The moment that was supposed to be the crowning achievement of the left-wing lawfare crusade against Donald Trump ended up being the confirmation of its defeat.
In a Manhattan courtroom on Friday, Judge Juan Merchan formally handed down sentencing to President-elect Trump following his controversial conviction early this year on 34 felony counts related to alleged hush money payments made back in 2016. Just days before Trump is set to be sworn in as the 47th President of the United States, Merchan sentenced Trump to “unconditional discharge,” meaning that he will receive no jail, no probation and no fine.
For the left, this was supposed to be their final moment of triumph. From the moment Biden took office in 2021, every arm of government power, from progressive district attorneys to the Department of Justice, was weaponized to “get Trump.” The Democrat establishment finally got what they wanted when a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty in May – or so they thought.
Just as they had been hoping to be able to do, the corporate media eagerly began branding Trump a “convicted felon.” Liberal pundits confidently predicted that this surely, finally, would be the political end of Donald Trump.
But it quickly became evident that the American people saw right through the charade. Far from collapsing, Trump opened up an even more commanding lead over his Republican primary opponents and surged ahead of Joe Biden in hypothetical general election polls. Opinion surveys found that a majority of the country believed the prosecution and conviction were politically motivated, despite the legacy media and Democrat establishment working overtime to convince the public otherwise.
Most Americans saw Alvin Bragg’s “novel legal theory” for what it was – a cynical scheme to influence the outcome of the upcoming election and, hopefully, throw Democrats’ top political opponent in prison before he could beat them again at the ballot box.
Conservative law professor Jonathan Turley sums up Bragg’s “theory” nicely: “It is a case based on a non-crime. Bragg took a long-dead misdemeanor and zapped it back into life with a novel and unfounded theory. By using federal violations that were never charged, let alone tried, Bragg turned a misdemeanor into dozens of felonies and essentially tried Trump for federal offenses.”
Legal scholars on both sides of the political aisle always acknowledged that Bragg’s theory was dubious, if not downright bogus. In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Jed Shugerman, a law professor at Boston University, called Bragg’s prosecution “a legal embarrassment” and “a historic mistake.”
In the end it was a mistake, an enormous strategic mistake on Democrats’ part. Trump won back the White House in decisive fashion, and the American people made clear that, no matter what a Manhattan jury says, they do not view Trump as the criminal the left has so desperately tried to make him out to be. The smear campaign failed.
However, in one last gasp of the anti-Trump lawfare crusade, it was announced that sentencing in the case would take place on January 10 – one last chance to humiliate Trump. But like everything else in this saga, it once again backfired on the left-wing forces who ginned up the case in the first place.
In a telling sign of just how demoralized the left is following Trump’s victory, the outrage from conservatives that the sentencing was moving forward – and that a conservative Supreme Court allowed it – far outweighed liberal gloating. Fox News reported that outside the court room the only demonstrators were pro-Trump – a stark shift from earlier in the case when liberal protesters also frequently waited outside the building.
As Outkick founder Clay Travis put it on X, “Imagine you spent nine years of your life begging for Donald Trump to be prosecuted & after nine years you finally got your trial & conviction & then at the sentencing they gave no punishment at all & ended the case. How wrecked is your world?”
Voices like sports commentator Stephen A. Smith, no fan of Trump, exploded over the futility of the act. “This is the kind of stuff that just validates assertions about stuff being politicized,” Smith said. “What is the purpose of this? Is he going to jail? Gonna get a fine?”
The trial also provided yet another platform for Trump to eviscerate the political nature of the case and address Judge Merchan directly. “The people of the country understood what this was about, and I won by a landslide,” Trump, who was attending the hearing virtually from Florida, said. “This has been a weaponization of government. I’d just like to exclaim that I was treated very unfairly.” The full video of Trump’s address to the court has gone viral on social media, once again showing how thoroughly the left’s lawfare campaign failed.
Ultimately it was not Trump, but the Democrat establishment, liberal media, and, unfortunately, the New York legal system that were damaged by this shameful incident. The only silver lining is that, perhaps, the finality of Trump’s victory means such an error will never be repeated.
Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
