What did Donald Trump do today?

He remained a convicted felon.

U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein ruled today against Trump's latest attempt to have his 34 New York state felony convictions set aside.

The ruling was in one sense procedural: Hellerstein found that Trump waited too long to try to move the trial to federal court after his conviction in May of 2024. Trump would likely have been within his rights to ask that the trial be "removed" to federal court, in which a federal judge and jury would apply New York State law. But federal law requires that any such motion be made within 30 days of an accused criminal's arraignment, which for Trump would have been in April of 2023. Trump waited until after a jury had found him guilty and his sentencing was imminent, and did not show the required "good cause" for a later motion.

That rule exists, as Hellerstein wrote, so that defendants cannot "play one court off another," nullifying a state verdict in the hopes of another chance in federal court.

But there's another reason Trump wanted the case heard in federal court: his new argument that the crimes he committed were part of his official duties as president, and therefore subject to a special presidential immunity for official acts.

The "official presidential acts" Trump sought to sweep under the rug included:

• paying a tabloid publisher money in 2015, before he ever became president, to buy the rights to the story of his affair with a porn actress, among other stories
  
  
• using money from his chartered business for that personal matter and creating fraudulent business records to conceal it 

• lying to federal election officials about the nature of those expenditures 

• failing to disclose them as the illegal in-kind campaign contributions they were 

• falsifying other business records to make his bagman's work look like legitimate legal billing 

As Hellerstein wrote in his ruling, "There is no way that discussions regarding hush money payments to cover up the President's relations with Stormy Daniels could be an official act. An affair, or a cover-up of an affair, is not within the 'outer perimeter' of the President's official responsibilities."

Trump has already escaped all real consequences of his criminal actions. He was sentenced just days before returning to office, but a judge gave him the extremely rare sentence of an unconditional discharge, freeing him from any punishment, including even fines or probation. Under normal circumstances, Trump would likely have been on probation for the rest of his life, and would have been at genuine risk of being sentenced to a short prison term.

Trump remains the only president ever convicted of a felony, but those 34 counts are not the last ones he will necessarily face. Even setting aside illegal acts he's committed since returning to office, he is still liable for prosecution on state charges of election tampering and conspiracy in Georgia, and federal charges for his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and his theft of classified materials. Those cases were dismissed for various reasons before he returned to office, but could be refiled.
 

Why does this matter?

• In a democracy, no one is above the law. 

• Anywhere that the rule is "The leader can do whatever he wants and we'll find a way to make it legal" is a dictatorship.