Power-hungry presidents of both parties have been concocting ways to get around Congress for all of American history. But as Donald Trump prepares to take office again, legal experts are worried he could make the legislative branch go away altogether—at least for a while.

Several of Trump’s early Cabinet nominees—including Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and former Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii—have drawn widespread condemnation for their outlandish political views and lack of conventional qualifications. Their critics include some Senate Republicans tasked with voting on their confirmation. Anticipating resistance, Trump has already begun pressuring Senate GOP leaders, who will control the chamber next year, to allow him to install his picks by recess appointment, a method that many presidents have used.

The incoming Senate majority leader, John Thune of South Dakota, has said that “all options are on the table, including recess appointments,” for overcoming Democratic opposition to Trump’s nominees. But Democrats aren’t Trump’s primary concern; they won’t have the votes to stop nominees on their own. What makes Trump’s interest in recess appointments unusual is that he is gearing up to use them in a fight against his own party.

[Read: The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus]

If Senate Republicans block his nominees, Trump could partner with the GOP-controlled House and invoke a never-before-used provision of the Constitution to force Congress to adjourn “until such time as he shall think proper.” The move would surely prompt a legal challenge, which the Supreme Court might have to decide, setting up a confrontation that would reveal how much power both Republican lawmakers and the Court’s conservative majority will allow Trump to seize.

“None of this has ever been tested or determined by the courts,” Matthew Glassman, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, told me. If Trump tries to adjourn Congress, Glassman said, he would be “pushing the very boundaries of the separation of powers in the United States.” Although Trump has not spoken publicly about using the provision, Ed Whelan, a conservative lawyer well connected in Republican politics, has reported that Trumpworld appears to be seriously contemplating it.

Trump could not wave away Congress on his own. The Constitution says the president can adjourn Congress only “in case of disagreement” between the House and the Senate on when the chambers should recess, and for how long. One of the chambers would first have to pass a resolution to adjourn for at least 10 days. If the other agrees to the measure, Trump gets his recess appointments. But even if one refuses—most likely the Senate, in this case—Trump could essentially play the role of tiebreaker and declare Congress adjourned. In a Fox News interview yesterday, Speaker Mike Johnson would not rule out helping Trump go around the Senate. “There may be a function for that,” he said. “We’ll have to see how it plays out.”

Presidents have used recess appointments to circumvent the Senate-confirmation process throughout U.S. history, either to overcome opposition to their nominees or simply because the Senate moved too slowly to consider them. But no president is believed to have adjourned Congress in order to install his Cabinet before. “We never contemplated it,” Neil Eggleston, who served as White House counsel during President Barack Obama’s second term, told me. Obama frequently used recess appointments until 2014, when the Supreme Court ruled that he had exceeded his authority by making them when Congress had gone out of session only briefly (hence the current 10-day minimum).

[Watch: What’s behind Trump’s controversial Cabinet picks]

Any attempt by Trump to force Congress into a recess would face a few obstacles. First, Johnson would have to secure nearly unanimous support from his members to pass an adjournment resolution, given Democrats’ likely opposition. Depending on the results of several uncalled House races, he might have only a vote or two to spare at the beginning of the next Congress. And although many House Republicans have pledged to unify behind Trump’s agenda, his nominees are widely considered unqualified, to say the least. Gaetz in particular is a uniquely unpopular figure in the conference because of his leading role in deposing Johnson’s predecessor Kevin McCarthy.

If the House doesn’t block Trump, the Supreme Court might. Its 2014 ruling against Obama was unanimous, and three conservative justices who remain on the Court—John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito—signed a concurring opinion, written by Antonin Scalia, saying they would have placed far more restrictions on the president’s power. They wrote that the Founders allowed the president to make recess appointments because the Senate used to meet for only a few months of the year. Now, though, Congress takes much shorter breaks and can return to session at virtually a moment’s notice. “The need it was designed to fill no longer exists,” Scalia, who died in 2016, wrote of the recess-appointment power, “and its only remaining use is the ignoble one of enabling the president to circumvent the Senate’s role in the appointment process.”

The 2014 ruling did not address the Constitution’s provision allowing the president to adjourn Congress, but Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior official in the George W. Bush administration and an occasional Atlantic contributor, told me that the conservatives’ concurrence “is inconsistent with the extreme executive overreach” that Trump might attempt: “As I read them, this machination by Trump would not meet their definition of constitutionality.”

