Judge delays Trump sentencing until after election
TFG has gotten away with basically everything for his entire life so why stop now?
The judge overseeing Donald J. Trump’s criminal case in Manhattan postponed his sentencing until after Election Day, a significant victory for the former president as he seeks to overturn his conviction and win back the White House.
In a ruling on Friday, the judge, Juan M. Merchan, cited the “unique time frame this matter currently finds itself in” and rescheduled the sentencing for Nov. 26. He had previously planned to hand down Mr. Trump’s punishment on Sept. 18, just seven weeks before Election Day, when Mr. Trump will face off against Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency.
“This is not a decision this court makes lightly but it is the decision which in this court’s view, best advances the interests of justice,” Justice Merchan wrote in the four-page decision, which noted that “this matter is one that stands alone, in a unique place in this nation’s history.”
While the decision will avert a courtroom spectacle in the campaign’s final stretch, the delay itself could still affect the election, keeping voters in the dark about whether the Republican presidential nominee will eventually spend time behind bars.
Imagine reading that final graph in the Before Time.
The problem, or a problem, is that there’s no way to make a decision that doesn’t affect the election. Giving Trump special consideration as a defendant because he’s running for president seems like an unwarranted bonus for committing 34 felonies.
This whole situation is completely insane, to the point where today is one of those days where I feel I’m being gaslighted by reality.
FWIW at this point I have no sense at all of who is more likely to win in November.
Which is just amazing and terrifying. That Harris is up by about three nationally just means the race is a true tossup in the swing states which actually decide it. How crazy is it that there’s about a 99% chance that Harris is going to get more votes than Trump but the race is a coin flip?
What’s discouraging to me is that the Dems replaced a weak candidate, although a very good president, with a vastly better candidate. Biden over the past four years has grown far more visibly old and frail, and it was becoming increasingly evident he simply wasn’t capable of carrying out a full campaign, AND that a critical percentage of voters considered his age and frailty more or less disqualifying. This was a ridiculous belief, especially under the circumstances, but it wasn’t going to go away.. So there was a certain rationale for why Trump might well win — the Dems were stuck with a strikingly bad candidate from the standpoint of pure electoral politics (Again I think Biden has been a very good president on the whole. This is about his ability to win the 2024 election which is largely unrelated to that unfortunately).
Well now they’ve replaced a strikingly bad candidate with a perfectly adequate candidate in all the conventional ways, and the race between her and a demented grifting fascist criminal is a genuine tossup.
What a world.