Donald Trump is going to prison – but when?

| 7:56 pm EDT June 5, 2024
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From the start I’ve said that I fully expect Donald Trump to end up in prison. After all, three of his four criminal trials involve the kinds of top level felony charges that come with automatic lengthy prison sentences. That said, the one Trump trial that’s happened thus far is the one with the lowest level felony charges that don’t always mean prison. So the question is whether Trump’s July 11th sentencing hearing will come with a prison sentence, or if that’ll have to wait for Trump’s next trial.

There are factors going both ways. For instance, only about ten percent of the people convicted on this specific kind of felony charge end up being given a prison sentence. But Trump has been convicted on thirty-four of this kind of felony. And the underlying crime, election tampering, is more grave than the underlying crimes in most other bookkeeping fraud convictions.

There is also Trump’s misbehavior during the trial, including a double digit number of gag order violations before the judge threatened to lock him up over it. And as at least one legal expert has pointed out, Judge Juan Merchan tends to be tougher on white collar criminals than a lot of other judges.

So yeah, there are legal arguments in both directions as to whether Trump will be given a prison sentence. There’s a popular non-legal argument on social media, which is that if Michael Cohen got three years in prison for helping Trump to commit this crime, then Trump should get at least three years in prison.

This is perfectly valid from a logical perspective. Legally speaking, however, it’s apples and oranges. For one thing, Cohen was charged at the federal level, while Trump was charged at the state level. The laws are different, and so are the punishments. Cohen was also charged with things like lying to Congress (he did this at Trump’s instruction but that can’t be legally proven), and tax fraud (though Cohen says he was innocent on that charge and railroaded into pleading guilty).

The point is that, from a legal perspective, you can’t really expect Trump to get three years in prison just because Cohen got three years in prison. From a logical perspective, Trump should get thirty years for this scandal if Cohen got three years. But it doesn’t work that way.

I don’t expect Donald Trump to be given a lengthy, multi-year prison sentence in this trial. Even if Judge Merchan were looking to send a message about white collar crime and gave Trump a multi-year sentence, I suspect it would be reduced on appeal. Much as I want to see Trump get locked up forever, and much as I expect it to ultimately happen, this has never been the trial to do that.

I would expect that if Judge Merchan does give Trump prison time, it could be something like – and I’m just picking numbers here for illustrative purposes – thirty days in prison, another sixty days of house arrest, and two years of probation. But what do I know? We’ll see what kind of sentence Alvin Bragg asks for, and what Judge Merchan ultimately ends up doing.