WASHINGTON – 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 Trump mentioned the other night.

That little thing was the first criminal sentencing of an American president. That little thing was confirmation that 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.

Trump does not really consider it a little thing, of course, given how strenuously he sought to avoid the Jan 10 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 the Jan 10 sentencing in New York. While 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 in the fall that 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 Mr Norman L. Eisen, a former White House ethics counsel to President Barack Obama who has closely tracked Trump’s various legal cases and has founded a new organisation 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. Trump for years has worked to discredit any and all criminal and ci...