Trump Officially Sentenced Just Days Before Becoming President

President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced Friday morning in his hush-money case, after becoming the first president to be convicted of multiple felonies.

Judge Juan Merchan sentenced Trump to unconditional discharge, or a sentence without imprisonment, fines, or probation, saying that this was the “only lawful sentence” he could pass down.

Merchan made clear that Trump was receiving this sentence only because he is returning to the White House in a few days. It is the legal protection of the office that determined the sentence, not the occupant of the office, Merchan stressed in delivering the sentence.

It’s a whimper of an end for the historic case, in which Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up his payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, with whom he had an affair. Still, it’s a national embarrassment. Trump is now the first convicted felon to be sworn in as president.

Appearing virtually in the courtroom Friday, Trump complained that he did nothing wrong.

“I was the first president in history to be under a gag order. I’m totally innocent. I did nothing wrong,” Trump claimed. “They talk about business records, but they were extremely accurate and I had nothing to do with them.”

Undeterred, Merchan accused Trump’s lawyers of trying to create a “chilling effect” on the Supreme Court in pressing for the sentencing to be waived.

Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass also warned that Trump’s actions during the case were an attack on the rule of law. “Such threats are designed to have a chilling effect, intimidate those who have the responsibility to enforce our laws in the hopes that they will ignore the defendant’s transgressions because they fear [Trump] is too powerful to be subjected to rule of law like the rest of us,” Steinglass argued, according to Lawfare reporter Tyler McBrien.

Trump tried very hard to stop this moment from happening, leaning on his presidential immunity, but to no avail.

“Sir, I wish you godspeed as you pursue your second term in office. Thank you,” Merchan said as the sentencing concluded.

The Supreme Court shockingly slapped down Donald Trump’s request to block the sentencing for his sole criminal conviction, leaving him with few other options than to finally face the music at the finale of his hush-money trial Friday morning. But Trump’s interpretation of the rejection—which attempted to frame the forthcoming legal comeuppance as something of a fight song—wouldn’t have you think so.

“I appreciate the time and effort of the United States Supreme Court in trying to remedy the great injustice done to me by the highly conflicted ‘Acting Justice,’ who should not have been allowed to try this case,” Trump wrote Thursday night on Truth Social. “Every Legal Scholar stated, unequivocally, that this is a case that should never have been brought. There was no case against me. In other words, I am innocent of all of the Judge’s made up, fake charges.

“This was nothing other than Weaponization of our Justice System against a Political Opponent,” he continued. “It’s called Lawfare, and nothing like this has ever happened in the United States of America, and it should never be allowed to happen again.”

Trump then went on to lament the details of the gag order placed upon him in the case, claiming that preventing him from bashing the characters of witnesses and court staff in the hush-money trial was a violation of his First Amendment rights.

“For the sake and sanctity of the Presidency, I will be appealing this case, and am confident that JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL,” Trump wrote. “The pathetic, dying remnants of the Witch Hunts against me will not distract us as we unite and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

The Supreme Court ruled 5–4 on Thursday against Trump, determining that there would be no further delays in processing the president-elect’s criminal conviction. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump nominee, sided with the court’s three liberal justices in the majority decision. The court issued a brief, one-paragraph statement explaining its two-pronged rationale for rejecting Trump’s request.

“First, the alleged evidentiary violations at President-Elect Trump’s state-court trial can be addressed in the ordinary course on appeal,” the court wrote. “Second, the burden that sentencing will impose on the President-Elect’s responsibilities is relatively insubstantial in light of the trial court’s stated intent to impose a sentence of ‘unconditional discharge’ after a brief virtual hearing.”

Last week, Judge Juan Merchan dealt the final blow to any suggestions of serious consequences for the president-elect. Merchan wrote in his order that “unconditional discharge” had become the “the most viable solution” for Trump, indicating that the incoming president would not be hampered down with fines, court-appointed supervision, or incarceration.

Trump is scheduled to be sentenced at 9:30 a.m. on Friday, with the MAGA leader appearing virtually.

An appeals court has denied an emergency motion from two of Donald Trump’s co-defendants to stop the release of a report on the president-elect’s felony classified documents case.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team had asked the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision blocking the report’s release in favor of Carlos De Oliveira, the property manager of Mar-a-Lago, and Walt Nauta, a Trump aide who was photographed carrying large boxes around the estate. The court agreed with Smith’s side, ruling Thursday that the report could be released after three days.

Cannon previously tossed out the felony classified documents case against Trump by ruling Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional, a move that has been criticized by legal scholars and repeatedly celebrated by Trump.

Lawyers for De Oliveira and Nauta argued that allowing Smith to publish his report was an “improper attempt to remove from the district court the responsibility to oversee and control the flow of information related to a criminal trial over which it presides, and to place that role instead in the hands of the prosecuting authority.”

