Donald Trump: Classic or Dud?

please

peemails

at a 1000-ft level, do we want to be seen as the party that thinks it's cool if presidential elections hinge on whether or not a candidate once had consensual sex ten years ago?

The two modern Presidents this would have cost us are Trump and Bill Clinton so... yeah, cool.

I can't believe I have to point this out but the crime is the misuse of funds, not the consensual sex

do we want to be seen as the party that thinks it's cool if presidential elections hinge on whether or not a candidate once had consensual sex ten years ago?

this needs some clarification. just for starters, who are the "we" being addressed, are "we" really a "party", how do "we" as a party have the thoughts you attribute to us, and who is doing the seeing of us. Later we can get into the hermaneutics of what is cool and the whole sex aspect of your rather maze-like query.

xp There are 30+ charges to address, Stormy payment may be the absolute least of them. And agreed, until the charges are made public prognostication is useless.

will be pretty funny if theres some very bad shit in there

we being the left-leaning folks who populate ilx, and who i think it's safe to assume largely vote for democrats vice republicans. as for who is doing the seeing i think it's mostly the swing voters i have in mind -- i.e. the few who swing elections one way or another. the relatively sane ones, in particular. the ones whos party affiliations aren't etched in stone. but to escape from the maze, what i am really saying is: if all those 30 counts of fraud turn out to be misdemeanor-like efforts to hide his payment of extortion money, those relatively sane swing voters might reasonably think that's a.o.k. behavior if the alternative is yet another sordid and trivial sidetrack from actual important election issues. like, is "rule of law" in this case the be-all and end-all? i would think, rather, that ensuring trump doesn't get reelected should be the be-all and end-all. in which case (and this, seemingly, is my opinion and no one else's here, but so be it) this court case is a really, really stupid way to go about it. i could be totally proved wrong on tuesday when he reveals his airtight case, but that's the way it looks to me at the moment.

swing voters!

xp you seem to have forgotten the other court cases

You heard it here, because of swing voters laws no longer exist

i have not forgotten them. i am talking about this one in specific.

Jon Stewart said it best recently

“He could become president anyway. Fareed, we either have the rule of law or we have no rule of law,” Stewart said. “The rule of law does not take into account if that might make you a martyr to somebody.”

we certainly do not have the rule of law but its worth trying idk

The only way to guarantee no Trump presidency at this point is for him to drop dead, and no actions taken should be done so with WHAT ABOUT THE UNDECIDED VOTERS in mind

Xpost

what i am really saying is: if all those 30 counts of fraud turn out to be misdemeanor-like efforts to hide his payment of extortion money, those relatively sane swing voters might reasonably think that's a.o.k. behavior if the alternative is yet another sordid and trivial sidetrack from actual important election issues.

we have no idea what's really in those 30+ indictments. your concerns are, at this point, entirely imaginary. but I think it is a near certainty that however all this plays out, the opinions espoused on ilx will have no measurable effect of the outcome of the next US presidential election. so, rest easy.

haha well that's true, but also remember this is a public forum so if the "others" want a good view of how "we" think they just have to look here.

It's not even the job of prosecutors or a grand jury to "think of how people might vote".

Comey sure didn't care

i agree it shouldn't be, but bragg campaigned by bragging about how many times he's sued trump, so he might not meet that standard.

The only way to guarantee no Trump presidency at this point is for him to drop dead

Aside from him being dead, the best part of this would be Don Jr. trying to run and eating shit.

Next Trump Up

It should be remembered that Michael Cohen served time in jail over crimes connected with this investigation even though he was a cooperating witness. The indictments handed down against Cohen clearly implicated another "individual 1" in the same crimes (who obviously was Trump). iow, the evidence against Trump was just as compelling as that against Cohen, but the prosecutor at the time chose not to seek indictments against "individual 1", undoubtedly because the criminal was the chief executive of the US government. If anything about this case was driven solely by "politics" that qualifies, and it tilted in Trump's favor.

Can anyone even slightly open to the idea of voting for a second dose of Donald Trump as president be described as "relatively sane"?

unless one wants to dismiss nearly half the country as not sane. i know we joke, but calling half the country insane is not a good look. michael cohen pled to eight counts, the least of which (3 i think?) were related to the hush money.

Lol are u Matt Taibbi

does he say stuff like that? no i'm not.

unless one wants to dismiss nearly half the country as not sane. i know we joke, but calling half the country insane is not a good look.

Well, first of all, we're not talking about "nearly half the country"; we're talking about 40% (max) of registered voters, who are less than 50% of adult Americans. So we're probably actually talking about 17-20% of the population. And no, I am not joking. If they are still willing to vote for Donald Trump to be president, after having already had him as president for four years and seeing what he brought to the job (racism, corruption, incompetence, et fucking cetera), they are either insane — in the sense that maybe they're suffering from dementia or some other organic brain dysfunction — or actively evil. And it doesn't really matter which, because the practical effect is the same.

Donald Trump is not a traditional "guy whose politics I disagree with". He's a criminal and a psychopath, and if you actively support him, you're a piece of shit. And if you don't currently actively support him, but you can be convinced to vote for a criminal and a psychopath as president, you are yourself fucked in the head. This idea you seem to have about giving people the benefit of the doubt, and assuming they're reasonable and rational actors — you need to let go of that shit. We don't live in that country anymore.

