There are four million people with felony convictions in the United States who are legally prohibited from voting for president. One very famous person convicted of a felony will be president in little over a week.
In May 2024, a New York jury found President-elect Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, associated with his efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election by paying adult film actress Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about their affair.
But this morning, upon the district attorney’s recommendation, Judge Juan Merchan sentenced Trump to “unconditional discharge,” which confers no obligations on a defendant. Essentially, the prosecutor concluded that Trump should go to his room in the White House and think about what he had done. And as a result, Trump will not see the inside of a jail, be placed on probation, pay fines and fees, or experience any of the legal system’s typical consequences.
This didn’t stop Trump from fuming about his purported mistreatment, of course. (“This has been a very terrible experience,” he told Merchan via Zoom.) But he was, in fact, treated much better than people without his celebrity status, wealth, or whiteness. Across the country, almost 20 million people have been convicted of felonies. And even upon their release from incarceration, most people with felony records face lingering collateral consequences, like restrictions on where they can live, diminished access to employment, and rescission of the right to vote. In some states, Trump’s felony convictions mean he would be ineligible to vote in the election he just won.
Trump during his Zoom sentencing on Friday (Photo by BRENDAN MCDERMID/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
The policy of prohibiting people with felony convictions from voting is called felony disenfranchisement. This formal exclusion from the civic community emerged after the Civil War as a way to enforce racial hierarchy: Suffrage was not conditioned on an absence of convictions until Black men received the right to vote, when more than one-third of states enacted felony disenfranchisement laws in the 15-year period immediately following the Civil War. At the same time as felony disenfranchisement laws proliferated, states enacted a slew of laws basically criminalized Breathing While Black. By design, expanding criminal codes and felony disenfranchisement worked in tandem to suppress the vote.
Felony disenfranchisement is still limiting Black political participation and diminishing Black people’s quality of life, as intended by the legislatures that enacted those laws. Although many states, including New York, have gradually removed some of these restrictions, approximately four million people are still disenfranchised due to felony convictions, and Black Americans are disenfranchised at a rate more than three times higher than non-Black Americans. Nationwide, one in 22 Black Americans of voting age are disenfranchised. And in 15 states, at least 5 percent of the Black adult population cannot vote because of a felony conviction.
The extreme leniency afforded to Trump by the legal system this week—shielding him from any accountability as he prepares to assume expansive powers over American democracy—emphasizes the staggering perversity of felony disenfranchisement. Proponents of felony disenfranchisement sometimes argue that the practice is justified by breaches of the proverbial social contract—that people who didn’t follow the law get no more say over it. Yet neither Trump’s status as a convicted felon nor his more general contempt for the law will prevent him from assuming the presidency in a week and a half.
It was a foregone conclusion that Trump’s sentencing this morning would be merely symbolic. What it symbolized is the legal system’s selective application of rules in order to promote and maintain white supremacy.
