Biden Issues Sweeping Deportation Protections Before Trump Takes Office - The New York Times

Biden Issues Sweeping Deportation Protections Before Trump Takes Office

"The move allows hundreds of thousands of people from Sudan, Ukraine, El Salvador and Venezuela to stay in the country temporarily.

Jan. 10, 2025

Migrants waiting at a welcome center in El Paso last month.Paul Ratje for The New York Times

The Biden administration on Friday issued sweeping extensions of deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of people from Sudan, Ukraine, El Salvador and Venezuela in a move that makes it almost impossible for President-elect Donald J. Trump to swiftly strip the benefit when he takes office.

The extension of Temporary Protected Status, as the program is called, allows the immigrants to remain in the country with work permits and a shield from deportation for another 18 months from the expiration of their current protection in the spring. Late last year, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken recommended the protections be extended in a series of letters.

For decades, Democratic and Republican administrations have designated the protection for citizens of countries that are in upheaval and deemed unsafe to return to. President Biden has expanded who could receive the status, as war erupted in Ukraine and instability gripped countries like Venezuela and Haiti.

“These designations are rooted in careful review and interagency collaboration to ensure those affected by environmental disasters and instability are given the protections they need while continuing to contribute meaningfully to our communities,” said Representative Adriano Espaillat of New York, the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Mr. Trump has vowed to end the program, at least for certain countries. Immigrant advocates had been urging the Biden administration to extend it for many of those countries before he takes office.

In his first term, Mr. Trump terminated the status for about 400,000 people from El Salvadorand other countries, arguing that conditions there had changed and that the protection was no longer warranted. The move was challenged in court and did not take effect, but he is expected to try again during his second term, as part of his pledge to conduct mass deportations.

According to the Congressional Research Service, more than a million migrants from countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East had Temporary Protected Status as of 2024.

The move makes it legally difficult for Mr. Trump to roll back the protections for citizens of the four countries, at least until they expire some time in 2026.

“Because President Biden has extended protection for the nationals of all these countries, President Trump will be unable to deport these individuals any time soon, “ said Steve Yale-Loehr, an immigration scholar at Cornell Law School.

”Trump can’t ignore what Congress wrote into law in 1990,” he said.

About 600,000 Venezuelans who currently have the protection will be allowed to renew and remain in the United States until October 2026, and approximately 232,000 immigrants from El Salvador will be able to do so. More than 100,000 Ukrainians will also be able to remain in the United States until October 2026. Some 1,900 people from Sudan will also be allowed to renew their status.

The program was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush to ensure that foreign citizens already in the United States can remain in the country if it is not safe for them to return to their home country because of a natural disaster, armed conflict or other upheaval.

On the campaign trail, JD Vance, the vice president-elect, called the program illegal when he criticized Haitians who had settled in his home state of Ohio and benefited from it. Haiti has been experiencing political turmoil and gang violence, and some 200,000 of its citizens are protected from removal under T.P.S. until early 2026.

“We’re going to stop doing mass grants of Temporary Protected Status,” Mr. Vance said in October.

Critics have argued that the temporary protections are extended repeatedly and serve as a de facto means to enable people to stay in the country indefinitely, contrary to its intention of being a short-term solution.

While the program has become all but permanent for many immigrants, it also highlights how troubled many corners of the world are and the failure of Congress to pass legislation to update the U.S. immigration system to the realities of contemporary global migration.

Immigrants from several countries, including El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, have been eligible for the protection for more than two decades. Other countries, such as Ethiopia, Lebanon and Syria were added more recently.

If the status were eliminated, hundreds of thousands of immigrants would immediately become unlawful residents of the United States, unless they immediately departed. Many of them have U.S.-born children, businesses and jobs in sectors that rely on immigrant labor such as construction, hospitality and health care.

In cities like Denver, temporary status has allowed thousands of Venezuelans, who arrived in the last two years from the southern border on buses provided by the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, to legally work there and integrate into the economy.

Mike Johnston, the city’s mayor, said that he applauded the Biden administration’s announcement to extend the designation.

“In Denver, folks with Temporary Protected Status are working critical jobs, contributing to our economy and becoming integral members of our communities,” he said.

Gonzalo Roa, 43, a Venezuelan who is a beneficiary in Columbus, Ohio, said that he had been anxious about the fate of the program.