Thanks in part to those legal uncertainties, Trump’s easiest path is simply to secure Senate approval for his nominees, and he may succeed. Republicans will have a 53–47 majority in the Senate, so the president-elect’s picks could lose three GOP votes and still win confirmation with the tiebreaking vote of Vice President–Elect J. D. Vance. But the most controversial nominees, such as Gaetz, Kennedy, Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth (Trump’s choice for defense secretary), could struggle to find 50 Republican votes. And as Thune himself noted in a Fox News interview on Thursday night, Republicans who oppose their confirmation are unlikely to vote for the Senate to adjourn so that Trump can install them anyway.

Thune, who had been elected as leader by his colleagues only one day before that interview, seems fine with helping Trump get around Democrats. Letting Trump defy Thune’s own members and neuter the Senate is a much bigger ask. Then again, if Trump takes his power play to the limit, the new majority leader won’t have a say at all.

Pete Hegseth maintains he is innocent and says the sexual encounter in 2017 was consensual.

At its best, a presidential biopic can delve into the monomaniacal focus—and potential narcissism—that might drive a person to run for the White House in the first place. That’s what Oliver Stone did in 1995’s Nixon, dramatizing the 37th president’s downfall with the exhilarating paranoia of the director’s best work. Though guilty of some fact-fudging, Stone retained empathy for Richard Nixon’s childhood trauma and lifelong inferiority complex, delivering a Shakespearean tragedy filtered through a grim vision of American power. As Nixon (played by a hunched, scotch-guzzling Anthony Hopkins) stalks the halls of a White House engulfed by scandal, and stews with jealousy at the late John F. Kennedy, the presidency never seemed so lonely.

A presidential biopic can also zoom in on a crucial juncture in a leader’s life: Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln explored its protagonist’s fraught final months, during which he pushed, at great political risk, for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. Spielberg’s film was captivating because it didn’t just re-create Lincoln’s famous speeches, but also imagined what the man was like behind the scenes—in backroom dealings, or in contentious confrontations with his wife, Mary Todd. Like its 1939 predecessor, Young Mr. Lincoln, the film wisely limits its scope; focusing on a pivotal period proves a defter approach than trying to capture the full sprawl of a president’s life, a task better left to hefty biographies.

And then there’s a movie like this year’s Reagan, the Ronald Reagan biopic starring Dennis Quaid. Reagan is a boyhood-to-grave survey of the 40th president’s life and administration, with a chest-beating emphasis on his handling of the Cold War that blurs the line between biopic and Hollywood boosterism. Filmed with all the visual panache of an arthritis-medication commercial, the movie is suffocating in its unflagging reverence for its titular hero. In its portrayal of Reagan’s formative years, secondary characters seem to exist primarily to give mawkish pep talks or to fill the young Reagan’s brain with somber warnings about the evils of communism. “God has a purpose for your life, something only you can do,” his mother tells him after he reads scripture at church. Later, in college, he is disturbed by a speech from a Soviet defector, who visits a local congregation and lectures wide-eyed students that they will not find a “church like this” in the U.S.S.R.

Unlike Lincoln, the film seems incapable of imagining what its protagonist was like in private moments or ascribing any interior complexity to him. Even his flirty exchanges with his wife, Nancy, feel like they were cribbed from a campaign ad. “I just want to do something good in this world,” he tells his future spouse on a horseback-riding date. “Make a difference.” The portrayal isn’t helped by the fact that the 70-year-old Quaid is digitally de-aged and delivers his lines in a tinny imitation of the politician’s voice. A bizarre narrative device further detaches the audience from Reagan’s perspective: The entire movie is narrated by Jon Voight doing a Russian accent, as a fictionalized KGB agent who surveilled Reagan for decades and is now regaling a young charge with stories of how one American president outsmarted the Soviet Union.

They say history is written by the winners. But sometimes the winners like to put on a bad accent and cosplay as the losers. Yet despite heavily negative reviews, Reagan remained in theaters for nearly two months and earned a solid $30 million at the box office, playing to an underserved audience and tapping into some of the cultural backlash that powered Donald Trump’s reelection. The film’s success portends a strange new era for the presidential biopic, one in which hokey hagiography might supplant any semblance of character depth—reinforcing what audiences already want to hear about politicians they already admire.

