Last Friday, New York Judge Juan Merchan, who presided over Donald Trump’s hush money trial, refused to quash the indictment and set aside the jury verdict which made the president-elect a convicted felon. He announced he would sentence Trump on January 10 and, on Monday the judge denied Trump’s motion for a stay.
Along the way, he delivered a stern rebuke to our soon-to-be president and an important reminder to the rest of us that in a free country, even the most powerful people cannot erase their past. Merchan’s ruling, as the New York Times reported, denies the president-elect “the opportunity to clear his record before returning to the White House.”
“To dismiss the indictment and set aside the jury verdict,” Merchan wrote, “would not serve the concerns set forth by the Supreme Court in its handful of cases addressing presidential immunity nor would it serve the rule of law.”
Merchan has set an example of resistance on the cusp of a second Trump presidency. His ruling will serve this country well as we enter a period in which the occupant of the Oval Office intends to bend judges and others to his will and in which serving him will be the standard against which government officials, journalists, and others will be judged.
Judge Merchan did us all a service by delivering that lesson.
Trump got the message, but he did not like it. He lashed out at the legal proceedings that resulted in his conviction and at Merchan.
“Every major legal pundit… has stated strongly there was no case, there is no case, and this was just a witch hunt,” Trump claimed to Fox Digital News.
Then, getting personal, he turned his fire on Merchan. “The judge,” Trump claimed, without any evidence, “is the most conflicted judge in the history of jurisprudence…. He created a case out of nothing because he wanted my political opponent to win.”
And, not surprisingly, the president claimed that “Nobody “has ever gone through what I go through—this is a disgrace.”
No, Merchan’s ruling is the very opposite of a disgrace. What Merchan said, and the fact that he set the sentencing date mere days before Trump’s return to power, will remind everyone of the disgrace that he will bring with him to the White House.
Before looking more closely at Merchan’s decision, let me say more about the role of history and memory in a democracy.
Writing in 2019, Jeffries Martin observed that in a democracy, respecting and learning from the past is a singular virtue. “Historical work,” Martin explained, has “long served as a major intellectual bulwark for democratic republics….” He conceded that such work would not in itself “preserve our democracy. But when fostered in a critical and democratic spirit, they constitute an important piece of what we might call a culture of resistance and liberty.”
In a democracy, we can argue over what history means or what parts of the past should be venerated and which should not be, as fights over monuments have shown. But, no one gets to re-write history or erase memory to suit their convenience or serve their partisan purposes. In authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, history and memory belong to the powerful. Rewriting and whitewashing the past, whether of a nation or its leaders, is standard operating procedure. As Jason Stanley puts it, “Authoritarians…erase history… seeking to separate us from our own history to destroy our self-understanding and leave us unmoored, resentful, and confused.”
In a free society, history and memory are treasures. They remind us of who we are by reminding us of what we have done. This is as true for the stories of individuals as it is for social and political histories.
In a free country, history speaks freely. Its judgments can be generous or harsh, but they are meant to be heard. That is true whether those judged are poor or powerful, heroic or infamous.
And that makes facing his and America’s past so painful and problematic for the man who will be this country’s forty-seventh president. As the New Yorker’s Susan Glaser explains, “Rewriting history—and, at times, even outright inverting it—is one of the signatures of Trumpism….”
And he has allies in that effort. Glaser notes that one of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s early acts was to try “to rewrite history to suit Trump’s version of events—a project that will be crucial in determining whether Trump can overcome the stigma of a criminal conviction.”
Johnson’s House Republican majority went so far as to “decree the fact of Trump’s trial off-limits. In one instance, they had a reference to “Trump’s various criminal cases… ‘taken down’—that is, struck from the official record.”
Erasing his past is what Trump and his lawyers asked Merchan to do. But that is precisely what Merchan refused to do.
On virtually every page of Merchan’s 18-page opinion, the judge shows a reverence for the past, whether it be the past recorded in relevant judicial opinions or Trump’s New York criminal trial. On the third page, he reiterates the central truth about Trump’s past, which he will not obliterate.
He says in, straightforward and simple prose, that“the Defendant has been found guilty on 34 felony counts…by a unanimous jury of Defendant’s peers, after trial.” Merchan insists that the significance of that “cannot possibly be overstated.”
He rightly calls respecting that verdict a “bedrock principle in our Nation’s jurisprudence.”
In evaluating Trump’s claim that the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision requires that the verdict be set aside, Merchan carefully parsed applicable precedent. He showed us that in a court of law, judges are not free to ignore precedents with which they disagree or to make the past disappear.
That is why Merchan could conclude that dismissing the indictment and setting aside the jury verdict “would not serve the concerns set forth by the Supreme Court in its handful of cases addressing Presidential immunity nor would it serve the Rule of Law.”
Before ending, Merchan showed his fidelity to the past that Trump wanted him to erase by reiterating that “A jury heard evidence for nearly seven weeks and pronounced its verdict…”
That fidelity is why, as Merchan notes, Trump has great “disdain for the Third Branch of government” and takes every opportunity, as he did on the Fox Digital Network, “to broadcast… his lack of respect for judges, juries, grand juries and the justice system as a whole.”
And the judge did one other thing that produced Trump’s rage. He insisted on settingt “this matter down for the imposition of sentence prior to January 20, 2025.”
To be clear, Marchan has already stated that he does not intend to imprison the president-elect. Still, Marchan’s move means that before Trump again swears to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, he will learn that under its terms, he has no power to erase the past and escape its judgment. Judge Merchan did us all a service by delivering that lesson.
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