The lawyers also pushed back on the notion that there was a sense of urgency to get the report published before Trump’s inauguration later this month.

“The only counsel in this case now claiming urgency is the Attorney General, but the government’s brief does not explain this urgency,” the lawyers wrote. “The Attorney General is an office and not an individual: It will continue in perpetuity. The urgency of political activity is a fake urgency.”

Still, their motion to block the release was denied, but the Eleventh Circuit left in place Cannon’s order enjoining its release.

U.S. attorneys said Wednesday that the report would not be made publicly available but would be accessible to members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, which the defense lawyers said could lead to possible leaks. Now Attorney General Merrick Garland can publicly release the report from Sunday.

De Oliveira pleaded not guilty to allegedly trying to help Trump delete security footage, and Nauta pleaded not guilty to moving the boxes (a tough one, as again, he was photographed).

The Senate voted to advance a bill Thursday that would allow the government to detain undocumented immigrants accused of committing nonviolent crimes, following the House’s passage of the bill Wednesday.

The Laken Riley Act advanced by a 84–9 vote in the Senate, with 33 Democrats voting with every Republican in the chamber, despite the fact that the bill doesn’t require a conviction or charge, but merely an arrest, to target an undocumented immigrant. There are also no protections for children or DACA recipients. The House bill saw 48 Democrats join Republicans to pass it, and the Senate version still needs a final vote.

Senate Democrats, like their counterparts in the House, seem to be backing the GOP’s rhetoric demonizing all undocumented immigrants, penalizing them just for being suspected of a crime. With less than two weeks until Donald Trump is sworn into office, many Democrats are already joining Republicans in granting him new powers to carry out his planned mass deportations.

See which Senate Democrats voted to advance the bill below:

1. Angela Alsobrooks—Maryland
2. Tammy Baldwin—Wisconsin
3. Michael Bennet—Colorado
4. Richard Blumenthal—Connecticut
5. Lisa Blunt Rochester—Delaware
6. Maria Cantwell—Washington
7. Chris Coons—Delaware
8. Catherine Cortez Masto—Nevada
9. Tammy Duckworth—Illinois
10. Dick Durbin—Illinois
11. John Fetterman—Pennsylvania (co-sponsor)
12. Ruben Gallego—Arizona (co-sponsor)
13. Kirsten Gillibrand—New York
14. Martin Heinrich—New Mexico
15. John Hickenlooper—Colorado
16. Tim Kaine—Virginia
17. Mark Kelly—Arizona
18. Angus King (independent who caucuses with Democrats)—Maine
19. Amy Klobuchar—Minnesota
20. Ben Ray Luján—New Mexico
21. Jon Ossoff—Georgia
22. Gary Peters—Michigan
23. Jack Reed—Rhode Island
24. Jacky Rosen—Nevada
25. Chuck Schumer—New York
26. Jeanne Shaheen—New Hampshire
27. Elissa Slotkin—Michigan
28. Chris Van Hollen—Maryland
29. Mark Warner—Virginia
30. Raphael Warnock—Georgia
31. Peter Welch—Vermont
32. Sheldon Whitehouse—Rhode Island
33. Ron Wyden—Oregon

The leader of Germany’s nativist far-right party wants us to believe that Adolf Hitler was actually a raging Communist.

Alternative for Germany Party, or AfD, co-leader Alice Weidel gave an interview with Elon Musk on Thursday live on X. She discussed everything from “woke mind virus” censorship to how stumped she was on the conflict in the Middle East. Her most eyebrow-raising assertion though was that Hitler was a Communist.

“Hitler was a Communist. He considered himself as a socialist.… The biggest success of our country was to label Adolf Hitler as a conservative or a libertarian,” Weidel opined. “He was a Communist socialist guy. Full stop. AfD is the exact opposite. It’s a conservative libertarian party. Hitler was not ‘on the right.’ Hitler played with people’s envy against each other. That was a socialist weapon. He was nothing other than an antisemitic socialist.”

Weidel’s shameless attempt to associate Hitler with her political enemies on the left was met with zero pushback from Musk.

In reality, Hitler was actually very specific about not being a socialist, even as his Nazi Party was called the “Nationalist Socialist Party” (a popular ‘gotcha’ among Weidel and her fans). Hitler changed the meaning of socialism to fit his own fascistic narrative.

“​​Socialism is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not socialism. Marxism is not socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take socialism away from the socialists,” Hitler said in a 1923 interview. “Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common.”

Hitler was also a staunch anti-Communist.

“In the years 1913 and 1914 I expressed my opinion for the first time in various circles … that the problem of how the future of the German nation can be secured is the problem of how Marxism can be exterminated,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. He advocated for “the destruction of Marxism in all its shapes and forms” in those same pages.

