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.

Representative Brittany Pettersen, a second-term Colorado Democrat, was not planning to have a second child at the age of 43.

“As if our life wasn’t complicated enough!” she said with a laugh as she arranged herself on a couch in her office on Capitol Hill earlier this week, staring down at her pregnant belly just weeks from her due date. She blamed the “mistake” on the confusion of working in two time zones. “It can make things hard with consistent birth control,” she said. “It was not part of the plan.”

Congress has existed for 236 years, but somehow Ms. Pettersen is about to become only the 13th voting member to give birth while in office, and the first from her home state. As Ms. Pettersen tries to plan the next phase of her life, the reality is setting in that this job was not created with someone like her in mind.

There is no maternity leave for members of Congress. While they can take time away from the office without sacrificing their pay, they cannot vote if they are not present at the Capitol. So Ms. Pettersen has taken a lead role in a new push by a bipartisan group of younger lawmakers and new parents in Congress to change the rules to allow them to vote remotely while they take up to 12 weeks of parental leave.

“This job is not made for young women, for working families, and it’s definitely not made for regular people,” said Ms. Pettersen. “It’s historically been wealthy individuals who are not of childbearing age who do this work.”

Before boarding her plane on Thursday to return to Lakewood, Colo., where she planned to remain until after she gives birth, Ms. Pettersen introduced the “Proxy Voting for New Parents Resolution.” It would change House rules to allow new mothers and fathers in Congress to stay away from Washington immediately after the birth of a child and designate a colleague to cast votes on their behalf.

“I feel really torn,” Ms. Pettersen said, “because I’m going to choose to be home to make sure that my newborn is taken care of, but I feel that it’s unfair that I’m unable to have my constituents represented at that time.”

The resolution, she said, “is common sense. It’s about modernizing Congress.”

The idea has been percolating on Capitol Hill for some time, but has become all the more pressing for the new Congress, its proponents argue, because the House is now so closely divided, with Republicans holding the majority by just one vote.

Republicans savaged former Speaker Nancy Pelosi for breaking with centuries of history and House rules by instituting proxy voting during the coronavirus pandemic. Former Representative Kevin McCarthy, as the minority leader, filed a lawsuit arguing that allowing a member of Congress to deputize a colleague to cast a vote on their behalf when they were not present was unconstitutional.

House Republicans also argued that allowing proxy voting would have a negative effect on member “collegiality.” Ms. Luna’s resolution never came to the floor for a vote.

Now, the bipartisan group is trying again. Ms. Pettersen’s resolution was one of the first introduced in the opening days of the 119th Congress. It is slightly broader than Ms. Luna’s original proposal, written to include proxy voting for new fathers.

“I’m not in favor of proxy voting; I think it should be very rare,” said Representative Mike Lawler, a New York Republican who welcomed his second child eight days before the election. “But I don’t think any member should be precluded from doing the job they were elected to do simply because they become a parent.”

Mr. Lawler, a leader of the new effort whose baby is 2 months old, cannot afford to be away from the Capitol while his party holds a one-seat majority.

“I understand the impact when you are given a choice between being home or coming and doing your job,” he said. “It’s not a great choice.”

Mr. Lawler dismissed concerns from House leaders about creating a bad precedent, saying the existing protocols no longer fit the Congress of the modern era.

“You have younger people getting elected to public office at a much higher rate than when these rules were established,” he said. “If we talk about being pro-family, you have to at least recognize that giving birth to a child or becoming a parent should not be an impediment to doing your job.”

Ms. Pettersen said she had considered having her baby in Washington so she could continue voting, but ultimately decided against it.

“It’s unfair to my family and unfair to my newborn if we’re not at home where all of our support and my doctor and support system is,” she said.

Ms. Pettersen is still relatively new to Washington and to motherhood — her son is still in prekindergarten — but the disconnect between her situation and the job of an elected official has been painfully obvious to her ever since she was pregnant with her first child and serving in the Colorado legislature.

Back then, she was the first member of that body ever to go on maternity leave. The only way to get paid while on leave was to categorize her situation as a “chronic illness.”

When she returned, Ms. Petterson successfully pressed to change the law to ensure that future state lawmakers would be given up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave.

Even before she walked the halls of Congress as the rare pregnant member, Ms. Pettersen said she felt like an odd fit for the Capitol.

When she was 6 years old, her mother was prescribed opioids after hurting her back and became addicted to heroine and then fentanyl. She overdosed more than 20 times. Growing up, Ms. Pettersen said, nobody even kept track of whether or not she came home at night.

“I saw Phish shows when I was 12 years old in Kansas and other places,” she said. “Still got straight A’s, though.”

(Her mother recently celebrated her 70th birthday and seven years in recovery.)

Because her parents were behind on taxes, she didn’t qualify for student loans, so Ms. Pettersen paid her way through school in cash, waiting tables, cleaning houses and working various odd jobs. She was the first person in her family to graduate from high school or college.

Beating the odds has made Ms. Pettersen even more determined to try to change her current workplace to make it feasible for more people like her.

“Being pregnant and being a member of Congress, people ask, ‘How are you doing this with your family?’ — all these questions I know my male colleagues don’t get,” she said. “It’s such a double standard.”