The Supreme Court rejected President-elect Donald Trump’s effort to stop a sentencing hearing in his hush money case on Thursday, essentially guaranteeing the first-ever sentencing of a former president on criminal charges will take place Friday in New York—though Trump will likely face few,

The defeat at the Supreme Court was a rare reversal for Trump’s strategy of seeking to delay his criminal cases with multiple appeals – which he used in his federal cases to buy time until he could use his executive authority to thwart them. Of course, for this to work he had to live up to his end of the bargain and win the election.