The "extraordinary victory" took place on November 5th. Today was just the lame anti-climax.

Despite the fact that Judge Juan Merchan telegraphed his no-consequences sentence -- and that the Supreme Court made it clear that Merchan had to follow through -- the outcome of the Alvin Bragg prosecution stunned CNN's panel immediately afterward. Noting that an "unconditional discharge" rarely gets applied in felony convictions, the commentators grudgingly admitted Donald Trump won in the end:

JIM ACOSTA: Not just the sentence of an unconditional release, which means he’s not going to do any jail time. The fact that he is going to be going into the White House as a convicted felon, but the fact that he appeared virtually in those stunning images we just saw a few moments ago of him appearing in the courtroom on a flat screen in front of the judge, with his attorney by his side and the flags behind them.

PAULA REID: Yeah, just zoom out here, big picture. Six months ago, he faced four criminal cases. He had been convicted in New York hush-money case, which was considered the least serious of the four. 

And now, even though he has been convicted, he has received really no punishment there. The two federal cases against him have been dismissed. And the Georgia case, the prosecutor has been disqualified. That case is not completely dead, but it’s basically on life support. I mean, if we look at his legal defense team, this is an extraordinary victory.

Immediately afterward, CNN legal analyst Laura Coates lamented what she called a double standard in favor of Trump in the sentence he received. Not all felons get prison or jail time, but very few if any get nothing at all as a consequence of conviction:

COATES: Well, I'm going to put on my legal analyst beret, if you don't mind, because it already goes with the look today. But let me tell you, what this looks like for many people, many people are looking at whether there are two systems of justice in America. Well, I got to tell you, Donald Trump right now and is a little in a league of his own for the reasons that my colleagues have described. But an unconditional release, normally, if somebody is convicted of a crime and does not have a jail sentence imposed, a probationary period comes in. They're checking in with a probation officer. They may have to engage in drug testing. They may have to have certain jobs or endeavor to have them, community service. They have to keep their nose clean. How often have you heard that said, in order to make sure that they don't have the ability to be actually brought into a jail?

Donald Trump doesn't have any of those conditions. The condition he now has is to maintain his role as the commander-in-chief and president of the United States. But why he is fighting this so hard is not just the pure ego or the aversion to having been convicted, it shows you the stigma in our country of what it's like to be a convicted felon and the societal shame that, for most defendants, it could entail. For him, it became a kind of, as we saw, political badge of honor where it was at that point when this case was charged that there was a changing of the winds when he was able to use that to propel him for the sympathy and political expedience that he was seeking.

But in this case, it goes back to what they call election interference. Imagine figures, names in the past, Stormy Daniels, Michael Avenatti, Michael Cohen. I am really curious to what they feel today knowing what they endeavored, a jury finding him guilty, and now essentially in like a lion, out like a lamb, or a president.

Let's talk about the double standard that put Trump in that courtroom in the first place -- as well as in the other New York courtroom in Letitia Adams' fraud-with-no-victim lawsuit. In both cases, the state pushed theories that had never been used in court before; Bragg's conversion of misdemeanors into felonies via alleged campaign-finance violations was an absurd construct, corruptly designed for political motives. Adams' predicate was so nonsensical and so threatening to other developers in New York that Governor Kathy Hochul had to publicly declare that the state would only ever apply it to Trump -- exposing the political motivation of that court case as well. (The appellate court seemed pretty concerned about that too; we're still waiting for their decision.)

The state of New York declared war on Donald Trump to derail his political ambitions. They just lost today, and Merchan knows it, but they really lost on November 5th. Everyone knew that then, and that was before Trump finally got the right to appeal this cooked prosecution and trial. Let's see how CNN feels if and when all of these lawfare efforts get dismantled in the end.