When Donald Trump called on a judge Tuesday to throw out his New York hush-money conviction, it was perhaps less about expunging his record than rewriting the history books. After all, the guilty verdict rendered this spring by a jury of his peers isn’t going to have much of a tangible impact on his life: It didn’t stop him from winning reelection over Kamala Harris—whose campaign emphasized his status as a felon—and that victory has all but ensured he will never face jail time on his 34 counts. In fact, the most concrete, lasting impact of that and the other cases against him—which have also been extinguished by his win last month—will likely be the Supreme Court decision that arose from one of them, imbuing the office he’ll soon occupy with the power to commit any crimes deemed part of his “official” duties.
But while he has somehow managed to once again escape accountability, he still bears the ignominious distinction as the first and only United States president to be tried and convicted of felonies. It’s a reminder that no matter how entrenched his brand of politics has become, there will always be something aberrant about him personally. And it is that blemish he is now seeking to remove as his lawyers ask Judge Juan Merchan to dismiss the case in whole.
Citing President Joe Biden’s sweeping pardon of his son—in which the president argued that Hunter Biden was a victim of “selective” prosecution—Trump’s attorneys said Tuesday that the president-elect’s “case should never have been brought” by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and must now be thrown out. “President Biden argued that ‘raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.’ These comments amounted to an extraordinary condemnation of President Biden’s own DOJ,” Trump’s team said in the filing.
Bragg, they claimed, “has engaged in ‘precisely the type of political theater’ that President Biden has condemned.”
It was predictable that Trump would seek to capitalize on Biden’s perhaps understandable but deeply hypocritical move to protect his son—and that he would use it both to advance a profoundly cynical view of politics and legitimize his own unscrupulous conduct. But just how quickly Trump pounced on it is telling: He’s long maintained not only that he’s a victim of partisan persecution, but that the impropriety his foes decry is actually not all that bad or different than what anyone else does. With Biden’s pardon, he finally saw something to point to as proof.
Which is dishonest, of course. The Hunter Biden pardon was unprincipled and self-serving, but it is neither evidence that all Trump’s opponents are dishonest nor is it equivalent to the grand corruption and shameless immorality that has characterized his own public life. Hunter Biden—long a target of bad-faith Republicans and soon, perhaps, of a MAGA-fied Justice Department—was found guilty of lying to obtain a firearm and evading taxes he later paid. Trump, by contrast, was convicted of a hush-money scheme and charged with other felonies, including trying to overturn a free and fair election and mishandling classified documents after leaving office. Trump and Hunter Biden’s situations are not the same. But Trump—in suggesting he and his old rival’s son were both targeted by a politicized legal system—is trying to make it seem like he’s not really outside the norm.
It’s important to resist Trump’s efforts at revision.
We must remember that Trump was able to cast himself as a self-made success story because he escaped the consequences of his misdeeds as a businessman. And until being found liable for sexual abuse against writer E. Jean Carroll last year, he largely avoided accountability for his personal conduct, allowing him to play an upstanding family man, albeit unconvincingly. The same rules applied while he was president: The anticlimactic end of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, and then-loyal Attorney General William Barr’s warping of the report, has made it possible for him to claim the whole probe—which resulted in multiple convictions and uncovered suspect conduct by his campaign—was a “hoax” that amounted to nothing.
The congressional inquiries Democrats launched into his conflicts of interest and other shady conduct while in office? They’ve mostly been forgotten. Trump’s two impeachments? He was never convicted because Republicans protected him, many of them knowing better and hoping he’d simply go away. Trump has succeeded in downplaying, in the American public’s short political memory, the many offenses that brought his impeachments about in the first place. Even after he incited an insurrection at the Capitol, his allies in that very building helped him avoid answering for what he’d done—and, in so doing, rehabilitated his political viability.
All in all, the 91 charges he’d eventually face would hardly cover the unchecked mischief he’d engaged in throughout his life. However, they were, at least for some time, an overdue acknowledgment of his incorrigible delinquency. Eventually, his case in Georgia would be derailed by the indiscretion of his prosecutor: Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, whose romantic relationship with a member of her team was seized on by Trump’s attorneys. Another, the classified documents case brought by special counsel Jack Smith, would be torpedoed by Judge Aileen Cannon—one of Trump’s own appointees. And Smith’s other case—his banner prosecution, over efforts to subvert the 2020 election—would be delayed until rendered moot by Trump’s 2024 triumph, but not before it brought about a Supreme Court ruling that effectively put presidents “above the law,” as Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in writing for the three-member liberal minority.
That leaves Trump’s conviction in the Stormy Daniels case, the first and what was once regarded as the least consequential to be brought against him. It’s become the last standing accounting of his misconduct—and perhaps the last tether, for some time, to the convention that the rules really do matter and apply to everyone.
This, of course, has always a bit of a fantasy. The system does treat Hunter Biden “differently,” in roughly the same way it treated Trump differently even before he entered politics: Were their transgressions more apparent than they would be if they were anonymous? Maybe. But it’s certain that their place in society also made them far more likely to walk away from any consequences they might face for them. There’s a two-tiered justice system, alright. But it simply favors the rarified few—rather than, as Trump suggests, one party over another.