“It is great news that it’s being renewed,” said Mr. Roa, who works at a car dealership and runs a small restaurant with his wife.

Without the status, Mr. Roa said, he would lose his job at the dealership and his two Venezuelan-born children would not be eligible for college scholarships and other benefits that require legal status.

A correction was made on 

Jan. 10, 2025

: 

An earlier version of this article, relying on a statement from the office of Representative Adriano Espaillat of New York, misattributed a comment to Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary. It was Mr. Espaillat who praised the decision to grant Temporary Protected Status to migrants from several countries, not Mr. Mayorkas. The article also misstated the month when extended Temporary Protected Status for more than 100,000 Ukrainians is set to expire. It is October 2026, not August.

Miriam Jordan reports from a grass roots perspective on immigrants and their impact on the demographics, society and economy of the United States. More about Miriam Jordan"

Biden Issues Sweeping Deportation Protections Before Trump Takes Office - The New York Times

This Part of Mozambique Was Like Paradise. Now It’s a Terrorist Hotbed. - The New York Times

This Part of Mozambique Was Like Paradise. Now It’s a Terrorist Hotbed.

"Islamic State militants have rampaged across the northern Cabo Delgado Province for more than seven years. The government says the situation has stabilized. Residents tell a different story.

Jan. 12, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET

By John Eligon and Tavares Cebola

Photographs by Joao Silva

John Eligon, Tavares Cebola and Joao Silva reported from Mocimboa da Praia, Macomia, Pemba and Ibo Island in Cabo Delgado Province, Mozambique.

In October, we traveled to the Cabo Delgado Province in northern Mozambique to understand how terrorists who claim an affiliation with the Islamic State have gained a foothold and wreaked havoc on Muslims and Christians alike.

Officials in the region and in the West say they are deeply concerned that if the Islamic State affiliate known as ISIS-Mozambique is not contained, then the loosely linked Islamic State network that has been gaining ground in pockets of Africa could become a bigger global threat.

What locals call “the war” has robbed the region of what was a largely peaceful life of fishing and farming.

Nearly 6,000 people have been killed and up to half of the province’s 2.3 million people have been displaced. Finding food and shelter has become a daily struggle in a province rich with natural resources like rubies, gas and timber.

Since our visit, the country has grown only more tense. After a disputed presidential election, Mozambique has been engulfed in the worst election-related violence since a long-running civil war ended in 1992. Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets across the country to protest a result that many believe was rigged by the governing party, Frelimo. Nearly 300 people have been killed during the protests, according to Decide Electoral Platform, a civil society organization.

On top of that, Cabo Delgado and Nampula province to the south took a direct hit from Cyclone Chido in mid-December, killing as many as 120 people, displacing tens of thousands, and leaving many without food and clean water.

Mozambican soldiers on an airstrip in the town of Macomia, which was attacked by Islamic State militants last year. 

Schools have reopened in Macomia after being closed for eight months because of the insurgency.

Amid the chaos, insurgent attacks have risen sharply in Cabo Delgado, creating new uncertainty after government officials earlier had said they had largely defeated ISIS-Mozambique.

There is little doubt that the insurgency is at its weakest, diplomats and security analysts say, down to a few hundred fighters from several thousand. That is mostly because international troops, led by the Rwandan military, have picked up the slack for Mozambique’s ill-equipped and ill-trained armed forces.

But insurgents have now broken into small groups scattered across the dense forests of a province roughly the size of Austria, turning the conflict into a game of Whac-a-Mole, security experts said. Attacks are smaller than in the past. But they were more frequent in 2024 than in 2023, and have spread to previously unaffected areas.

“The government is doing the best it can,” Valige Tauabo, the governor of the province, said in an interview.

Where the Insurgency Began

Our Cessna 206 landed on an airstrip in Mocimboa da Praia, a sleepy fishing village that was the birthplace of the insurgency. A Rwandan soldier in battle gear surveilled us from the control tower.

Because of the high risk of ambushes, we had chartered a flight from the provincial capital, Pemba, a luxury few residents can afford. 

We hopped into a sedan that wove around barricades set up by the Rwandan military and made our way into the village.

In October 2017, more than two dozen insurgents raided a police station in Mocimboa da Praia and killed two officers in the first attack of the insurgency.