In retrospect, Lincoln, with its innate faith in the power of government to do good, was as much a product of the “Obamacore” era—that surge of positivity and optimism that flooded pop culture beginning in the early 2010s—as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway smash Hamilton. But the arrival of the Trump era threw cold water on those feel-good vibes, and since Lincoln, presidential biopics have largely failed to connect with crowds. Two lightweight depictions of Barack Obama’s young adulthood arrived in 2016, but neither reckoned with his complicated presidency. In 2017, Rob Reiner delivered the ambivalent and uneven LBJ, which sank at the box office and made little impression on audiences. Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese developed and seemingly abandoned a Teddy Roosevelt biopic.

In development for more than a decade, Reagan emerges from a more plainly partisan perspective. Its producer, Mark Joseph, once called The Reagans, the 2003 TV movie starring James Brolin, “insulting” to the former president. Though Reagan director Sean McNamara expressed hope that his film would unite people across political lines, its source material, The Crusader, is a book by Paul Kengor, a conservative who has written eight books about Reagan and who presently works at a right-wing think tank. And its star, Dennis Quaid, is among Hollywood’s most prominent Trump supporters. In July, Quaid appeared on Fox News live from the Republican National Convention, proclaiming that Reagan would help Americans born after 1985 “get a glimpse of what this country was.”     

The notable presidential biopics of the past were prestige pictures that at least tried to appeal to a wide swath of the moviegoing public, across political spectrums. Even 2008’s W., Stone’s spiritual sequel to Nixon—inferior by far, and disappointingly conventional in its biographical beats—is hardly the liberal excoriation many viewers might have expected from the director; it was even criticized for going too easy on George W. Bush. Released during the waning months of his presidency, when Bush-bashing was low-hanging fruit for audiences, the film portrays the 43rd president as a lovable screwup with crippling daddy issues. As Timothy Noah argued in Slate at the time, “W. is the rare Oliver Stone film that had to tone down the historical record because the truth was too lurid.”

Instead, new entries like Reagan and Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, the more nuanced film, reflect the market demands of a more fragmented moviegoing public—and reality. Rarely do two movies about the same era of American history have so little audience overlap. Set from 1973 to 1986, The Apprentice portrays Trump (Sebastian Stan) as a young sociopath-in-training, dramatizing his rise to business mogul and his relationship with mentor Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), a Svengali of capitalist chicanery molding a monster in his own image. In the most shocking scenes, the film depicts Trump brutally raping his wife, Ivana, and undergoing liposuction surgery. (Ivana accused Trump of rape in a 1990 divorce deposition, then recanted the allegation decades later. Trump’s campaign has called the movie a “malicious defamation.”) The film, in other words, gives confirmation—and a sleazily gripping origin story—to those who already believe Trump is a malevolent con man and irredeemable misogynist. It knows what its viewers want.

[Read: How the GOP went from Reagan to Trump]

So, seemingly, does Reagan, which shows its protagonist primarily as the Great Communicator who tore down that wall. But as the Reagan biographer Max Boot recently wrote, “the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union were primarily the work of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—two consequences of his radically reformist policies … Reagan did not bring about Gorbachev’s reforms, much less force the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Reagan resists such nuance, hewing instead to a predictable hero’s narrative. Soviet leaders are swathed in visual clichés: grotesque men sipping vodka in cigar-filled rooms.

Meanwhile, the film renders Reagan’s domestic critics without sophistication or dignity. As Matthew Dallek chronicles in his book The Right Moment, Reagan spent much of his 1966 campaign to become California’s governor sensationalizing and condemning marches protesting the Vietnam War at UC Berkeley, and later called for a “bloodbath” against the campus left. In the film, we see Reagan, as the state’s governor, calling in the National Guard to crack down on Berkeley protesters, but we never learn what these students are protesting; Vietnam is scarcely referenced. (A nastier incident, in which Reagan-sent cops in riot gear opened fire on student protesters and killed one, goes unmentioned.)

A less slanted film might have interrogated the conflict between Reagan’s anti-totalitarian Cold War rhetoric and his crackdown on demonstrators at home. It might also have reckoned with the president’s devastating failure to confront the AIDS epidemic, a fact the movie only fleetingly references, via a few shots of ACT UP demonstrators slotted into a generic montage of Reagan critics set to Genesis’s “Land of Confusion.” But Reagan remains tethered to the great-man theory of history, in which Reagan single-handedly ended the Cold War, preserved America’s standing in the world, and beat back lefty Communist sympathizers. A match-cut transition, from a shot of newly retired Reagan swinging an axe at his ranch to young “wallpeckers” taking axes to the Berlin Wall in 1989, literalizes the message for grade-school viewers: The Gipper brought down the wall himself. It’s not that the movie is too kind to Reagan—but by flattening him in this way, it robs him of the conflicts and contradictions that made him a figure worth thinking about today.

