Trump Formally Becomes a Felon Ten Days Before Formally Becoming President

No punishment aside from constant reminders until he dies

Jan 10, 2025

Jan. 10: Trump sentencing … Democrats go hard right on immigrants … Trump seeks disease to justify immigration crackdown … Pizzagate attacker killed by actual threat …

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ABC’s coverage of Donald Trump’s arrival on April 15, 2024, for the first day of the criminal trial that ended in his conviction, the only conviction he’s had in his life. (Screengrab / ABC video.)

Yes, today is the day. A day sure to be celebrated as a holiday by the gilled descendants who inhabit the flooded but socially utopian future of our hippiest dreams.

It’s National Trump Is a Felon Day.

It’s the day of RePresident-elect Donald Trump’s sentencing hearing in Manhattan, the borough that has defied him and rejected his lifetime of unwanted advances. It’s the hearing at which Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records were finally entered in the ledgers of justice and Jesus and everybody, making Trump truly, officially, indisputably a felon.1

The Supreme Court voted yesterday, 5-4, against Trump’s request to delay the sentencing until he can have Judge Juan Merchan extradited to the moon. The only Trump appointee to vote against him was the only woman he appointed, Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

According to statute, today’s sentencing means certain conditions now apply automatically, without even an avenue for appeal. First and most obviously, of course, Trump will be designated by the Andy Borowitzes of the world with labels such as “Felonious Punk.” Or “Goutlaw.”

Trump will now be barred from voting in some states and from traveling to some nation-states. All of which, of course, could waive such prohibitions in light of Trump’s ability to warp the laws of physics in his immediate proximity.

Nevertheless, today we rejoice in some tiny glimpse of accountability or The System reflecting reality as we know it. And I’ll do it, too, just like I tried to get away with corny puns by blaming them on Borowitz.

But in my heart of hearts, it goes against my convictions to mock Trump’s, uh, conviction. (Dammit this is hard!) For two reasons.

One of them I suspect longtime Newsfuckers might guess. I don’t like stigmatizing criminal records.

It’s not that I reject the legitimacy of the jury’s verdict that Trump illegally falsified business records to prevent voters from learning he paid Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about something she probably wasn’t inclined to brag about anyway. And I don’t have the criminal-justice experience to weigh in on whether Trump was prosecuted for something no one else would’ve been — but I do think (a) only Trump Trumps, so what even is precedent? But also (b) we use bullshit laws and prosecutions all the time to go after people for other shit we know they did but can’t prove.

But also, just generally, I’m old enough to remember the left’s crusade to re-humanize suspects, defendants, and, yes, even convicts guilty of crimes much more heinous than Trump’s. Even if he doesn’t merit mercy, to my mind wielding his criminal record against him threatens to perpetuate a stigmatization that will splash up on everyone else with a record.

And that has consequences for all of us, with things like job discrimination and denying convicts the vote and yes obviously I’m overthinking this. Which brings me to Point Two.

I reject the Wall of Assumed Decency our elites have erected between Trump and other modern presidents. Trump did horrible things with a system that both parties built for presidents to do horrible things.

But he did not — as far as we know — engage in the kind of systemic corruption and abuse of power his now-somehow-cool predecessors got away with. Yes, Trump said a very bad thing in a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But President George W. Bush got the entire Justice Department to magically decide that the CIA could torture people. Which it then did.

In a warped system, criminality is no measure of integrity or humanity. So, yea, rejoice thee Newsfuckers far and wide on this, the first National Trump Is a Felon Day. But let us in the spirit of this new holiday redouble our commitment to impose a higher standard on him and any successors he allows.

Some Democrats Shift from “Trump Won” to “Trump’s Right”

Because political winds can only move Democrats to the right, some of them are responding to the narrow, plurality victory of RePresident-elect Donald Trump by voting today to advance an immigration bill that’s even worse than TFN has been worseness-warning about.

The nine Democratic-caucusing senators expected to move the bill forward are:

Tammy Duckworth (D-IL)
John Fetterman (D-PA)
Ruben Gallego (D-AZ)
John Hickenlooper (D-CO)
Mark Kelly (D-AZ)
Angus King (I-ME)
Jon Ossoff (D-GA)
Gary Peters (D-MI)
Jacky Rosen (D-NV).

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent reports that some of them — Fetterman and Gallego — have actually made it harder to amend the bill toward sanity before it passes. And Democratic congressional aides are pissed.

The two could have simply said they were voting to advance the bill. Instead, they endorsed the bill itself. Other Democratic senators didn’t. They just said they’d let it move forward and fix it along the way. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) notes that Republicans need Democratic votes to overcome the filibuster, so Democrats still have some hope.