Back then, the group called itself Al Shabab (analysts say it is unaffiliated with the Shabab in Somalia). Researchers say it had begun forming around 2005, when the teachings of extremist clerics from neighboring Tanzania to the north began infiltrating the mosques and madrassas in Cabo Delgado.

To win recruits, the extremists told the locals that while they struggled in poverty, their land was rich in natural resources. Lucrative natural gas reserves that had attracted some $24 billion in foreign investment, including nearly $5 billion from the United States, were nearby, off the coastal town of Palma.

Resentment of the government grew with multiple reports of the Mozambican military assaulting or killing civilians in Palma.

But the insurgents’ early message quickly got lost in their brutality.

In March 2020, Islamist militants gathered village residents on a soccer field in Mocimboa da Praia and warned them not to associate with the government, or “we’re going to decapitate everyone,” recalled Sanula Issa.

Sanula Issa, whose husband was killed by insurgents in 2020. 

Voting at a school in Pemba during national elections in October.

Only a couple of weeks later, Ms. Issa said, she was startled awake early one morning by gunfire and shouts of, “Allahu akbar!”

She raced to the beach with her husband and three children, she said, and tried to pile into boats with others. But the insurgents grabbed her husband and decapitated him with a machete, said Ms. Issa, 33, wiping away tears with a pink head scarf.

“They are evil,” said Ms. Issa, who once cooked rice for sailors. “They ruined people’s lives — innocent people.”

But it is not as though the locals turned to the government.

“Our dislike goes both ways,” said Rabia Muandimo Issa, who is no relation to Sanula Issa. She lost her brother and sister, and her home in Mocimboa da Praia, in an insurgent attack five years ago. “We don’t see good coming either from the government or the insurgents.”

A Displacement Crisis

For most of his 20 years, Muinde Macassari had a comfortable life in a shack near the ocean, fishing with his family. But since insurgents stormed his seaside village of Quiterajo two years ago, he has been sleeping on blankets in his aunt’s yard in Pemba, sharing a tent with two relatives.

The heat in the tattered tent becomes oppressive, and rain trickles through the torn canvas.

Hundreds of thousands of people have returned to their communities, only to find that their jobs, homes and stability are now gone.

Hundreds of thousands of others, like Mr. Macassari, live displaced in unfamiliar communities.

More than 80,000 displaced people are now crowding into Pemba, which had previously held about 200,000 residents. Aid organizations say Mozambique’s conflict does not get the assistance it needs because it is overshadowed by other global crises. 

Mothers with children wrapped to their backs crowd clinics for child malnutrition treatment. Displaced people cram into the low-slung homes of family, friends and good Samaritans, using bedsheets as dividing walls.

A health clinic in Pemba.

Muinde Macassari was kidnapped and forced to join the insurgents two years ago.

Mr. Macassari sleeps outside because his aunt’s squat, two-bedroom concrete home is already full with 10 people.

He had been kidnapped by the insurgents, he said, forced to wash their clothes and stand guard, but says he was never sent into battle. He slept in the forest on an uncomfortable bed made of coconut tree leaves and ate just occasional portions of rice, corn and cassava.

Mr. Macassari said he understood some of the grievances the extremists preached — about the political elite riding around in fancy cars while everyone else was poor. But if the insurgents’ complaints are with the government, Mr. Macassari wondered, “why then are they killing innocent people?”

He escaped one night, using a bathroom break as an excuse, he said. He ran through the bush until he made it to a nearby village.

A Sour Homecoming

When insurgents captured Cheia Cassiano during an attack on Mocimboa da Praia in early 2020, they offered him a choice: You can join us, or we can kill you.

Over the next year, Mr. Cassiano, now 37, said the insurgents forced him to run, lift weights, fire a gun — and attack villages. They preached their message loudly: The war will not end until the end of the world; men should wear pants and women long skirts; everyone needed to pledge fealty to Islam, not the government.

“I was anxious,” Mr. Cassiano said. “Within the insurgency, when you don’t perform according to the plan, they can kill you.”

The insurgents seized control of Mocimboa da Praia in August 2020 and held it for a year, until troops from Rwanda and countries in southern Africa drove them out. It was the longest the insurgents had occupied a town over the course of the conflict.