In this way, too, Reagan forms a curious contrast to Nixon. A central message of Stone’s film is that even if Nixon had wanted to end the Vietnam War, he was powerless to act against the desires of the deep state (or “the beast,” as Hopkins’s Nixon calls it). In a defining scene, a young anti-war demonstrator confronts the president. “You can’t stop it, can you?” she realizes. “Because it’s not you. It’s the system. The system won’t let you stop it.” Nixon is stunned into stammering disbelief.

Indeed, Stone’s trilogy of films about U.S. presidents (JFK, Nixon, and W.) all reflect some paranoia about the dark forces of state power. (The unabashedly conspiratorial JFK suggests that Kennedy was eliminated by the CIA and/or the military-industrial complex because he didn’t fall in line with their covert objectives.) They are stories of ambitious leaders whose presidencies were hijacked or truncated by forces beyond their comprehension—movies whose villains are shadowy figures operating within the bowels of the U.S. government. It’s not just Stone’s view of state power that makes his films more interesting; it’s that he takes into account forces larger than one man, regardless of that man’s own accomplishments.   

Reagan’s vision of the institution is more facile. Its hero is endowed with near-mythical power to end wars and solve domestic woes; its villains are as clearly labeled as a map of the Kremlin. The film’s simplistic pandering vaporizes complexity and undercuts the cinematic aims of a presidential biopic. It’s a profitable film because it instead adheres to the market incentives of modern cable news: Tell viewers what they want to hear, and give them a clear and present enemy.     

In his 2011 book, The Reactionary Mind, the political theorist Corey Robin argues that the end of the Cold War had proven unkind to the conservative movement by depriving it of a distinct enemy. For today’s GOP, a good adversary is hard to find—in the past few years, its leaders have grasped around haphazardly in search of one: trans people, Haitian immigrants, childless women. (And, as always, Hillary Clinton.) In Reagan, though, the world is much simpler: There’s an evil empire 5,000 miles away, and a California cowboy is the only man who can beat it. It’s a flat narrative fit for one of his old B movies.

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Alex Jones looked different in the final hours of Infowars, as though he were ready for something new. Broadcasting from his Austin studio for the last time yesterday, Jones had shaved his head and ditched his standard shirt and blazer (no tie) in favor of a T-shirt with a massive red Infowars logo. For $49.99, you could buy the same shirt on his website. “Every purchase of this T-shirt goes directly to ensuring that no matter what obstacles arise, Alex Jones will continue to broadcast the truth,” the product description reads.

Jones had lost a yearslong legal battle with the parents of Sandy Hook victims, who were terrorized by Infowars fans after Jones falsely accused them of being “crisis actors.” Last year, he was ordered to pay more than $1 billion in damages to the Sandy Hook parents, forcing him to declare bankruptcy and sell his company. Yesterday morning, The Onion announced that it had bought Infowars at auction, and would turn the site into a satire platform. During his final broadcast, Jones said he was supposed to vacate the Infowars headquarters at some point that day. After 25 years, during which Jones turned a local talk-radio show into his own conspiratorial media empire, it was all ending.

Or was it? “The studios are humming and ready,” Jones said into the camera during the final stream, which happened on X rather than on the Infowars website. “They’re just three miles from here. We’re ready to go.” Jones has already established his next plan: He will, of course, continue streaming through a new website unaffiliated with the Infowars brand. And there’s good reason to suspect that it will work. After Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News, he continued to stay relevant and garner an audience on the show he hosts on X. Jones still has 3.2 million followers on X that he can direct to wherever he ends up going. (He was banned from Twitter in 2018 but reinstated by Elon Musk last year.)

His approach to conspiracism—world-encompassing theories in service of far-right ends—is now common, a fact that the show itself likes to take credit for. Modern conspiracism is all “downstream from Alex Jones,” another Infowars personality, Owen Shroyer, said in the show’s final stream. “What started at Infowars has metastasized.”

