Trump gets sweetheart sentence and still complains

BALTIMORE – The late District Court Judge Robert Gerstung had a sense of perspective to match his droll sense of humor. Too bad he’s not around anymore to share his thoughts on fair play with a criminal named Donald J. Trump.

Some years back, Gerstung sentenced a young defendant to six months in prison for some street crime. The young man, exhibiting how tough (and stupid) he was, muttered words just loud enough for Gerstung to hear.

“Shee-it,” he said, as he was led away, “I can do six months standing on my head.”

Gerstung summoned the young man back to the bench.

“Son,” he said, “I’m gonna give you an additional six months, just to get you back on your feet again.”

Imagine that. The kid gets a sweetheart sentence, and he’s still mouthing off.

From him, Donald Trump could learn. The future president and newly convicted felon got the sweetest possible deal on Friday, January 10. Having been convicted of 34 counts of paying a porn star $130,000 to hide an affair from the American public (and from his wife, Melania), Trump listened as Judge Juan Merchan offered him “unconditional discharge.”

It’s a phrase so rare that veteran attorneys were saying they’d spent their careers involved in criminal cases and never once heard it uttered. It means Trump gets no financial penalty and no prison time, not even six months.

And yet, given a chance to wrap up his thoughts at sentencing, Trump declared the entire process “very, very unfair.”

He called it “a political witch hunt.”

He declared himself “totally innocent. I did nothing wrong.”

Tell that to Melania, President Felon.

Trump said, “I got indicted for calling a legal expense a legal expense.”

By this, he means the $130,000 he handed over to his former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen. It was Cohen who made the payments to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet. It was Trump repaying Cohen the original hush money.

What Trump is leaving out, as he continues to whine about getting unfair treatment, is why it was so important that Stormy keep her mouth shut about their little fling.

Trump was already in trouble for admitting – on tape – what a sexual pig he was. The whole country heard him boasting about molesting women, grabbing their private parts, because “they let you do that when you’re famous.”

Here we were, days from an election, and one more sex-related headline might cost Trump the 2016 election. Trump hadn’t yet learned how forgiving American voters are when it comes to sexual abuse.

He worried that voters would actually care that he’d slept with a porn star while his wife was home cuddling their baby son.

That’s why the big bucks had to be paid to Stormy – to fix an election. And that’s why Trump got himself indicted for it, and why he was declared guilty on 34 separate counts.

It was the hush money that changed American history.

Each one of those 34 criminal counts carried the potential of prison time or financial penalty.

Instead, Trump got nothing, aka “unconditional discharge.”

As Judge Merchan explained, this was “the legal protection offered to the office of the president of the United States…not the occupant of the office.”

The office, not the occupant.

But, instead of going to prison, Trump goes to the White House. And he does it while complaining that he got a bad deal. Hell, he doesn’t even get the kind of six-month penalty handed out by the late Judge Gerstung.

He’d have given Trump prison time just to get America “back on its feet again.”

Michael Olesker

Michael Olesker, columnist for the News American, Baltimore Sun, and Baltimore Examiner has spent a quarter of a century writing about the city he loves.He is the author of several books, including Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home, Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore, and The Colts’ Baltimore: A City and Its Love Affair in the 1950s, all published by Johns Hopkins Press.