And Democrats are still hoping to amend the bill — despite the Fettermanian kneecapping and Gallegoish undermining. For one thing, the bill gives the Department of Homeland [sic] Security (DHS) less flexibility when dealing with undocumented immigrants accused of crimes.

Once, DHS could prioritize the most (allegedly) dangerous defendants. This bill will require DHS to detain even suspects in low-level crimes like shoplifting. Pulling resources from the allegedly worst of them.

Also Fettermanianly and Gallegoesquely tougher to amend now are the bill’s pathways for MAGA attorneys general to block all immigrants from specific countries to their states. Imagine Texas banning Indian immigrants. Tesla would have to hire American immigrants.

“We’re frustrated that certain Senate Democrats took the bait,” a senior Senate Democratic aide told Sargent. “As a result, we could end up making some really bad immigration policy.”

Which means now Democrats are even stealing Republican jobs.

Los Angeles’s Original Sin

More than 400,000 people have now been ordered to evacuate their homes in and around Los Angeles, which is on fire. At least ten people are known to have died and entire neighborhoods have disappeared. Ten thousand structures have been destroyed. And by “structures,” TFN means mostly places where people lived.

Two of the fires are already among California’s worst 20 ever. And they’re the only two to have come in January, CNN reports. Fifteen of those 20 have occurred in the past ten years.

The fires are getting worse, more numerous, and coming during more parts of the year. Because the climate is changing because we keep pumping carbon emissions into the air.

But that’s not the only reason. Your judicious TFN will wait for more information to point fingers, if any, over the prep and response. But there’s one aspect of these fires for which we already have centuries of information: The location.

The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson has a thoughtful, almost elegiac, contemplation of the land now being ravaged by wildfires. Like the best history lessons, it helps explain our now and offers clear lessons about the future for us to ignore.

It’s worth a read, but in short, the city was built on a fireplace. A place of fires.

Discussing Mike Davis’s 1998 book “Ecology of Fear,” Meyerson writes:

“L.A.’s pre-European residents, the Chumash and Tongva Indians, annually set small fires in the hills of Pacific Palisades and Malibu to clear out the brush that would explode if left in place. … when [‘Two Years Before the Mast’ author Richard Henry Dana] first sailed up the California coast in 1826, he saw a fire engulfing Topanga Canyon. Mike then documents the 13 fires that had burned at least 10,000 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains just west of the Palisades between 1930 and 1996. Mike makes a compelling case that the dry hills surrounding Los Angeles, running from Pasadena in the east to Malibu in the west, will regularly ignite when the Santa Ana winds blow, and that building houses in those hills all but guarantees that many of those houses will burn, particularly when those winds soar above 50 miles per hour.”

The first houses that have burned in these fires didn’t exist in the 1960s, Meyerson writes. Only later did developers push further than ever into the Palisades hills. The breezes and the view were irresistible to the wealthy.

“...the incentives for developers to put mansions on those hills rose accordingly.
“Mike Davis told us what would happen to those homes and, when the winds reached their apogee, as predictably they would, to the shops and homes and apartments on the flatlands, too. The Chumash and early-19th-century seagoers knew what would happen. Only we denied it.”

Wanted: Hard-Working Disease, Willing to Travel

As TFN previously told you, the Trump2.0 administration is planning to reinvoke Title 42, which will let the government deport people without due process because of the medical crisis. So now they need a medical crisis.

The New York Times reports that RePresident-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is actively recruiting for qualified diseases. The disease in question must be eligible to be cited in an executive order claiming it justifies suspending due process.

It must be able to work in the United States and willing to travel.

Four people close to the hiring team told the Times that they’ve been recruiting for months, having already considered tuberculosis. They’ve since moved in another direction.

Team Trump is also asking Border Patrol allies whether they can recommend any reliable diseases found among migrants recently.

The team is also considering invoking Title 42 without citing any specific disease, given the legal power of simply gesturing vaguely at the world and muttering how immigrants might have scary new diseases. And they fully expect to force this thinking [sic] on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the body responsible for assessing Title 42 needs.

The good news is that all of these Trump World sources sharing this with the Times means the inevitable lawsuits challenging this will now have evidence that Trump’s Title 42 invocation is both politically motivated and scientifically unsound.

Which is supposed to be Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s, department!

Musk Already Half-Done with Shrinking Government

Before the Trump2.0 administration has even taken office, the co-head of its made-up Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is already halfway done with his job of eliminating $2 trillion in government spending. That benchmark would devastate the U.S. military, which could do with some strategic devastating, but also cut ~~to the~~ into the bone of fundamental government services for humans, some of whom are old and/or veterans, and others of whom are neither but according to science still have some value.

