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The Supreme Court's narrow vote to permit a New York state judge to formally pronounce a practically meaningless sentence on Donald Trump pursuant to a jury verdict convicting him of 34 felonies was hailed by some as promising news, that there remain institutional guardrails constraining the 47th president from doing anything he wishes after taking office.

The truth is different: The once and soon-to-be-once-again president will have virtually no guardrails limiting him. This is because he has effectively routed every civic institution that might have provided one, and he's got a depleted citizenry eating out of his hand.

The very fact that the court came so close to blocking a state judge from formally sentencing Trump to no sentence at all speaks volumes. A federal court should not interfere with a state court judge's authority to pronounce sentence on a state court jury verdict. But this was Donald Trump who'd been convicted, this was a Supreme Court dominated by Trump appointees and Trump devotees, and Trump has rolled America's criminal justice system at every turn.

Trump once faced four separate sets of criminal indictments, issued by four separate grand juries in four jurisdictions. His defenders insisted that these fell somewhere between parking in a loading zone and jaywalking. But they were for an attempted coup d'etat, pilfering classified documents and obstructing justice, and the New York charges were for criminally orchestrating fraudulent entries in business records to conceal hush money payments.

In other times, Americans would have been appalled. In other times, the findings of even probable cause to conclude that a presidential candidate had committed even one of these crimes would have been decisively disqualifying.

Not now.The indictments have all evaporated, thanks both to a gullible citizenry and a supportive judiciary. The coup-related charges were eviscerated by a Supreme Court effectively ruling that Trump was immune from prosecution for any crime he committed while in office, no matter how criminal his intent, other perhaps than shoplifting a Slushie from a convenience store while on a stroll. The classified documents and obstruction charges were broomed by a Trump loyalist who owed her judicial appointment to The Man Himself, and who may well ultimately be rewarded with elevation to the Supreme Court.

That left the New York fraud charges. These were the "least serious" of the criminal charges against Trump -- relative to staging a coup and violating the Espionage Act. But they weren't peanuts: a jury unanimously found that, beyond any reasonable doubt, Trump had purposefully committed 34 fraudulent acts.

All that was left was for the trial judge to perform his legal duty of pronouncing sentence, an act which, he had already announced, would result in no consequence for Trump while still establishing him as the convicted felon that he is.

Trump asked the Supreme Court to block the state judge from doing what the law requires. And he darn near pulled it off; it was only because one of his appointees, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, voted to actually allow the judge to do his duty that the "sentencing without any sentencing" went forward, by a 5-4 vote.

Let's face it: if Amy Coney Barrett is Trump's guardrail, America's in for a time.

Trump hasn't merely successfully neutralized the judiciary. The GOP that he controls controls both houses of Congress, at least for the next two years. This means there'll be no congressional investigations of his administration. It also means he'll win Senate approval of high-ranking appointees whose unsuitability for positions crucial to our national security range from eyebrow-raising to head-popping. A robust free press, the remaining potential guardrail, is much diminished: cowed in many cases by the threat of retaliation by Trump or his supporters or weakened by financial woes.

It doesn't help that Americans are exhausted, disinterested and willing to accept the hooey that is thrown at us. We've been rolled by a con man, who is riding high.

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Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.

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