Between Trump’s sentencing, Biden claiming he could win the election, and the release of the Special Counsel report, it’s like we’re stuck in a time loop, repeating the same thing and expecting a difficult result, or progressives are hoping for a time machine to go back and replay events to generate a different result.
As President Donald Trump readies himself to return to the White House last week after reaching the climax of the greatest, most improbably political story ever told, Democrats and their enablers in the mainstream media have placed all their hopes and dreams on the sudden invention of time travel, seeking to return to early last year or some other point and achieve a different result. How else can you explain a trifecta of recent non-events that are essentially attempts to replay an election that has already happened, as though a different outcome might be achieved simply by wishing it was so? First, Judge Juan Merchan formally sentenced President Trump in the New York “hush money” case by issuing no sentence at all via an unconditional discharge. Though the decision was telegraphed well in advance and was a nakedly political attempt to force a supposed sentence prior to the inauguration, when the President would be beyond a state judge’s reach, the venerable news organization, Reuters, was forced to rely on old grade school threats to describe the maneuver, “Although Trump will avoid jail, fines and probation, Merchan’s sentence of unconditional discharge puts Trump’s May 2024 conviction by a jury on his permanent record.” Surely, that will teach him and all of his supporters. His permanent record! As New York law puts it, a judge “may impose a sentence of unconditional discharge … if the court, having regard to the nature and circumstances of the offense and to the history, character and condition of the defendant, is of the opinion that neither the public interest nor the ends of justice would be served by a sentence of imprisonment and that probation supervision is not appropriate.” Judge Merchan himself described his reasoning for sentencing a supposedly convicted perpetrator to a non-sentence prior to the hearing this, “the Court, having regard to the nature and circumstances of the offense and to the history, character and condition of the defendant, is of the opinion that neither the public interest nor the ends of justice would be served by a sentence of imprisonment and that probation supervision is not appropriate,” and “no proper purpose would be served by imposing any condition upon the defendant’s release.” In his final ruling, he noted, “The considerable, indeed extraordinary, legal protection afforded by the office of the chief executive is a factor that overrides all others. Despite the extraordinary breadth of those protections, one power they do not provide is the power to erase jury verdicts.”
In other words, the actual conviction occurred last May, the sentencing event itself means nothing now, the conviction itself might well be overturned on appeal, and President Trump will retake the oath of office next week as planned. Still, much of the mainstream media was gleefully obsessed with the significance. The New York Times headlined it, “The President-Elect Is a Felon, but His Sentence Carries No Penalty” and opined with no irony considering they’d been calling the President-elect a felon for months, “As a Felon, Trump Upends How Americans View the Presidency. The Tennessean noted, “Trump is a convicted felon, but he got off scot-free. It’s a travesty.” They published a letter to the editor, “Once again, Donald Trump will not be held accountable for his crimes. He has a sterling record, never paying a price for wrongdoing. The slap on his wrist by the judge makes a mockery of the jury that found him guilty on 34 counts. I expected a fine.” While I am certain Trump, sitting on a multi-billion dollar fortune would be terrorized by a fine, MSNBC’s “The Beat with Ari” claimed “‘The truth matters’: Trump sentenced as a felon after failing to outrun secrets.” PBS NewsHour ran an entire segment on “How Trump avoided punishment for his felony convictions.” Amna Nawaz asked William Brangham, “How did Judge Juan Merchan explain his rationale for what some are calling a lenient, lenient sentence?” Mr. Brangham replied, “I mean, Amna, on one hand, this wasn’t a surprise. The judge had telegraphed this in a memo earlier. But, yes, this is a relatively rare situation, to have a defendant convicted of 34 felony convictions and face no jail time, no penalties, no fines, no probation. Merchan, in describing today, said that, on one hand, this was a trial that was very ordinary. It unfolded in an ordinary way. Jury was selected. Judges — I mean, the lawyers gave their arguments. Witnesses were heard. A verdict was reached. But, he said, because of the defendant, this was an extraordinary trial, and sentencing him would be the same. Merchan said that, if Donald Trump had been a regular citizen, a regular defendant, that he would have likely have faced much harsher punishment for those crimes.” While some of this might well be true, all of it from the conviction to the potential sentencing, was debated endlessly during the election. Rehashing it now changes nothing, and yet this is precisely what none other than President Joe Biden did himself later that same day in a different line of thought, leading to the second leg in the trifecta.
