Once more, Donald Trump’s lawyers are attempting to override the guilty verdict of a jury in the Manhattan hush money case, asking the court to toss it while slinging invective at the office of District Attorney Alvin Bragg, which successfully won Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts this year.

With Trump’s second White House term around the corner, Bragg has already agreed to a delay in sentencing until after he leaves the Oval Office, obviously a concession that no other defendant would be in a position to receive. There’s no reason to go further and toss the case.

A few things can ultimately be true at once. Yes, this was the weakest of the Trump criminal cases, and the least significant in the grand scheme, particularly when stacked up against the historical gravity of the federal crimes that Trump was charged with, which encompassed an effort to undermine the United States’ form of government and abscond with some of its classified secrets.

It was a difficult case to understand the intricacies of and to explain to a layman, given that the big-ticket item — the payment to Stormy Daniels during the campaign — was not itself the criminal activity charged. That distinction belongs to the falsification of business records, which were only a felony in concealing another crime, and on and on.

It’s a case that really only an attorney could love, and we were not thrilled when it was the first that secured an indictment and then the only one to go to trial and conviction as the others languished in a thicket of delays.

Does that all make it a worthless case? Absolutely not. Falsification of business records is charged all the time, and the evidence that Trump did it is overwhelming. The former and future president was tried before a jury, and that jury found him guilty. That’s the system we have, and while it’s not perfect, it’s certainly better than any alternative that we’ve seen.

What his attorneys are asking for in asking the case to be thrown post-conviction is for Trump to be explicitly put above the law, with the finding that he committed these felonies simply washed away for a man who has shown no sense of appreciation of guilt, no remorse, not even a morsel of respect for the system.

The idea that the Hunter Biden pardon (a huge error by President Joe Biden ) is a reason to drop the case against Trump is just misdirection on Trump’s lawyers’ part. Trump has long lived in a fantasy world where the Justice Department and the nation’s law enforcement systems are stacked against him, as opposed to the reality that they’ve been incredibly lenient in dealing with his transgressions.

That fantasy has extended to the suggestion that Bragg was somehow in cahoots with federal prosecutors, who were themselves casting about for ways to manufacture legal trouble for Trump and hurt him politically, all on behalf of either Joe Biden or a shadowy deep state. That this conspiracy has made it to the attorneys’ official filings is frankly an embarrassment to them, and the court should dismiss it out of hand, along with the rest of the defense’s spurious arguments.

We don’t know what the exact right punishment for Trump is for these offenses, but it’s not nothing.

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