Those on the left and the right quickly sounded off in opposition to Weidel’s claim.

“The fact that Alice Weidel—co-leader of Germany’s far-right extremists—calls Hitler a ‘communist’ and likening Nazis to ‘leftish Palestinian’ antisemites in ONE sentence epitomizes the distorted discourse the liberal center in Germany has normalized over the past 15 months,” wrote Guardian reporter Hanno Hauenstein.

“Hitler did not govern as a communist, where the state owned all of the means of production. All private companies were NOT nationalized as is claimed below. Hitler governed more like Mussolini (and sadly today’s America) via economic fascism,” wrote libertarian commentator Chris Rossini. “Private hands … but those hands are at the disposal of the state. That’s economic fascism. Not communism … where there are no private hands … and only the state.”

“Alice Weidel’s claim that Hitler was a ‘communist socialist’ is completely off. Hitler and the Nazis were far-right, deeply anti-communist, and focused on nationalism, not socialism. They worked closely with big businesses, not against them,” military news outlet Geo Insider posted.

Musk gave Weidel a huge, uninhibited platform to spread her right-wing misinformation campaign. The world’s richest man was already accused of election interference in Germany prior to his interview with the AfD leader, and is looking to bolster far-right politics in the U.K. and Italy as well.

Meta employees are protesting the company’s new content moderation guidelines, which practically amount to no content moderation at all.

Some of the recent changes have dropped the digital guardrails on controversial topics such as immigration, race, gender identity, as well as language around the LGBTQ+ community, including allowing users to suggest that being gay is a mental illness. That last detail has sent some of the company’s own employees into a rage, according to internal conversations obtained by 404 Media.

“I am LGBT and Mentally Ill,” one employee wrote on an internal Meta forum called Workplace reads, 404 Media reported Thursday. “Just to let you know that I’ll be taking time out to look after my mental health.”

Users on Meta’s platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, will also be allowed to refer to women as “household objects or property or objects in general,” Black people as “farm equipment,” and transgender individuals as “it,” according to an updated version of Meta’s hateful conduct policy that crossed out the prohibitions.

On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social media behemoth would rid itself of its third-party fact-checkers, opting instead to replace them with user-generated corrections à la Elon Musk’s “community notes” function on X.

“Fact-checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcement posted to Facebook. “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.”

John Fetterman will become the first sitting Democratic senator to visit Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate following the 2024 election, CBS News reports.

“That is the plan. Yes, we are going to have a conversation,” Fetterman told the network, confirming that he accepted an invitation to meet with the president-elect.

“I think that, one, he’s the president, or he will be officially,” Fetterman continued. “And I think it’s pretty reasonable that if the president would like to have a conversation—or invite someone to have a conversation—to have it. And no one is my gatekeeper.”

When Fetterman ran for the Senate in 2022 against Trump’s handpicked candidate Mehmet Oz, Trump shamelessly accused Fetterman of abusing heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, and fentanyl, which Fetterman’s campaign dismissed at the time as “the same crap from these two desperate and sad dudes.”

Since then, Trump has been reelected president, Oz became Trump’s shady pick to run Medicare and Medicaid, and Fetterman became one of the most GOP-friendly Democrats in Congress. He has boasted about shifting away from progressive politics for more than a year, even claiming that brain damage from his near-fatal stroke allowed him to “say the things that I have to really believe in and not be afraid of if there’s any kind of blowback.”

Fetterman’s right-wing turn, including his full-throated support for Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, has cost him a lot of Democratic support. Most recently, Fetterman even downplayed Trump’s crazy idea to annex Greenland, comparing it to the Louisiana Purchase, signaling that he may be willing to go against his own party over the next four years like former Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin.

An official on Trump’s transition team said that a meeting between the president-elect and senator has not yet been finalized, but it goes to show that Fetterman either isn’t worried about the coming Trump presidency or just doesn’t care. Pennsylvania might have one Republican senator in Dave McCormick and one Democrat in name only.

A MAGA visit intended to make Greenland look pro–Donald Trump appears staged from the bottom up.

The so-called tourism trip saw Donald Trump Jr., far-right political pundit Charlie Kirk, and Trump administration staffer Sergio Gor visit the self-governing Danish territory at a time when the president-elect has made some odd jokes and eyebrow-raising militaristic threats about buying Greenland.

The trio’s presence on the island—and myriad photo ops with local residents—was not taken well by some of Greenland’s politicians, who slammed Don Jr.’s visit as a stunt to make the territory appear open to U.S. governance. Pipaluk Lynge, the chair of Greenland’s parliamentary foreign and security policy committee, told Politico that the territory wants its “own independence and democracy.” Lynge also warned the United States not to “invade” the nation, which is largely composed of Indigenous tribes, in light of its historical treatment of Alaska’s Indigenous population.