In an interview Wednesday, Musk announced that he has achieved 50% of his $2 trillion goal by declaring that 50% unrealistic. Remember, the first rule of cutting spending is cutting how much spending you’re cutting.

“If we try for $2 trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting one,” Musk said, adding DOGE to the long list of obviously unrealistic Musk predictions that Musk ultimately acknowledges are unrealistic before he gets into his self-driving taxi and flies into the tunnel he built that goes all the way from Las Vegas to up his own ass.

Musk’s Government-Shrinking To Increase Size of Government

Fresh off his success at shrinking the expectations for how much he’ll shrink government, Musk — who’s so stupid he has more money than Vivek Ramaswamy — is now looking to finish the job of making government smaller by making government bigger. That’s right, DOGE is hiring, because it turns out it takes people to make government efficient.

On Tuesday, DOGE posted a help-wanted ad on Twitter, for a “very small number” of full-time engineers. What exactly is a very small number? I asked Google, which for some reason had AI generate an answer instead of just finding one. Here’s what Google’s AI said:

“A ‘very small number’ refers to a number that is extremely close to zero, often written with many decimal places or expressed using scientific notation with a negative exponent, like 0.000001 (which is the same as 1 x 10^-6) or 0.00000000000001 (which is 1 x 10^-12).”

Even your otherwise skeptical TFN has to admit that hiring just 0.000001th of an engineer is pretty fucking efficient! Reportedly, DOGE is also hiring HR, IT, and finance people. Y’know, who want to sign up for an outfit that’s supposed to go away in less than two years.

And those salaries? They already represent a cost overrun from Musk’s original estimate, which was that “compensation is zero.”

And didja notice the nature of those DOGE jobs? They’re all support positions. None of them involve the thing-doing of assessing government spending and regulations to find doable cuts.

Anyway, this isn’t Earth-shaking news, TFN is just contractually obliged to remind people that billions of dollars rot your brain.

Biden Announces Last Infrastructure Spending, First Biden Nostalgia

Still-Pres. Joe Biden today is announcing $5 billion in allocations for 560 projects spread around every corner of the United States except Greenland and Panama, Semafor reports. It’s the last major bucket of allocations to come out of his signature 2021 infrastructure-spending law.

The funding will be used to improve infrastructure for a broad range of transportation that people can take to vote against their own interests, including:

Railways
Intercity rail
Surface transportation
Airports
EV charging stations.

The funding will also generate economic activity by creating construction and maintenance jobs and improving transportation. The resulting increased prosperity is expected to increase tax revenues for RePresident Donald Trump to funnel to Big Oil and put more money in people’s pockets to buy Let’s Go Brandon t-shirts.

The projects are expected to be finished in time for ceremonial ribbon-cuttings by Presidents Trump, Vance, Musk, some other Trump, and Hannity.

Four Quickies

JD Vance is unemployed. He resigned as Ohio’s junior senator at midnight last night. Which means on Jan. 20 he’ll become the vice president of the United States with just slightly more than two whole years experience in government.
The Supreme Court today will hear arguments over whether to save TikTok from federal law barring the social-media platform in the U.S. if it’s still owned by a Chinese-controlled company on Jan. 19. RePresident-elect Donald Trump literally submitted a brief to the Supreme Court arguing for a delay in the ban to give Trump a shot at fixing all this because, his brief actually argued, he’s literally the only person on Earth who can. Y’know, like he’ll end the war in Ukraine on Jan. 20.
The mind-worm victim who attacked a Washington, DC, pizzeria in the made-up conspiracy known as Pizzagate is burnt. In 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle inside the Comet Ping Pong restaurant. He had self-deployed to save non-existent children who were, I dunno, trafficked through secret tunnels by space creatures for Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden to eat or something. Welch apparently realized he got bad intel and acknowledged he fucked up. Well, Newsfuckers, he fucked up again. During a traffic stop Saturday in Kannapolis, NC, Welch pulled a gun and got shot dead by the cops. A forgotten casualty of the war on child-trafficking Democratic bloodsuckers and space aliens.
After Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that remaining moderators at his social-media sites will let posters call LGBTQ+ people mentally ill, employees at one of his companies are responding accordingly. 404 reports that some LGBTQ+ Facebook workers are taking sick days to deal with their mental illness by recuperating at home with a nice hot gay sex. Now that’s meta.

TCB

SUPPORTING TFN I’m stupidly and counter-productively trying to publish some of my pre-inauguration original reporting over on the Jonathan Larsen Substack this weekend. That’s leaving me with less bandwidth to create opportunistic, pandering SEO-bait for TFN — which is exactly the kind of stuff that pays the bills. (The original reporting rarely yields new paid subscriptions; I do it anyway because I have a problem.)

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