Losing Infowars is still consequential for Jones, even as he begins broadcasting from a new studio and website. Infowars’ precise influence is hard to track, but as of 2022, his show was broadcast on about 30 radio stations, and to millions who tune in online. Jones also still faces financial challenges. The Onion has taken over his supplement business, a significant source of his revenue. He will owe money to Sandy Hook families until he pays off his remaining debt.

Jones will weather this with the support of some powerful friends, however. Steve Bannon appeared on the final stream, and on Wednesday, Roger Stone broke the news live on Infowars that Tulsi Gabbard is Donald Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence. Jones also has had a relationship with the president-elect that could be to his advantage in the future: He interviewed Trump in 2015, early in his presidential campaign. In 2016, he was a VIP guest at Trump’s GOP-nominee acceptance speech. And in 2021, J. D. Vance praised him as a “truth-teller.”

At one point while I watched the Infowars broadcast, the video cut away from Jones. This was it. Then, Shroyer and another Infowars personality, Harrison H. Smith, popped up to keep things going. Jones yelled something at them from off camera about lawyers coming in. Each successive moment of the stream felt like it could be the final one. Shroyer and Smith kept speaking in a series of dramatic aphorisms, as though they were putting the finishing touches on a monologue. Then they would pick right back up and do it again. “The system doesn’t want you to know this information” flowed into “This is not a victory for the bad guys. This is them being revealed and brought out in the open. This will only backfire.” After teasing that the stream was about to end, Shroyer interjected with: “It’s all happening right now. History is unfolding.” This had to be it. Nope. He continued: “We are the Jedi; we are destined to win in the end.”

Then Jones came back for more. “I will never surrender; I will never back down,” he said. Jones then began to muddle his way through something about how his sinking ship was tied to a new ship and that a whole armada was coming, but the armada was a stand-in for the American people. He couldn’t end his ending. The camera cut to a zoomed-out shot of him in his studio, alone at his desk, glumly looking down at some papers, with monitors showing the Infowars logo around him for the last time. The stream cut out.

And then it came back. Jones appeared in the studio, but in a different shirt, suggesting that the segment was prerecorded. Wistful, cinematic music played while Jones excitedly hawked one of his supplements—something called “Ultimate Hydraforce.” Jones joked that he was going to get in trouble for false advertising because, as it turned out, Ultimate Hydraforce wasn’t just hydrating; it was also a pre-workout supplement and has some other beneficial stuff as well. “I always seek to bring you the very best supplements; you can get the best results and come back and get them again,” Jones said. Infowars is ending. But Infowars will never really be over.

A month after his election in 2016, Donald Trump chose Andrew Puzder, a longtime fast-food-company CEO, to be his secretary of labor. Most of Trump’s Cabinet picks moved smoothly through the confirmation process, but Puzder’s nomination languished amid allegations of wage theft, sexual harassment, and spousal abuse, as well as his acknowledgment that he had hired an undocumented immigrant as a nanny and not paid her taxes. By February 2017, he gave up and withdrew his nomination.

Being a president’s most troubled or scandal-ridden nominee is dangerous—like being the weakest or sickest member of the herd when predators start to circle. Republican senators probably calculated that if they rejected Puzder, Trump would send a pick with less baggage and higher qualifications, which is exactly what he did: Alex Acosta, the eventual selection, had a long government résumé and easily won confirmation.

Something very different is happening with Trump’s Cabinet picks this time. Less than two weeks have passed since the election, but the president-elect has already put forward a batch of nominees so aberrant by historical standards that any one of them would have been a gigantic story in the past. (Hello, Attorney General–designate Matt Gaetz.) Each one barely holds the media’s attention for an hour or two before the next nomination eclipses them. (Whoops, I didn’t see you there, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.)

If Senate Republicans reject one of these unqualified nominees, how can they justify saying yes to any? And yet, how could they reject the whole slate of nominees by a president from their own party, who is so popular among their own voters? Perversely, the sheer quantity of individually troubling nominees might actually make it harder for the Senate to block any of them.

[Elaine Godfrey: Either way, Matt Gaetz wins]

The list of wild picks also includes Tulsi Gabbard, the walking embodiment of horseshoe theory and Trump’s nominee to be director of national intelligence; Pete Hegseth, a square-jawed Fox News host tapped by Trump to lead the Pentagon; and Kristi Noem, a governor with no national-security experience, selected to head the Department of Homeland Security. By the time anyone gets around to noting that Trump is appointing his personal lawyers (who defended him in his several criminal trials) to top legal posts in the government, who will have the energy to be shocked?

