WASHINGTON — Donald Trump made twofold history on Monday, becoming the first to take the oath of office despite having tried to end American democracy, as well as becoming the first presidential convicted felon.
Administering the oath was Chief Justice John Roberts, whose Supreme Court conservative majority paved the way for Trump’s return by sidetracking a criminal prosecution based on his January 6, 2021, attempt to remain in power.
The ceremony took place in the rotunda of the US Capitol, where four years and two weeks earlier, a mob of Trump’s supporters — inflamed by his lies that the 2020 election had been stolen from him — rampaged through the building, searching for and threatening to murder Trump’s own vice president at the time, Mike Pence, for refusing his demand to award him a second term.
Trump’s return to the White House completes a remarkable comeback. Had he been convicted on the federal charges for his January 6 actions — which authoritarian experts say meet the definition of a self-coup — Trump could have received decades in federal prison. Instead, he is again commander in chief of the United States armed forces and putative leader of the free world.
Had Roberts and the five other Republican-appointed justices not agreed to take Trump’s appeal in February 2024, Trump could well have been on trial for his actions leading up to and on that day’s violent attack on the US Capitol amid the Republican presidential primary.
The high court then took four more months to issue a ruling that effectively gave Trump and all presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for all actions they take in office if they can argue that they were part of “official” duties.
The ruling made trial on the four felony counts of fraud and conspiracy impossible before the November election. After Trump narrowly won, special counsel Jack Smith dismissed the charges — along with unrelated charges in South Florida based on Trump’s refusal to turn over secret documents he took to his country club there. Smith cited long-standing Department of Justice policy not to prosecute a sitting president.
The court’s immunity ruling also helped Trump avoid any consequence following his 34 felony convictions in a New York City court last May for falsifying business records. Trump faced up to four years in prison from that jury verdict and had potentially exacerbated his situation by repeatedly flouting the trial judge’s rulings, leading to contempt of court citations.
But his lawyers pointed to the Supreme Court decision and said that immunity applied in the New York case as well, essentially arguing that Trump’s 2017 payments to his lawyer to reimburse him for a $130,000 payment to a porn star ahead of the 2016 election were “official” acts of the presidency because they took place while he was in office.
The trial court judge, Juan Merchan, ultimately found that argument specious but said that because Trump had been elected to the presidency again in November, he was not permitted by the Constitution to sentence him to anything.
Trump is only the second president in U.S. history to have won two nonconsecutive terms. The first was Grover Cleveland, who won the elections in 1884 and 1892. Cleveland, however, did not try to overturn democracy after losing to Benjamin Harrison in 1888. Nor was he a convicted criminal.