Political theorist explains why Trump’s sentencing rant is so 'ominous'

06 January

On Friday, January 3, Justice Juan Merchan denied President-elect Donald Trump's request to dismiss Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr.'s hush money/falsified business records case. And he has set the following Friday, January 10, as the sentencing date.

However, Merchan said that "a sentence of an unconditional discharge appears to be the most viable solution," which means that the conviction would stand but Trump will not face jail time, a fine or probation. And the sentencing will not interfere with Trump's inauguration ten days later on January 20.

In May, a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty on 34 criminal counts. Trump faced criminal indictments in three other cases as well, but Bragg's case was the only one that went to trial.

Trump is furious that Merchan wants to proceed with the sentencing — even if it is only an "unconditional discharge." In a social media post, Trump wrote, "There has never been a president so evilly and illegally treated as I."

Political theorist Adam Gurri explained why he finds that reaction so troubling during an appearance on The New Republic's podcast. Host Greg Sargent described Trump's reaction as "ominous," and Gurri didn't disagree.

Gurri told host Sargent, "First and foremost, this is going to be his pretext for going after his own opponents: prominent Democrats, but also, Republicans that aligned against him like Liz Cheney. These are all things that he's fairly openly promised throughout the campaign. That's my number one concern. Otherwise, depending on sentencing, we'll see an early confrontation between the Trump Administration and the legal system to the extent to which he can just ignore it — the extent to which he weaponizes it against, perhaps, state judges themselves."

Gurri warns that Trump will have "a lot of tools at this disposal" after he returns to the White House in two weeks.

"You have someone like Kash Patel at the FBI," Gurri told Sargent. "And one potential is suddenly there are corruption investigations into judges that have ruled on the cases against him. Things like that, where even if he doesn't succeed — even if the courts eventually throw it out — it can be enough to scare any of the judges in any of the cases that have been brought against him. In the long term, once they've tested how to scare judges and intimidate judges, judges are one of the number-one impediments to the many policies that he has promised to enact."

Gurri pointed out that dictators and authoritarians don't necessarily follow the far-right totalitarian models of Nazi Germany on the far right or the Soviet Union on the far left. And he cites Trump's more extreme administration nominees as a disturbing sign.

Gurri told Sargent, "There's different varieties of dictatorship. One of the most common ones is the personalist dictator who doesn't run a government that is all powerful the way a totalitarian one is but manages to make sure that such government, as there is, is completely in the thrall of this one person…. Essentially, unless a GOP-controlled Senate actually pushes back on a significant number of these nominations, we're going to get people who are loyal but not competent, and loyal but not moral."

Listen to the full New Republic podcast at this link or read the transcript here.

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