We don’t know yet if the Senate will confirm any or all of these nominees, but weariness is apparent in the voices of Republican senators, who face a choice between approving Trump’s nominees and allowing Trump to use a dubious constitutional work-around to appoint them without requiring a Senate vote. Many have gasped or raised pained questions about Gaetz, and some have even predicted that his nomination will fail, but none has publicly pledged to vote against him.

Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana is a medical doctor who has shown a willingness to buck Trump and even voted to convict him during Trump’s second impeachment; he’s the incoming chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Yet Cassidy responded to the preposterous HHS nomination by posting on X that Kennedy “has championed issues like healthy foods and the need for greater transparency in our public health infrastructure. I look forward to learning more about his other policy positions and how they will support a conservative, pro-American agenda.”

This isn’t how things used to work. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated former Senator John Tower to be secretary of defense. Few could question Tower’s credentials. A World War II veteran, he’d served nearly 20 years on the Armed Services Committee; he later investigated the Iran-Contra affair. But allegations of womanizing and alcohol abuse led the Senate to reject his nomination, even though the body tends to give former and current members an easy ride. Hegseth, by comparison, is a veteran but has no government experience, has a history of infidelity and was in 2017 accused of sexual assault, and has expressed various extreme views, including lobbying Trump to pardon American soldiers accused of murdering prisoners and unarmed civilians. (Trump granted the pardons.)

Or consider Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, whom President Barack Obama nominated to lead HHS in 2009. Daschle was forced to withdraw his nomination over $140,000 in unpaid back taxes. That was a serious lapse, yet it feels quaint compared to Kennedy’s or Gaetz’s dubious résumé.

[Franklin Foer: Why the Gaetz announcement is already destroying the government]

A clear sign of how much things have changed may come from Puzder, whom Trump is reportedly considering nominating as labor secretary again. If Senate Republicans are willing to approve the same guy they rejected eight years ago, the advice-and-consent guardrails will be well and truly gone.

The circuslike bombardment of freakishly unqualified personnel picks calls to mind Steve Bannon’s notorious insight that the press can handle only so much information, real or fake, without being overloaded. Uncovering, verifying, debunking, and explaining information takes time and resources. “The real opposition is the media,” Bannon told the journalist Michael Lewis in 2018. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Something similar might apply to U.S. senators who might otherwise be tempted to show some independence.

Ascribing too much strategic intent to Trump is always a risk. The president-elect works from impulse and intuition. Trump selected Gaetz on a whim during a two-hour flight, according to The New York Times; Politico has reported that Susie Wiles, Trump’s campaign manager and incoming chief of staff, was on the plane but was unaware of the Gaetz pick. Even if Trump is not consciously following Bannon’s directive, however, the effect is the same. Intentionally or otherwise, the shit level is high and rising.

One of the many troubling consequences of Donald Trump’s reelection is that he will largely avoid responsibility for his conduct in his four criminal cases. No other criminal defendant in American history has had the power to shut down his own prosecution. This is an unprecedented and wrenching affront to the principle that no one is above the law.

The potential exception is the New York State case. In May, a jury found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts related to falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 election.

Justice Juan Merchan recently granted the parties’ joint request to pause the New York proceedings while both sides consider what should be done in light of Trump’s reelection. Trump’s attorneys claim that the case must be dismissed altogether to avoid “unconstitutional impediments to President Trump’s ability to govern.” Even the district attorney’s office said it wants time to consider how the court should balance the “competing interests” of the jury verdict and the needs of the office of the presidency.

Out of an abundance of caution, Merchan avoided a preelection sentencing that potentially could have influenced the election. But the election result changes nothing about the criminal case. Now that the election is over, sentencing should proceed promptly.

[Quinta Jurecic: Bye-bye, Jack Smith]

Once in office, Trump may cancel federal prosecutions of himself and his allies. He has threatened to use the Justice Department to pursue political opponents. He may seek to bend the justice system to his will in unprecedented ways. But that doesn’t mean the DA or Merchan should “obey in advance” by abandoning the jury’s verdict.

Trump’s attorneys are essentially arguing that the election wipes the slate clean, that the people have spoken and all criminal matters must be dismissed. His former attorney general William Barr made a similar point in an interview with Fox News, where he called on prosecutors to drop all the pending criminal cases. “The American people have rendered their verdict on President Trump,” Barr argued. Prosecutors, he said, should “respect the people’s decision and dismiss the cases against President Trump now.”

