BREAKING: Trump’s Sentence Is Revealed

President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced in his hush money trial on Friday, with Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan saying it’s in the “public interest” that the Republican receive a punishment, at least on paper, for his crimes.

Trump, appearing remotely on a video screen, sat quietly next to one of his lawyers and listened intently as Merchan reviewed the facts of the case and how a jury arrived at the decision to convict him on 34 felony counts of concealing a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels. On a call in court, Trump was informed by Merchan that he would be given an “unconditional discharge” sentence, effectively negating any consequence he may have received based on the conviction. He is the first former president to be convicted of a felony crime, and he will be the first to take office with that designation when he is sworn in next week. On MSNBC, commentators noted that Merchan reflected it would be impossible for Trump to “follow through and be a president” if he had the specter of a criminal sentence hanging over his head, something that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg at one point requested when he asked Merchan to stay the sentencing until after Trump finished his second term.

Liberals cheered the fact that the ruling “saddles” President-elect Trump with his felony conviction, while other legal observers noted that Friday’s ruling speeds up the process by which he may appeal the jury’s decision. On Thursda,y the U.S. Supreme Court declined to pause the proceedings, ruling in a split 5-4 majority that Trump had not made his case that he should be immune from the charges against him, but the majority of justices also wrote suggesting that Trump had a strong case for pursuing his appeal. “Normally, a felony sentence, you’d be checking in with a probation department, you’d be subject to drug and alcohol testing, you’d be subject to fines,” said Adam Pollock, a former New York assistant attorney general. “Here, an unconditional discharge is really done: You live with this stigma of the felony, and you do have certain collateral consequences.”

He explained: “I believe Trump had a gun permit, the NYPD has not rescinded his gun permit… But basically, he is done, yet he lives as a felony. He goes into office as a convicted felon.” Whether Trump “carries that stigma” for long remains to be seen; the president-elect has vowed to pursue all appeals in the case. “I never falsified business records. It is a fake, made up charge,” the Republican president-elect wrote on his Truth Social platform last week, NBC Chicago reported.

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