by Michael O’Neill

In a juxtaposition that went from the sublime to the ridiculous, former President Jimmy Carter’s state funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington DC was held on Thursday, 9 January, the day before Donald Trump’s criminal sentencing hearing in New York City. It was the prelude to his second inauguration on Monday, 20 January.

Trump had been convicted on 30 May 2024 by a jury in New York City in a State of New York criminal case, charged with 34 counts of falsification of business records, related to ‘hush money’ transactions. They were intended to ‘hush up’ salacious and politically toxic Trumpian behaviour after the 2016 leak of the notorious 2005 ‘Access Hollywood’ tape threatened to finish off his 2016 presidential campaign against Hilary Clinton.

On 10 January 2025, Judge Juan Merchan, having previously announced his intention to do so, officially ‘sentenced’ Trump as a ‘convicted felon’ to ‘unconditional discharge’, thus without imposing any real sentence or penalty. I can only guess the judge thought this might be the only way to avoid the Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court cancelling the jury’s guilty verdict.

Six months earlier, on 1 July 2024, they had agreed with Trump’s attorneys, in the most serious of the four cases he faced – his involvement in the 6 January 2021 storming of the Capitol in 2021 to prevent the peaceful transfer of power – that he was immune from prosecution for anything that could be described as an ‘official act’ while he was president. They sent the case back to the Washington DC Circuit Court, which had dismissed the immunity claim, for further review. Judge Merchan did not accept the immunity claim.

Above the law

 

In effect, the U.S. Supreme Court, and all the other enablers of Donald Trump, including those who voted for him in his presidential campaigns down through the years, have demonstrated the fallacy of the American legal myth, ‘No one is above the law’. Donald Trump has demonstrated otherwise, in the civil and criminal law systems.

He already acted like a bad king, puffed up with his triumphs in 2016 and 2024, with spurious lawsuits even his nominated federal judges dismissed. He was also a nasty monarch who promoted violence, from his first appearance down a golden staircase at Trump Tower to announce his first candidacy in 2015 to his final campaign, 2021-2024.

He told his MAGA cult base he was their retribution, their revenge, their saviour. His main campaign issues were inflation and the price of eggs, and above all preventing immigration at the southern border, mostly by non-white refugees and asylum-seekers, relatives of American citizens and non-citizens. He falsely presented himself as a populist, a friend of the working class.

From the mid-point of 2024 to the end of the campaign, it became clear he was being funded and influenced by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who impressed Trump with the third of a billion dollars he gave to his campaign, and who epitomises the racism and revenge of his ancestral South African apartheid Boers. At the inauguration ceremony inside the Capitol, Musk and other oligarchs were in the first row of seats behind Trump. At the later parade inside the basketball arena, he thanked the MAGA cult faithful for saving civilization and ended with a Nazi salute.

The party of Trump

 

‘Ridiculous’ and ‘preposterous’ hardly begin to describe a day that ended with Trump pardoning over 1500 Capitol stormers convicted of their attempted violent coup on 6 January 2021. It led to the deaths of at least six people, and serious injuries to 140 police officers. So ended the Republican Party’s phony appropriation of being the party of law and order, the party of democratic conservatism which supports the thin blue line of the police. They are simply the party of Trump.

The next day at the Washington National Cathedral, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, Mariann Edgar Budde, at a national prayer service, appealed to Trump to have mercy on the people likely to be affected by his mass deportation policy. She also spoke of people fleeing wars and persecution in their own countries, LGBT and other vulnerable people. Not unexpectedly, Trump responded to the bishop with hate and insults.

Bishop Mariann will be glad to meet the newly appointed Catholic Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal McElroy from California. The Trump administration appointed a Trumpian as the next ambassador to the Vatican. The Vatican appointed a strong supporter of Pope Francis, and a very well qualified scholar of American politics.

Michael Leddy O’Neill was an assistant public defender.