Mocimboa da Praia emptied out during the occupation in 2020. But in 2022, residents began returning and life in many ways seems to have returned to normal. A market in the center of town buzzes at night with street vendors and growling motorcycle taxis. Fishermen gather around a sandy cove at sunrise, preparing nets and wooden boats, and drying out fish on tarps. Teams compete on dirt soccer fields.

Cheia Cassiano, who was forced to fight for the insurgents, in Mocimboa da Praia.

A market in Mocimboa da Praia, which was occupied by insurgents for a year.

But with just a little probing, it is easy to find deep physical and mental scars.

The steeple of the Catholic church in the center of town stands tall, but most of the building has been reduced to rubble. Next door, an elementary school is mostly gutted, with faded writing on a chalkboard reminding parents of a deadline, now years old, to enroll their children. A hospital infirmary is just a metal skeleton.

Where statues once stood of two of Mozambique’s liberation heroes, Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Machel, there are just broken foundations.

Many residents returned after the fighting to find empty patches of dirt where their homes made of red clay and thin logs once stood.

Mr. Cassiano, who joined the fighters after he was kidnapped, said his house had been burned down. He has rebuilt it and now sells fish for a living, but carries a visible scar of the conflict: He is missing his right hand. He said that he got into a dispute with his fellow insurgents over a bicycle he took from a village they raided. They accused him of stealing the bike from a group leader, he said, and, in accordance with their interpretation of Shariah law, chopped off his hand.

Trying to Heal

At a community center next to a displacement camp in Mocimboa da Praia, children in an art therapy workshop sometimes draw stick figures without heads, or sculpt mounds of clay into rifles.

One recent day, children sat in a circle singing, keeping the rhythm by slapping rock-filled plastic bottles on the ground.

“Children have the right to play,” they sang, “and to live as a child.”

A traditional dance called Mapiko at a community center that helps children affected by the conflict.

A school that is no longer in use after the insurgents’ yearlong occupation of Mocimboa da Praia.

One 12-year-old said she was only 8 when she was kidnapped by insurgents from Mocimboa da Praia and sexually assaulted multiple times while in captivity. She was once beaten for not putting on her hijab properly. She escaped into the bush with several women, and says she ate sand to stay alive.

She acted erratically when she returned home, said her aunt and uncle, whom she lives with because her parents were killed in an insurgent attack.

“I have seen people killed!” she would scream in sudden outbursts, her aunt said.

She is now back in school, and said she has begun to recover by spending time with other child survivors who gather at the center, run by the Foundation for Community Development, a local nonprofit. As we sat on the ground speaking, she stared downward, tracing the sand with a twig. The horrific things she has experienced, she said, are now motivation for her life ahead.

“I want to be a nurse,” she said, “to help other people in my community.”

John Eligon is the Johannesburg bureau chief for The Times, covering a wide range of events and trends that influence and shape the lives of ordinary people across southern Africa. More about John Eligon"

This Part of Mozambique Was Like Paradise. Now It’s a Terrorist Hotbed. - The New York Times

The Rachel Maddow Show 1/11/2025 | 🅼🆂🅽🅱️🅲 BREAKING NEWS Today January 11...

An American Savage!

Deadline: White House 1/11/2025 | 🅼🆂🅽🅱️🅲 BREAKING NEWS Today January 11,...

Jack Smith, Who Led Prosecutions of Trump, Resigns

(What a pathetic country)

​

“Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed to investigate former President Donald Trump, has resigned. Smith, who faced legal setbacks in both the classified documents and election interference cases, left his position after Trump’s political victory, as the Justice Department cannot pursue prosecutions against a sitting president. The release of Smith’s final report detailing his decision-making in both cases remains uncertain, with Trump’s legal team opposing its publication.

​

Mr. Smith, a special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, had signaled that he would step down before Donald J. Trump’s inauguration.

Jan. 11, 2025Updated 7:32 p.m. ET

Jack Smith, the special counsel, in August 2023.Kevin Wurm/Reuters

Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought two failed federal prosecutions against President-elect Donald J. Trump, resigned this week, according to a footnote buried in court papers — a remarkably muted conclusion to a fight that redefined the nation’s legal and political landscape.

