with this delay, this principle might have hit a limit. Trump and his MAGA allies might reasonably conclude that their strategy—responding to every hint of an effort to hold him accountable to the same laws the rest of us must follow with attacks and smears designed to delegitimize the justice system itself—has been rewarded.
The delay came after Trump and his lawyers demanded it. Last month, they argued that holding off would safeguard the “integrity” of the proceedings. They also hinted that a sentencing before the election would smack of “election interference,” suggesting that it would inevitably be sneakily designed to influence voters.
Of course, precisely the opposite is true: Handing the sentence down in late September—per Merchan’s original timetable—would have been tantamount to refraining from letting electoral considerations taint Trump’s sentencing.
For one thing, a late September sentencing would have been more in line with what typical defendants in that courtroom face, according to Karen Agnifilo, a former chief assistant district attorney in Manhattan. She says non-imprisoned defendants like Trump routinely get sentenced some 30 to 60 days after conviction, which in Trump’s case came on May 31.
“This is definitely out of the ordinary,” Agnifilo told me of the delay of sentencing until late November, which will now come around six months after Trump’s conviction.
What’s more, recall that Trump was already granted a previous sentencing delay. Indeed, some liberals argued just after the conviction that he should be sentenced promptly, precisely because delaying it late into election season would expose it to accusations of politicization. Now not only has that happened, but those accusations have also helped grant Trump what he wants a second time.
In his order explaining his decision, Merchan wrote that “the public’s confidence in the integrity of our judicial system” will be served by ensuring that the verdict against Trump is not “diluted by the enormity of the upcoming presidential election.” In other words, a preelection sentencing might lead the public to view the verdict and the sentencing as deeply suspect.
But why would the public reach such a conclusion? Might it be because Trump and his allies have spent years declaring that any application of the law to him is inherently corrupt?
To be fair, Merchan faced a real dilemma here without easy answers. But it’s a dilemma that Trump-MAGA corruption created. To grasp the deep perversity of this situation, read this description in The New York Times of the choice before Merchan:
A delay would … reward the stalling tactics Mr. Trump has deployed throughout the case, and feed the very impression the judge has labored to dispel—that the former president is above the law.
Yet if Justice Merchan, a moderate Democrat who was once a registered Republican, imposes a sentence just seven weeks before Election Day, Mr. Trump will no doubt accuse him of trying to tip the campaign in favor of [Kamala] Harris.
Notice that the latter consideration—that a September sentencing would trigger accusations that the judge is boosting Harris—is based on something Trump would manufacture out of nothing. Trump would claim that is the case, backed up by a massive right-wing media propaganda network, even though there is not one shred of evidence anywhere to support it. Merchan delayed the sentencing apparently to avoid giving Trump the mere opportunity to create the false impression that the system is rigged against him.
“This is a court explicitly taking the election and political considerations into account in order to grant Trump a reprieve,” legal scholar Matthew Seligman told me. Paradoxically, Seligman said, following Merchan’s original sentencing timetable would have actually constituted “the apolitical administration of justice.”
All this also rewards Trump’s strategy of employing high-priced elite lawyers and their gamesmanship to delay his multiple criminal trials on many fronts. Unfortunately, the legal system has not handled that too well. Trump’s criminal trials for stealing state secrets and conspiring to overthrow American democracy with mob violence have—with an assist from a corrupt federal judge in Florida and from the Supreme Court that Trump helped appoint—also been delayed until after the election.
True, Trump was convicted for using fraud to cover up payoffs designed to hide his affair from the 2016 American electorate, in a display of extraordinary rectitude and courage by a jury of ordinary Americans. But he has now secured a delay that few typical defendants could achieve, says legal commentator Norman Eisen: “It’s a tremendous disservice to ordinary criminal defendants, particularly poor, brown, and Black ones, who don’t have these kinds of resources.”
All this is probably a political gift to Trump, because a sentencing would have reminded voters of his criminality and profoundly low character. However, it’s possible a September sentencing might have helped Trump play the martyr to his base, perhaps keeping them energized through a rough patch in his campaign. Harris might now be able to argue: Do you really want to elect a convicted felon who may be on his way to jail before Inauguration Day?
We can’t be sure how the politics of all this would have played if Trump had faced justice this month. But we do know this: Yet another time, the liberal legal project has not acquitted itself all that well in the face of Trump’s bullying and lawlessness, and MAGA’s arsonist tactics very well may, to some extent or other, have paid off for him once again.
