As our David Zimmermann reports, Judge Juan Merchan today denied President-elect Donald Trump’s post-trial motions and put the pedal to the metal in an effort to sentence Trump prior to his inauguration – next Friday, in fact.

In my opinion, this is a spiteful effort by an activist New York progressive Democrat to get Trump formally branded as a convicted felon before he enters office.

As the election demonstrates, there is no public interest in seeing Trump sentenced; this gambit – like the absurd case itself – is all about Democratic lawfare. To repeat what I’ve argued here, the fact that lawfare hurt Democrats nationally – it is a big reason why they lost the presidential election and are looking at Republican control of the White House and both houses of Congress – does not mean it hurts Democrats in Manhattan (where Harris, despite losing even the popular vote, topped Trump by 63 percentage points).

I have a column on Fox News Opinion about Merchan’s ruling. It begins:

In what appears to be a bid to ensure that President-elect Trump enters office as a formally convicted felon, Judge Juan Merchan has denied Trump’s post-trial motions and proposes to sentence him next Friday, January 10.

The bait for Trump to agree to this is that Judge Merchan is signaling that the sentence will be a conditional discharge – meaning the president-elect would face no prison time and no post-sentence monitoring (such as probation). Moreover, because the imposition of sentence and entry of the judgment would end the proceedings in the trial court, Trump would be free to commence his appeal of what would be 34 felony convictions on the charge of business-records falsification.

I do not believe Trump will agree to this; instead, I suspect he will seek an immediate appeal on the immunity claims that Merchan conclusively rejected in today’s 18-page opinion and order.

I go on to explain why I believe Trump has cards to play to avoid being sentenced next week, and how – if Merchan truly believed his claim in the opinion that Trump conspired to steal the 2016 election – he could not conceivably maintain that a no-jail, no-probation sentence was appropriate.

The column is here.