President Biden awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction to Pope Francis on Saturday, granting one of the nation’s highest honors to a figure he called “the People’s Pope.”

“Pope Francis, your humility and your grace are beyond words, and your love for all is unparalleled,” Mr. Biden wrote on X. “You are a light of faith, hope, and love that shines brightly across the world.”

Mr. Biden honored the pontiff during a weekend in which he was scheduled to meet with the pope in person at the Holy See. The president, however, canceled the three-day trip to Italy to coordinate the federal response to raging wildfires in Los Angeles, according to a White House statement.

Rather than the usual award ceremony, in which the president places the award around the neck of the recipient, Mr. Biden posted on X an image from the Oval Office in which a military aide presented the medal. The White House announced the honor after Mr. Biden spoke to Pope Francis on Saturday and informed him of the award.

It was the first time during Mr. Biden’s term that he had awarded the medal “with distinction,” a more prestigious version of the honor. Mr. Biden received the recognition from President Barack Obama in 2017. Other recipients include Pope John Paul II and Colin L. Powell.

Mr. Biden, a Catholic, has seen Pope Francis as an admired ally on the global stage and turned to him as a sounding board, and the pope has lobbied for Mr. Biden to use his presidential power during his final weeks in office.

Last month, Pope Francis called Mr. Biden and asked him to commute the sentences of those on federal death row. Days later, Mr. Biden used his clemency power to soften their sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole, sparing their lives.

A citation included in the White House announcement for the award said that Pope Francis was “unlike any who came before.”

“His mission of serving the poor has never ceased,” the statement read. “A loving pastor, he joyfully answers children’s questions about God. A challenging teacher, he commands us to fight for peace and protect the planet. A welcoming leader, he reaches out to different faiths.”

Mr. Biden awarded the honor days after bestowing the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 18 leaders of the political, financial and celebrity establishment.

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 J. Trump mentioned the other night.

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

Mr. Trump does not really consider it a little thing, of course, given how strenuously he sought to avoid Friday’s 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 Friday’s sentencing in New York. While Mr. 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 last fall that Mr. 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 Norman L. Eisen, a former White House ethics counsel to President Barack Obama who has closely tracked Mr. Trump’s various legal cases and has founded a new organization 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. Mr. Trump for years has worked to discredit any and all criminal and civil cases against him as nothing more than politically motivated witch hunts and found plenty of Americans to agree with him. His supporters do not view him as a villain but as a victim. Even a significant number of opponents have grown weary of it all, or their outrage has faded into resignation.

“What is extraordinary about Trump’s behavior and record is that the electorate does not care, as it once did, that a president pay public fealty to law and norms and other traditional expectations of the office,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush. “Trump has revolutionized how the public thinks about the presidency even before his second term has begun.”

Indeed, he has not only moved the bar for the presidency, but is attempting to do the same for senior cabinet positions and other top officials in government. He picked Pete Hegseth, a Fox News personality, to be secretary of defense despite the allegation that he raped a woman at a Republican political conference and a report that he was pushed out as head of two veterans organizations after being accused of mismanagement, drunken behavior and sexual impropriety.

Mr. Hegseth, who has since left Fox, has insisted the encounter at the conference was consensual, and police did not file charges. But Mr. Trump has selected other candidates for top positions who have been accused of sexual misconduct themselves or failure to stop it. Most of them, like Mr. Hegseth, dispute the allegations and Mr. Trump and his allies seem willing to accept their denials. But there was a time when an incoming president would have avoided nominees with such baggage in the first place.

Mr. Trump’s allies maintain that if standards have shifted, the president-elect’s pursuers have only themselves to blame by initiating unfounded or overhyped investigations as part of what they said looked like an effort to stop a political opponent. Mr. Trump’s adversaries cannot win at the ballot box, his camp charges, so they have abused the justice system.

“Our norms have changed in what we will accept in presidents because federal and state Democratic officials debased prosecution by deploying it as a political tool to influence presidential elections,” said John Yoo, another former Bush Justice Department official now teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.

A YouGov survey released on Friday found that 48 percent of adults said they believed that Mr. Trump had committed crimes in the hush money case, while 28 percent did not and 25 percent were not sure. Following the sentencing, 19 percent said it was too harsh, 24 percent said it was about right and 39 percent did not think it was harsh enough.

On the broader question of whether Mr. Trump was politically singled out for the worst treatment, most Americans disagreed. Forty-two percent said they thought Mr. Trump was actually treated more leniently than other people and 14 percent said he was treated about the same, while 30 percent said he was treated more harshly. That 30 percent clearly reflects Mr. Trump’s hard-core base, and enough other voters evidently concluded that they were not bothered enough to vote against him and cared more about inflation, immigration or other issues.

The hush money case was not the only legal issue confronting Mr. Trump, though. He was indicted three other times, twice for trying to overturn the 2020 election and hold onto power illegitimately and a third time for taking classified documents that were not his when he left the White House and refusing to give them back even after being subpoenaed. None of those cases made it to trial before the election, but voters were extensively told about the evidence.

Moreover, Mr. Trump lost several other cases that in the past would have been hard for a would-be president to overcome. He was found liable for sexual abuse in one civil case and business fraud in another. And his Trump Organization was convicted in criminal court of 17 counts of tax fraud and other crimes. He will be the first president with judgments of this scale against him to take the oath of office as well.

“Essential to the efforts of the founders was their ultimate respect for the citizens who they believed would be informed and for the most part moral and sensible,” said Ty Cobb, a former White House lawyer for Mr. Trump who has become a critic. “Sadly, we blew past all that somehow.”

Still, the only criminal conviction of Mr. Trump personally was the hush money case, in which he was found guilty of falsifying business records to hide $130,000 paid to a woman who said she had a sexual tryst with him while his wife Melania was pregnant with their son. He denied the affair, but made the payments through a fixer anyway.

Mr. Yoo said that the nature of the hush money case worked against Mr. Trump’s adversaries because it seemed less momentous than the other three criminal indictments.

“If the Democratic lawfare campaign had actually convicted Trump of a crime related to Jan. 6, we might think of Trump differently,” Mr. Yoo said. “But pursuing him for bookkeeping shenanigans to conceal hush money payments showed that Trump’s opponents would stoop to the most inconsequential legal charges to try to stop him.”

Even some who have been critical of Mr. Trump questioned whether the hush money prosecution was worth it, especially since it was brought by a Democratic district attorney who reopened the matter after his predecessor opted against filing charges.

“Of all the cases against Mr. Trump, the New York case was the most partisan and least meritorious,” said Michael W. McConnell, a Stanford Law School professor and former federal appeals court judge appointed by Mr. Bush. “The conviction says more about the low standards of prosecutorial integrity in the once-vaunted Manhattan D.A. office than about Mr. Trump.”

Even the judge’s sentence seemed to undermine perceptions of the case’s seriousness. Rather than try to impose jail time or financial penalties, the judge gave Mr. Trump what is called unconditional discharge, a concession to the reality that an actual penalty was implausible 10 days before the inauguration.

At the end of the day, beyond the minimum qualifications in the Constitution, the standards for who is fit to be president are determined not by politicians or a judge or jury but by the voters. In this case, the voters gave their verdict long before the official sentencing.

And that is no little thing.