What nonsense. The election was not a “verdict” on Trump’s criminality. A majority of voters apparently concluded that Trump’s criminal cases were not disqualifying—just as the sexual assaults, pandemic response, efforts to overturn the last election, and many other things apparently were not disqualifying. That doesn’t mean they didn’t happen or that Trump is not legally and morally responsible.

No doubt all public-official defendants would like to be able to say that winning their next election means everyone should just forget about their alleged crimes. That’s not how our system works. An election is not a jury verdict, and winning an election doesn’t make you any less guilty.

When it comes to Trump, the New York case may be the rule of law’s last stand. As president, Trump is sure to swiftly kill off the two pending federal prosecutions—the classified-documents case in Florida and the January 6 case in D.C. He may not even need to do it himself. Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Justice Department have already begun discussing how to wind down the cases, based on the DOJ policy that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.

Even if the current Justice Department were to attempt to keep the cases alive somehow—such as by merely agreeing to pause them until Trump is out of office in four years—the new Trump Justice Department will simply dismiss them. Trump may pardon his co-defendants and co-conspirators, and may even try to pardon himself.

Unlike with the federal cases, Trump cannot unilaterally make the state prosecutions go away. The Georgia case is currently mired in appeals over whether the DA should be disqualified for a conflict of interest. But although the Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president does not bind the states, the reality is that a state will not be allowed to put a sitting president on trial. If prosecutors survive the appeals, the trial might proceed against the remaining defendants in a year or two. But any potential trial of Trump is sure, at a minimum, to be postponed until he is out of office—and who knows whether there will be any appetite to pursue the case at that point.

That leaves New York. Until he granted the most recent extension of time, Merchan was set to rule on November 12 on Trump’s claim that the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity requires dismissal of his convictions. That argument is a long shot, because almost all of Trump’s relevant conduct in the case took place before he was president. And although Trump is arguing that a few items of evidence in his trial should have been barred by immunity, those claims are unlikely to derail the convictions. Assuming Merchan denies the motion to dismiss, sentencing was set for November 26—until the election results cast that into doubt.

The sentencing should go forward. The argument by Trump’s attorneys that the entire case should be dismissed based on his reelection amounts to nothing more than a claim that a president (or in this case, a president-elect) is above the law and may never be held criminally accountable. Thanks to the election results and the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, that appalling claim may often be true—but it doesn’t have to be in this case.

The defense claim that sentencing would unconstitutionally impede “Trump’s ability to govern” is laughable. Trump is not yet the president. He’s not responsible for governing anything other than his transition. A sentencing proceeding would involve a few hours in a New York courtroom—probably less time than a round of golf. He could squeeze it in.

[David A. Graham: The twisted logic of Trump’s attacks on judges]

The defense may be suggesting that if Trump were sentenced to prison, that would interfere with his duties. It’s true that a prison sentence could be problematic. If Merchan were inclined to sentence Trump to prison, he would likely stay that sentence pending appeal. Once Trump was in office, even if the convictions were affirmed, the state presumably would not be allowed to jail the sitting president.

In the unlikely event of Merchan trying to jail Trump immediately, a higher court would undoubtedly intervene. The federal courts are no more likely to allow a state to jail the president-elect than to allow a state to jail the president.

But Merchan has sentencing options short of locking up the president-elect. He could impose a fine and/or sentence Trump to probation, suspending the service of any probationary period until Trump leaves office. He could even impose a jail sentence but similarly suspend that until Trump is no longer president.

At this point, the details of the sentence are less important than the sentencing taking place. Justice requires that the criminal process be completed. The defendant has been found guilty by a jury. The next step, in the ordinary course, is for the judge to impose a sentence. That will formalize Donald Trump’s record as a convicted felon. Even if Trump ends up with no substantial sentence, that’s an important legal and historical statement.

Once he is sentenced, Trump’s attorneys may appeal his convictions. That can proceed with almost no involvement from Trump himself. The appeals process will be handled by the lawyers and will not interfere with any of his presidential duties. His convictions may be affirmed on appeal or they may be tossed out, but there’s no reason the regular criminal process can’t continue.

Although the idea was unthinkable to many of us, a criminal can be president of the United States. The people have spoken, as Trump’s attorneys and supporters would say. But just as Trump’s criminal cases did not prevent his reelection, the election should not prevent the regular criminal process in New York from concluding. This sentencing must proceed.