Mr. Smith, a former war crimes prosecutor who fought a bitter and protracted battle on two fronts with the Trump legal team but lost in both a district court and in the Supreme Court shaped by Mr. Trump, left his offices in Washington on Friday, according to a senior law enforcement official.

His departure was expected. Mr. Smith had signaled his intention to leave before Mr. Trump, who had threatened to fire and punish him, took office on Jan. 20.

In the end, Mr. Smith made no formal announcement. His spokesman had no comment.

The special counsel departed after his efforts in the courtroom were essentially rendered moot by Mr. Trump’s political victory in November. Under a Justice Department policy prohibiting the pursuit of prosecutions against a sitting president, Mr. Smith was compelled to drop both of the cases he had filed against Mr. Trump in 2023 — one in Florida, accusing him of mishandling a trove of classified documents, and the other in Washington, on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

Mr. Smith’s final week was marked by one more legal setback at the hands of Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Trump-appointed jurist presiding over the Florida documents case: She temporarily blocked public release of his final report until at least Monday.

The monumental legal saga, which embittered Mr. Trump and steeled him for his remarkable return to power, ended with a single line at the bottom of the last page of a brief sent to Judge Cannon on Saturday: “The special counsel completed his work and submitted his final confidential report on Jan. 7, 2025, and separated from the department on Jan. 10.”

Mr. Smith’s resignation left unfinished one last step in the more than two-year odyssey he undertook by investigating and ultimately bringing charges against Mr. Trump: the release of a two-volume report detailing his decision-making in both criminal cases.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers and lawyers for his two co-defendants in the documents case have been fighting fiercely for the past week to stop the release of both volumes. In court papers, they have assailed the report as a “one-sided” and “unlawful” political attack against the president-elect and complained it unfairly implicates some unnamed “anticipated” members of his incoming administration.

The report amounts to Mr. Smith’s valedictory word on the work he started when he was first appointed in November 2022, shortly after Mr. Trump announced he was running again for president. It contains his explanations of why he brought the charges he did in the two cases as well as his legal reasoning for not bringing other charges.

Each of the cases died in different ways.

The classified documents case was dismissed outright by Judge Cannon in a July ruling that found — against decades of precedent — that Mr. Smith had been unlawfully appointed to his job as special counsel. While Mr. Smith’s deputies appealed that ruling, they dropped the challenge where Mr. Trump was concerned after he was re-elected, but not against his two co-defendants.

Around the same time, the Supreme Court hobbled the election interference case in a landmark ruling that granted Mr. Trump a broad form of immunity for official acts he took as president. The ruling not only called into question many of the allegations in Mr. Smith’s indictment, but more important, made it impossible to hold a trial on the charges before the election.

Earlier this week, the Justice Department said it did not intend to immediately release the volume of Mr. Smith’s report concerning the classified documents case because the prosecution of Mr. Trump’s former co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, continued. The department said it planned to show that part of the report in private to members of Congress and make it public only once all of the proceedings against the two men had been completed.

The Justice Department does, however, plan to release the volume concerning the election interference case as soon as possible. But lawyers for Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira have asked Judge Cannon to extend her order blocking the report.

The two investigations of Mr. Trump were initially conducted by regular federal prosecutors. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland placed Mr. Smith in charge of the cases after Mr. Trump announced his plans to run for president in order to put some distance between the inquiries and the Justice Department.

Mr. Smith was “the right choice to complete these matters in an evenhanded and urgent manner,” Mr. Garland said in announcing the appointment of the upstate New York native, who had been serving as the top prosecutor at The Hague investigating war crimes in Kosovo.

Mr. Smith, 55, cut an elusive figure. He granted no interviews and kept a low profile — appearing before reporters only briefly to read short statements affirming his intention to investigate Mr. Trump fairly and quickly.

“Adherence to the rule of law is a bedrock principle of the Department of Justice,” said Mr. Smith, in announcing the Florida indictments in August 2023. “And our nation’s commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world. We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone.”

Now, Mr. Smith and the small team of veteran prosecutors who worked on the Trump cases may end up in the cross hairs of Republicans. Three of the Trump team lawyers he opposed have been given top positions in the Justice Department and the White House by Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly suggested that those who put him in the criminal dock should face consequences.

