Trump 2.0: A Criminal Sentencing, Presidential Legacies, and Greenland
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From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today.
Donald Trump's sentencing in the New York hush money case is just two days away, and he is throwing a Hail Mary in the direction of the U.S. Supreme Court.
During a busy week, President-elect Trump asked the Supreme Court to prevent him from being sentenced in a New York criminal case.
There has been international pushback over Trump's recent comments about taking control of Greenland.
He implied that as president, he could use military force to seize control of Greenland and the Panama Canal.
Less than two weeks before his inauguration, the president-elect is mapping out headline-making plans for his administration.
And he overshadowed a sitting president who is using his final days in office to try to Trump-proof his legacy. To make sense of all of this, I gathered three of my colleagues, senior political reporter Maggie Haberman and White House reporters David Sanger and Zolan Kano-Youngs. It's Friday, January 10th. Friends, welcome to the first Daily Roundtable of 2025. And thank you for being here. Maggie, you are joining us from Washington. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. David, you are coming to us from Mar-a-Lago.
Nice to have you. Well, I'm down the street in Palm Beach. But yes, we've been in and out of Mar-a-Lago a few times.
Good. And Zolan, we are talking to you from Italy, where President Biden was supposed to be but had to cancel because of the Los Angeles wildfires. Thank you for being on. Ciao. Ciao, colleagues. So we have all the geography covered here. And as always, we begin with the caveat that we are recording this at a very specific time around 115 on Thursday because the news could change before we run this. And in fact, we know it will change because the Supreme Court is about to make a major ruling at the request of President-elect Trump. Maggie, can you walk us through that request from President-elect Trump?
Sure. So President-elect Trump's lawyers filed a request for the Supreme Court to stop Trump's scheduled sentencing on felony falsifying business records that related to a payment to a porn star who said she'd had an affair with Trump. Right. We think of this as the hush money case. The hush money case. And the sentencing was scheduled by New York Justice Juan Merchan for January 10th. When this runs, Friday morning. Right. Now, it's worth bearing in mind, Michael, that part of why this sentencing has not happened yet is because Trump's legal team has repeatedly requested delays over and over and over again. And Merchan's feeling is it needs to happen at a certain point for closure and respect for the jury verdict and so forth and so on.
He has refused their request to dismiss the case outright. The Trump team is not surprisingly using every avenue they can to try to delay it.
And what's their strongest argument, Maggie, legally for why the Supreme Court should weigh in and stop this local court case from running its course?
Legally, it's the presidential immunity argument, and it's going to be up to the justices to decide whether in their previous ruling about how presidents have pretty broad immunity for acts committed while in office, whether this would technically apply. There is the question, and I do think that some of the justices may feel this pull of, whether an incoming president should be facing a hearing where even though the judge in the case has signaled that he's going to give Trump an unconditional discharge, meaning no penalties, no jail times, no anything, no home confinement, it is onerous to go into office that way. And that's not really a legal argument. It's more a respect for the presidency argument.
Fascinating. And David, what would it mean for the ruling to go either way, not just for Trump necessarily, but for the idea of the rule of law?
Well, for Trump to begin with, just the concept, as Maggie said, of being inaugurated in roughly 10 days as a felon is something that I think he would probably not want to see on his Wikipedia page, right? And it will fit into... the entire grievance argument that President-elect Trump has made that these prosecutions have been entirely political.
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