TRUMP SENTENCING: A BS CONCLUSION TO A BS CASE. President-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated two weeks from Monday, on Jan. 20. For now, his days in Mar-a-Lago are filled with getting ready to be president — meetings with aides, nominees, and world leaders. (The Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, was there over the weekend.) Even when he plays golf, he is preparing — on Friday, he called the Capitol from the course to strong-arm two Republican lawmakers who didn’t want to vote for Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) to be speaker of the House.

This Friday, though, Trump will have to put aside his work to attend, either in person or virtually, his sentencing in the Manhattan criminal prosecution in which he was convicted of falsifying business records. The case, brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, was widely viewed as the weakest of the four criminal cases brought against Trump by elected Democratic prosecutors and the Biden administration. For one thing, the charges, questionable as they were, were misdemeanors, past the statute of limitations, which Bragg inflated into felonies by alleging that Trump falsified records in a plot to steal the 2016 presidential election, which Bragg did not have the authority to police.

Even anti-Trump commentators were baffled by the case. “When Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg first brought charges against Donald Trump in March 2023, the legal theory behind the indictment remained remarkably unclear,” Quinta Jurecic, an editor of the journal Lawfare, from the liberal Brookings Institution, wrote last April. “Now, a year later, with the trial finally underway … the charges........

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