“I defeated deranged Jack Smith, he’s a deranged individual,” Mr. Trump told reporters in Florida this week. “We did nothing wrong. We did nothing wrong on anything.”

Some Democrats, including Representative Gerald E. Connolly of Virginia, the senior Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, have called on President Biden to issue a pre-emptive pardon of Mr. Smith and his team.

Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons. More about Glenn Thrush

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.  More about Alan Feuer“

INDIANS PARENTS ARE NOW REJECTING THEIR OWN BLACK CHILDREN OVER WHITE CH...

As a Felon, Trump Upends How Americans View the Presidency

​

“President-elect Donald Trump’s upcoming criminal sentencing for felony counts in a hush-money case marks a significant shift in presidential standards. Despite Trump’s efforts to discredit the case as politically motivated, voters have largely accepted his conviction, viewing it as a partisan issue rather than a disqualifier for office. This acceptance reflects a broader erosion of public trust in the legal system and a willingness to overlook past transgressions in favor of other political priorities.

​

President-elect Donald J. Trump has worked for years to discredit any and all criminal and civil cases against him as nothing more than politically motivated witch hunts.

Jan. 10, 2025

Trump Sentenced in N.Y. Case

A voter in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Election Day affixed their “I voted” sticker to their shirt featuring Mr. Trump’s mug shot.Eric Lee/The New York Times

By Peter Baker

Peter Baker has covered the past five presidents and wrote a book with his wife about Donald J. Trump’s first term.

A big economic package, mass deportations, maybe even some invasions of other countries. Oh, and one more item. “I’ll do my little thing tomorrow,” a busy President-elect Donald J. Trump mentioned the other night.

That little thing was the first criminal sentencing of an American president. That little thing was confirmation that Mr. Trump, just 10 days later, would become the first president to move into the White House with a rap sheet. That little thing is the latest shift in standards that once governed high office.

Mr. Trump does not really consider it a little thing, of course, given how strenuously he sought to avoid Friday’s sentencing for 34 felony counts in his hush money case. But to a remarkable degree, he has succeeded in making it a little thing in the body politic. What was once a pretty-much-guaranteed disqualifier for the presidency is now just one more political event seen through a partisan lens.

After all, no one seemed shocked after Friday’s sentencing in New York. While Mr. Trump was spared jail time or financial penalties, he effectively had the word “felon” tattooed on his record for all time unless a higher court overturns the conviction. But that development was already baked into the system. Voters knew last fall that Mr. Trump had been found guilty by a jury of his peers, and enough of them decided it was either illegitimate or not as important as other issues.

“It speaks to the moment we’re in,” said Norman L. Eisen, a former White House ethics counsel to President Barack Obama who has closely tracked Mr. Trump’s various legal cases and has founded a new organization aimed at defending democracy. “You have somebody who is an adjudicated felon 34 times over, but you also have a nation that is either so numb or so in shock that it does not know how to react.”

And so the nation will soon witness the paradox of a newly elected president putting his hand on a Bible to swear an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” the supreme law of the land, barely a week after being sentenced for violating the law.

This will be a national Rorschach test. His critics will find it appalling. His admirers will see it as vindication.

That is no accident. Mr. Trump for years has worked to discredit any and all criminal and civil cases against him as nothing more than politically motivated witch hunts and found plenty of Americans to agree with him. His supporters do not view him as a villain but as a victim. Even a significant number of opponents have grown weary of it all, or their outrage has faded into resignation.

“What is extraordinary about Trump’s behavior and record is that the electorate does not care, as it once did, that a president pay public fealty to law and norms and other traditional expectations of the office,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush. “Trump has revolutionized how the public thinks about the presidency even before his second term has begun.”

Indeed, he has not only moved the bar for the presidency, but is attempting to do the same for senior cabinet positions and other top officials in government. He has picked Pete Hegseth, a Fox News personality, to be secretary of defense despite the allegation that he raped a woman at a Republican political conference and a report that he was pushed out as head of two veterans organizations after being accused of mismanagement, drunken behavior and sexual impropriety.

Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s pick for defense secretary, at the Capitol last month. Mr. Hegseth has faced allegations of sexual harassment, drinking on the job and financial mismanagement.Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Mr. Hegseth has insisted the encounter at the conference was consensual, and police did not file charges. But Mr. Trump has selected other candidates for top positions who have been accused of sexual misconduct themselves or failure to stop it. Most of them, like Mr. Hegseth, dispute the allegations and Mr. Trump and his allies seem willing to accept their denials. But there was a time when an incoming president would have avoided nominees with such baggage in the first place.

