This morning, the president-elect was sentenced for his 34-count conviction on business fraud and other New York state felonies in connection with silencing a porn actress about their affair before the 2016 election. But despite his crimes, Donald Trump received no punishment.

It would be hard for a novelist to imagine a more telling scene in the larger story of our moment in which a privileged old man can’t say enough to be racist, can’t break enough laws to be incarcerated, can’t fail enough to be a failure and can’t be stupid enough to be stupid. 

Van Lathan, Jr., wasn’t talking about the fact that impunity for pretty much everything is the point of Trump, but he may as well have been when he said in June that he’s “the whitest white man we’ve ever seen.”

With this sentencing, it’s official. Trump will be the first president to be a criminal president. This, of course, is only a minor accounting. Trump has been, in fact, a deviant and devious criminal mind for most of his adult life. He enriched himself when he was president the first time. He stole government secrets. He tried overthrowing an election. 

With his third campaign, he and his allies, including a murder of billionaires and half a dozen justices on the US Supreme Court, set out to turn the republic against not only itself but against the rule of law. 

They succeeded. 

Civil institutions could not hold him accountable. The media failed. The law failed. The courts failed. The American people failed. Some still like to say no one is above the law, but it all sounds quaint to me.

The insurrection of January 6, 2021, has been institutionalized. It is now the establishment. It is now “the way things are.” Trump and his allies have achieved what historical figures like Joseph McCarthy, Robert Welch and George Wallace could only dream of: the restoration of “natural order of things” in America. Heads – I win. Tails – you lose.

Some deny it. They insist on the existence of some kind of immutable law, like the force of gravity, that will compel Trump to be presidential. 

“There is one thing about being president-elect: You become president. And then you’re in charge. You’re responsible. You have to govern,” William Kristol said. “Beginning January 20, it will be Trump’s show. From the most trivial things to the most weighty, the power will emanate from and the buck will stop at Trump’s Oval Office.”

Again, quaint.

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The corruption of the J6 insurgency is now so deeply entrenched that its founding father is no longer alone in reveling in the fact that he’s the exception to every rule, norm and law. Trump can call up Justice Samuel Alito in the hope that the highest court in the land would stop his New York sentencing and Alito didn’t even deny that it happened. 

Prior to the 2024 presidential election, one could credibly claim, as CNN’s Kaitlin Collins did, that such a thing was “almost unheard of.” By the end of the next four years, the criminal president and a murder of billionaires will have broken so many laws and stolen so many tax dollars that calling up a justice will seem rather minor by comparison.

But with the transformation of the existing order, Trump can do much more than loot the public till. He can control reality. He already has a vast rightwing media apparatus at his disposal. With it, he can create “facts” by merely speaking the words. Soon, though, he will also have control of public data, like rates of inflation. No one can stop a criminal president from “cooking the books,” as Paul Krugman said, turning the federal government into the world’s largest organ of disinformation.

I don’t think anyone really knows, or can even imagine, how much damage Trump can do by controlling not only what we know to be true but also how we think by dint of controlling what we know to be true. And I think, in the absence of knowing just how bad it’s going to be, some are already reverting back to the old ways of thinking, as if Trump did not, with this third campaign, rewrite the rules in his favor.

I have in mind Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman who co-chaired the committee that investigated the J6 insurrection. She was recently awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal for her service. In response, Trump called her and other panelists “dishonest thugs.” 

Cheney responded: 

“Donald, this is not the Soviet Union. You can’t change the truth and you cannot silence us. Remember all your lies about the voting machines, the election workers, your countless allegations of fraud that never happened? … Remember how you sent a mob to our Capitol and then watched the violence on television and refused for hours to instruct the mob to leave? Remember how your former vice president prevented you from overturning our republic? We remember. And now, as you take office again, the American people need to reject your latest malicious falsehoods and stand as the guardrails of our constitutional republic — to protect the America we love from you.”

I put those words in bold, because I don’t know how anyone can say with a straight face that Trump can’t change the truth. I don’t know how anyone can say he can’t silence his enemies. He and his allies have for months been talking about the J6 insurrection as if it were a day of peace and love and harmony, not a bloody mutiny. Kash Patel, his pick to be head of the FBI, has already vowed to investigate anyone who helped Joe Biden “steal the election,” including members of the media who “lied.” Congressional Republicans are already trying to rewrite history so that the insurrection was an instance of justice denied.

In the meantime, neutral observers in the press, who might reasonably be expected to expose such corruption, can’t be trusted to, because they are terrified of Trump or because their bosses don’t like it when they hold him to the same moral standard that they hold Democrats to. Some Democrats, meanwhile, are playing along, acting like Trump is totally normal, or they’re joining efforts to punch down on society’s most vulnerable in order to prove they’re one of the good ones.

True, this is not the Soviet Union, but we are seeing the makings of something very much like the old totalitarian regime, in which the supreme leader has vast powers to control individuals with minimal responsibility to the people on account of the media, the law, the courts and the people having given him those same vast powers. 

“The American people need to reject your latest malicious falsehoods and stand as the guardrails of our constitutional republic,” Cheney said, as if the American people did not put a criminal in charge. 

It may yet be possible to “protect the America we love” from Trump, but who’s going to “protect the America we love” from the people?