Donald Trump Should Go to Prison
“Trump said after the verdict that the New York State court that convicted him was ‘rigged.’ That means it wasn’t rigged in his favor.”
By Steve Wishnia
Donald Trump should go to prison.
Much of the punditry following his conviction on 34 Class E felony charges on May 30 quoted supposed “experts” saying he’s unlikely to get jail time, as he’s 77 years old, a first offender, and E felonies are the least serious felonies in the New York State penal code. Oh, and it might be politically divisive.
Nonsense. Class E felonies are crimes that the New York State Legislature deemed serious enough to deserve one to four years in prison. They include causing serious injury to someone while driving drunk; intimidating a victim or witness, either by threatening violence or damaging their property; second-offense assault on a child younger than 11 with a dangerous object; grand larceny (stealing more than $1,000 worth of goods); paying a 13- or 14-year-old for sex; and unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, the offense accused car thieves often plea-bargain down to.
Or, in Trump’s case, penal code section 175.10, falsifying business records in the first degree. That rises from a misdemeanor to a felony when the “intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.”
His scheme involved somewhere between $130,000 and $400,000, depending on what you count. That’s not shoplifting toothpaste.
The deeper issue is that the criminal-justice system generally winks at white-collar crime. If you skip out on a $12 check for scrambled eggs and coffee at a diner, that’s theft of service, a Class A misdemeanor. If you refuse to pay a worker $1,200 in wages, that’s generally considered a civil offense.
A recent exception was the owner of the Grimaldi’s pizza chain and its Manhattan store manager, accused of stealing more than $32,000 in pay from 18 workers. They pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor attempted-fraud charge, and on May 29 were sentenced—merely to pay the workers what they were owed.
Trump might be a first offender, but he’s a career criminal. He’s got a long history of cheating workers. He stiffed so many contractors that getting paid much less than the agreed price got nicknamed “the Trump discount.” (He could afford to hire lawyers for longer.) In 2016, USA Today reported that the Labor Department had cited his companies 24 times since 2005 for paying less than minimum wage or not paying overtime rates. He’d also settled out of court with servers at his Miami golf resort who hadn’t been paid overtime, and with bartenders and waiters in California whose tips had been pocketed.
White-collar crime is often minimized because it’s “not violent,” and the perpetrators are respectable citizens, meaning white guys who wear suits and own homes in affluent areas, not black guys in raggedy sweatpants who got brought to court in a van from the Brooklyn House of Detention. But it is violent.
When a nursing-home resident dies from a fall or a lethal skin infection because the owners spent money paying inflated rent to a shell company in their wives’ names instead of hiring enough staff to walk the patients to the toilet, that is somewhere between negligent homicide and “depraved indifference to human life” murder for profit. When a private-equity firm buys a chain of stores with borrowed money, dumps all the debt on the company, and vampires off fat fees for themselves, until the business goes bankrupt and its workers lose their jobs and pensions, that’s just a more sophisticated version of what the Mafia would call a “bust-out scheme.”
Trump said after the verdict that the New York State court that convicted him was “rigged.” That means it wasn’t rigged in his favor, as the courts handling the other indictments he’s facing increasingly seem to be.
Those charges might be more serious than the financial-records fraud he was convicted of, but his trial on federal charges of purloining cartons full of top-secret documents while he was leaving the White House in 2021 has been stalled for months by a judge he appointed. And the federal and Georgia charges that he tried to nullify the results of the 2020 election are now mired in the Supreme Court, which is considering the ludicrous idea that he should be immune from prosecution for “official acts” as President.
The only thing more ludicrous is that four Supreme Court justices, fairly obviously including Samuel Alito, considered that claim valid enough to hear a challenge to two federal-court decisions rejecting it. One of Trump’s lawyers argued that if the President ordered the Navy SEALs to assassinate a political opponent, that would qualify as “official.”
The discretionary factor in sentencing is mitigating or aggravating circumstances, and in this case, there are plenty of aggravating ones. Trump has open contempt for the rule of law, except when it can be used against his opponents, because it represents the idea that he lives in a society where other people have rights he is bound to respect. He takes sadistic glee in cheating and bullying them.
Most dangerously, Trump wants to be dictator, and has a cult ready to follow him there. They don’t believe in democracy. His administrative minions are clearly thinking, “We’re going to do it right this time.”
If you compare the Jan. 6, 2021 mob attack on the Capitol with Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, the difference is that the Italian Fascists took power, not selfies.