“Greenland is not for sale and will never be for sale,” Aaja Chemnitz, another member of Greenland’s Parliament, told NBC News.

But some of the behind-the-scenes details of the pro-Trump expedition are even worse.

Danish media reported Thursday that a series of photos featuring Kirk and Greenlandic residents in MAGA hats was staged. The MAGA cohort reportedly rounded up homeless people from the area—including one person from under a bridge—promising them a meal at the Hotel Hans Egede in exchange for their participation in the pro-Trump photo circuit.

Videos of the trip that circulated on X describe the Greenlandic participants as “the local community in Nuuk,” but several local sources that spoke with DR News described the photographed individuals as “homeless and socially disadvantaged” people who are often outside the supermarket directly across from the hotel where the Trump event was held.

“All they have to do is put on a cap and be in the Trump staff’s videos. They are being bribed, and it is deeply distasteful,” Tom Amtoft, a 28-year resident of Nuuk, told the Danish news outlet.

Amtoft reportedly witnessed the group’s attempts to get locals to wear the MAGA caps for the photos, describing the process as “very aggressive.” He said the Trump envoys chose a “selective” group of people “who could say that Greenland should be bought.”

The Los Angeles wildfires have so far claimed 1,300 structures and threatened 60,000 more, torching a total area larger than Manhattan. Analysts predict that the blaze could be the most expensive in U.S. history, costing billions of dollars in repairs across the city—but it didn’t have to be that way.

Total economic losses for the inferno are predicted to reach nearly $50 billion, JPMorgan analyst Jimmy Bhullar told the Wall Street Journal, though they could continue to rise if the fires aren’t brought under control. Bhullar estimated that the price tag on insured losses would be more than $20 billion, nearly $8 billion more than the most destructive wildfire in California’s history, the 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County.

Local authorities have acknowledged there is a serious lack of personnel and essential resources, such as water, to effectively combat the fire. But remedies to legitimately tackle the growing climate threat have sat on the table, sinking from inaction, for years.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s Green New Deal proposed an $18 billion increase in national spending specifically to address the “more frequent and severe wildfires” plaguing the American West.

“In order to be able to quickly and effectively respond to wildfires, we will expand the wildfire restoration and disaster preparedness workforce,” the proposal reads. “We will increase funding for firefighting by $18 billion for federal firefighters to deal with the increased severity and frequency of wildfires.”

Sanders first unveiled the details of his radical agenda to fight climate change in 2019, after a cohort of progressive lawmakers in Congress outlined a new series of climate principles and goals for the nation. In March last year, Sanders and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reintroduced the legislation. They were joined by 55 lawmakers in the House and seven senators, but the proposal was ultimately dismissed by Republicans and Democrats alike for its lofty objectives, with some critics hyperbolically mischaracterizing the policy.

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton falsely told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt in 2019 that the proposal would confiscate cars and would force Americans to ride a light rail “powered by unicorn tears.” The same year, Wyoming Senator John Barrasso baselessly claimed that the Green New Deal would ban livestock and mark the end of ice cream, cheeseburgers, and milkshakes.

But while Congress has failed to offer alternative solutions, the looming national crisis awaits—with an incoming Republican trifecta apparently set on killing tax credits for electric vehicles and spurring fossil fuel production on federally protected land.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s transition team has already prepared executive orders for the president-elect to once again withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the international climate treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

And Trump isn’t likely to offer much help to California while it rebuilds from the blaze, either—the forty-fifth president reportedly resisted sending wildfire aid to the Golden State in 2018 because the state voted Democratic.

It seems that Karen Pence still holds a grudge against Donald Trump for leaving her husband to the January 6 mob.

Politicians past and present gathered in Washington, D.C., on Thursday for the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter. President-elect Trump and his wife, Melania, walked past his former Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, who were sitting alongside another former vice president, Al Gore.

Gore and Pence both stood up to greet Trump and Melania, shaking their hands and saying a few words. But Karen Pence stayed seated, staring ahead icily instead of greeting the couple.

It’s highly likely the snub was intentional, especially as Karen was seen later greeting former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura.

Trump shunned Pence in 2020 after the vice president refused to stop the certification of the election results. “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy,” Trump told Pence during the certification process, according to The New York Times. Pence chose to defy his president.

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” Trump tweeted during the January 6 riots shortly before shouts of “Hang Mike Pence” began ringing out from the crowd. Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson later testified that Trump expressed support for the chants that day.

It’s likely that this was Trump and Pence’s first public encounter since January 6, 2021. For Karen Pence, those wounds still seem to be fresh.