MAGA bullying pays off.
That’s what we may have just learned, now that the judge in Donald Trump’s hush-money case in Manhattan announced Friday that he will delay Trump’s sentencing until well after the presidential election. Judge Juan Merchan ruled that the sentencing for Trump’s 34 felony convictions will be handed down not on September 18—the original date he had set—but on November 26, three weeks after the voting concludes.
For years now, as Trump has faced accountability for an extraordinary string of misdeeds, his strategy has been to attack all efforts to apply the law to him as inherently illegitimate. The intent has been to cow judges and other administrators of justice into treating Trump differently from other ordinary defendants, lest they face up-is-down accusations of politicizing the law against him. Merchan—who has faced intense personal attacks from Trump—has generally not been cowed into granting him special treatment, insisting throughout that the law must be applied to him just as it is to everyone else.
But now, with this delay, this principle might have hit a limit. Trump and his MAGA allies might reasonably conclude that their strategy—responding to every hint of an effort to hold him accountable to the same laws the rest of us must follow with attacks and smears designed to delegitimize the justice system itself—has been rewarded.
The delay came after Trump and his lawyers demanded it. Last month, they argued that holding off would safeguard the “integrity” of the proceedings. They also hinted that a sentencing before the election would smack of “election interference,” suggesting that it would........