I can't even imagine giving benefit of the doubt to voting for a guy who proposed a Muslim ban, then tried to enact one his first month in office

insane is the wrong framing, I'd go with 'complicit with evil' same as it ever was.

Otm

(Four horsemen amassing)

it is not hard to imagine that people might be persuaded to vote if they don't buy bragg's alleged "novel legal theory" (kristoff) and think this is a political hit job

I don't think this describes any actual people (except for uh jason whitlock)

I like how Josh Marshall is thinking about this

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/how-to-think-about-the-trump-indictments-and-find-inner-peace

are there any previous examples of voters turning out because candidates are under criminal investigation? or does this supposed phenomenon only benefit donald trump?

lol

could maybe make a case for marion barry

feel like the right overestimates how conservative the population is, they'll vote for them because they're bigots or because they love guns or just really dislike liberals, but I don't think a whole lot of them are willing to go as far as "there is a nationwide conspiracy to steal the election and throw Trump in jail". even if they say that shit sometimes I think deep down they kinda think the news is real. I mean a hell of a lot of them got vaccinated.

catering to the far right serves their purposes, though, in the huge amount of the country where elections are not in doubt. many of them, maybe most, can be content with dominating their districts, or entire states, in the case of gop trifectas. if the senate or the presidency is democratic, well, that's a bummer, but they can still make sure that no significant legislation is passed, the supreme court and much of the federal judicial system is in their favor, and they can exist almost entirely in a rightwing media vacuum that will not only tolerate their bullshit but also reward them for more extreme views

gop politicians in these horrible places could theoretically try to be good people and not do things that actively endanger the lives of people. but that's not what their loudest idiots want, so they run the risk of getting primary'd by someone who is even more fucked up

yeah I just mean in general none of this shit is gonna "awaken a sleeping giant" that's gonna let Trump roll to the presidency again, that giant is already awake and perpetually fired up. but I think the last few election cycles have shown that going absolutely insane just might drive out turnout on the other side. I think that Josh Marshall blog summed it up pretty well.

Yeah, it's really bizarre that not one Washington journalist is willing/mentally able to accept the idea that tons of people really fucking hate Donald Trump and by extension the Republican Party. I mean, three straight elections now and these dipshits are still out there going, "This is likely going to fire up his base and might be risky for Democrats!" No, his base is not an electoral majority, and the people who hate "his base" are.

it's more than his base though. i would never dream of voting for trump in a million years but when i read these words in the nytimes it smells of "guy searching for a way to indict trump" not "rule of law being upheld."

One year ago this week, the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into Donald J. Trump appeared to be dead in the water.

The two leaders of the investigation had recently resigned after the new district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, decided not to charge Mr. Trump at that point. Amid a fierce backlash to his decision — and a brutal start to his tenure — Mr. Bragg insisted that the investigation was not over. But a disbelieving media questioned why, if the effort was still moving forward, there were few signs of it.

“Unless y’all are great poker players,” Mr. Bragg told The New York Times in an early April 2022 interview, “you don’t know what we’re doing.”

What they were doing, new interviews show, was going back to square one, poring over the reams of evidence that had already been collected by his predecessor.

For a time, their efforts were haphazard as they examined a wide range of Mr. Trump’s business practices, including whether he had lied about his net worth, which was the focus of the investigation when Mr. Bragg had declined to seek an indictment. But by July, Mr. Bragg had decided to assign several additional prosecutors to pursue one particular strand that struck him as promising: a hush-money payment made on Mr. Trump’s behalf to a porn star during the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump was indicted on that strand. He is expected to surrender to the authorities in Manhattan on Tuesday and face arraignment on more than two dozen charges, which will be unveiled at that time.

This account of Mr. Bragg’s decision to revive the investigation and point it toward the hush-money arrangement, based on interviews with about a dozen people familiar with the matter, reveals the circuitous, sometimes uncertain road that led to the first criminal charges against a former American president.

Along the way, a key internal skeptic of the investigation became one of its champions; Mr. Bragg shook up the Trump team and hired an experienced lawyer away from the Justice Department to help lead it; and he ultimately found new promise in a key witness he had once disregarded as unreliable. The district attorney was also emboldened late last year when his prosecutors won a conviction of Mr. Trump’s company in an unrelated tax case.

"promising"

we frame it "nobody is above the law," they frame it "they can and will come after you too," and i think that will be a more successful framing.

How does one pay any attention whatsoever to the life and career of one Donald Trump and not feel that searching for a way to indict Donald Trump = upholding the rule of law? How? Please tell me how. Any other living human who didn't tiptoe so gracefully between the raindrops while doing crimes would've been indicted many, many times before now.

how does one pay attention to politics and not realize that political problems (i.e. figuring out how to get people to vote for your candidtates) can't be solved by legal means?

No one itt is suggesting it can?

for a long time now, the singleminded focus of all the cable news shows has been trump/jail. if there are any other issues important to them, they don't get mentioned.

you're not seriously suggesting that if this wasn't happening cable news would be covering anything actually important, surely? that is not what it does.

that's sort of our problem, don't you think? it's our public face. (i know, i know, who do i mean by "our" etc. etc.) like, we actually have a voice there, small as it might be, whereas we have no voice about what tuucker carlson emits.