Mr. Trump’s allies maintain that if standards have shifted, the president-elect’s pursuers have only themselves to blame by initiating unfounded or overhyped investigations as part of what they said looked like an effort to stop a political opponent. Mr. Trump’s adversaries cannot win at the ballot box, his camp charges, so they have abused the justice system.

“Our norms have changed in what we will accept in presidents because federal and state Democratic officials debased prosecution by deploying it as a political tool to influence presidential elections,” said John Yoo, another former Bush Justice Department official now teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.

A YouGov survey released on Friday found that 48 percent of adults said they believed that Mr. Trump had committed crimes in the hush money case, while 28 percent did not and 25 percent were not sure. Following the sentencing, 19 percent said it was too harsh, 24 percent said it was about right and 39 percent did not think it was harsh enough.

On the broader question of whether Mr. Trump was politically singled out for the worst treatment, most Americans disagreed. Forty-two percent said they thought Mr. Trump was actually treated more leniently than other people and 14 percent said he was treated about the same, while 30 percent said he was treated more harshly. That 30 percent clearly reflects Mr. Trump’s hard-core base, and enough other voters evidently concluded that they were not bothered enough to vote against him and cared more about inflation, immigration or other issues.

The hush money case was not the only legal issue confronting Mr. Trump, though. He was indicted three other times, twice for trying to overturn the 2020 election and hold onto power illegitimately and a third time for taking classified documents that were not his when he left the White House and refusing to give them back even after being subpoenaed. None of those cases made it to trial before the election, but voters were extensively told about the evidence.

Moreover, Mr. Trump lost several other cases that in the past would have been hard for a would-be president to overcome. He was found liable for sexual abuse in one civil case and business fraud in another. And his Trump Organization was convicted in criminal court of 17 counts of tax fraud and other crimes. He will be the first president with judgments of this scale against him to take the oath of office as well.

“Essential to the efforts of the founders was their ultimate respect for the citizens who they believed would be informed and for the most part moral and sensible,” said Ty Cobb, a former lawyer for Mr. Trump who has become a critic. “Sadly, we blew past all that somehow.”

Mr. Trump at the New York State Supreme Court during his criminal trial in May. Mr. Trump is poised to be the first president with a felony conviction in his record.Doug Mills/The New York Times

Still, the only criminal conviction of Mr. Trump personally was the hush money case, in which he was found guilty of falsifying business records to hide $130,000 paid to a woman who said she had a sexual tryst with him while his wife Melania was pregnant with their son. He denied the affair, but made the payments through a fixer anyway.

Mr. Yoo said that the nature of the hush money case worked against Mr. Trump’s adversaries because it seemed less momentous than the other three criminal indictments.

“If the Democratic lawfare campaign had actually convicted Trump of a crime related to Jan. 6, we might think of Trump differently,” Mr. Yoo said. “But pursuing him for bookkeeping shenanigans to conceal hush money payments showed that Trump’s opponents would stoop to the most inconsequential legal charges to try to stop him.”

Even some who have been critical of Mr. Trump questioned whether the hush money prosecution was worth it, especially since it was brought by a Democratic district attorney who reopened the matter after his predecessor opted against filing charges.

“Of all the cases against Mr. Trump, the New York case was the most partisan and least meritorious,” said Michael W. McConnell, a Stanford Law School professor and former federal appeals court judge appointed by Mr. Bush. “The conviction says more about the low standards of prosecutorial integrity in the once-vaunted Manhattan D.A. office than about Mr. Trump.”

Even the judge’s sentence seemed to undermine perceptions of the case’s seriousness. Rather than try to impose jail time or financial penalties, the judge gave Mr. Trump what is called unconditional discharge, a concession to the reality that an actual penalty was implausible 10 days before the inauguration.

At the end of the day, beyond the minimum qualifications in the Constitution, the standards for who is fit to be president are determined not by politicians or a judge or jury but by the voters. In this case, the voters gave their verdict long before the official sentencing.

And that is no little thing.

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. More about Peter Baker“