This time, the Commander in Chief bizarrely reiterated that he could’ve won the election, or even more ridiculously, Vice President Kamala Harris, who actually lost the election could’ve somehow won it. During a news conference at the White House, a reporter asked if he regretted his “decision to run for reelection” in the first place or thought that the candidate switch-up “made it easier” for President-elect Trump. “I don’t think so,” President Biden responded. “I think I would have beaten Trump, could have beaten Trump. And I think Kamala could have beaten Trump and would have beaten Trump. It wasn’t about … I thought it was important to unify the party.” “When the party was worried about whether or not I was gonna be able to move, even though I thought I could win again, I thought it was better to unify the party,” he added in what amounts to a huge non sequitur. The President is certainly entitled to his opinion, but the end result remains a party looking backwards, rather pathetically insisting that some other reality would have occurred if only something else happened. Perhaps, the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on President Trump’s allegedly illegal attempts to overturn the results of the election illustrates this better than anything else. CNN began their coverage by uncritically claiming “The evidence was there to convict Donald Trump,” as though prosecutors frequently charge supposed perpetrators while believing the opposite and the contents of this supposedly explosive report weren’t almost all included in the original indictment, meaning there’s nothing new here. “That’s the simple and powerful conclusion from former special counsel Jack Smith in his final report on Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election culminating in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol,” they continued. “Smith’s 137-page report, released overnight less than one week before Trump is sworn in for a second term as president, is a full-throated justification of his investigation and defense against his myriad critics.” Of course, Special Counsel Smith’s failure to achieve a conviction requires an explanation and in this case, it was the Supreme Court that served a “major roadblock” in CNN’s phrasing.
“Because of the unprecedented facts and the variety of legal issues that would be litigated in this case, the Office was aware that the case would involve litigation risks, as would any case of this scope and complexity,” he wrote. “However, after an exhaustive and detailed review of the law, the Office concluded that the charges were well supported and would survive any legal challenges absent a change in the law as it existed at the time of indictment,” he added. CNN helpfully continued to described why this didn’t happen as planned, forgoing that the reality it wouldn’t happen as planned was known to many who didn’t suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, “But the law changed. Slowly. And in Trump’s favor,” they assert without evidence when the law is the same as it always has been and it was the Special Counsel himself who pursued rather novel interpretations. “Smith had attempted to speed things up, asking the Supreme Court in December 2023 to jump in and consider the presidential immunity question. The court, however, wasn’t in a hurry. It declined the request, waited for an appeals court ruling (which Trump lost) and didn’t hear oral arguments in the case until April,” they explained without bothering to mention that this was the usual process and it was only Special Counsel Smith who tried to circumvent it for political reasons, namely an attempt to secure a conviction before the election just like Judge Merchan. Incredibly, CNN did find time amid all of this historical rewriting and excuse-making to accuse the Supreme Court Justices of playing politics, “When the court’s conservative majority said in July that presidents enjoyed wide immunity for their official actions in the White House, it wasn’t until August that the special counsel was able to try again with a superseding indictment that limited the evidence Smith could use. Unsaid by Smith: Three of the justices in the 6-3 majority were appointed by Trump during the same term for which he now enjoyed immunity.”
To be sure, CNN did allude to the futile purpose of this entire episode earlier in the article, reiterating my opening point. “As with all of the legal battles Trump won over the past couple of years, it’s part of the ultimate ‘what if?’ question of the 2024 election.” Except that it most clearly isn’t. In all three of these instances, we have learned nothing new. President Trump was long convicted and charged, and President Biden has been delusional about his abilities for some time now, perhaps his entire career. It’s like we’re stuck in a time loop, repeating the same thing and expecting a difficult result, or progressives are hoping for a time machine to go back and replay events to generate a different result. As a Republican, this is probably a good thing. The more Democrats remain stuck in the past and refuse to learn the lessons of the election, the more likely we are to succeed. As an American, however, it’s depressing watching a large percentage of the country celebrate purely pyrrhic victories that mean nothing to anyone who’s not themselves and simply refuse to move forward. I’m reminded of a great episode of Family Ties, where Alex P. Keaton considers what he would do with a time machine. His first thought: I can go back and warn Nixon about the tapes. Fortunately or unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way, whatever we may wish, and it borders on the pathetic to continue thinking otherwise.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 